“Where Farm and Family Meet”
See WOUNDS, pg. 22A
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WOUNDS, from pg. 20A nesotans would take this moment to pause and wake up a little bit to the truth that this country came out of Indian country,” said Guy Lopez, a Dakota from Crow Creek, S.D., who now lives in Washington. “What happened 150 years ago wasn’t out of the blue and was not without provocation.” The year 1862 started with broken promises and starvation for the Dakota, who had been pushed into a narrow strip of reservation land along the Minnesota River. It exploded when their despair and anger turned into deadly attacks on settlers in August and September. It ended with the December hanging of 38 Dakota warriors in Mankato. An act of Congress then banished thousands of Dakota from Minnesota. The law, though now unobserved, remains on the books. “In a situation where it’s so contentious, part of what we’re trying to address through this observance is how we can be a better institution in terms of our relationship with the Dakota,” said Dan Spock, director of the history center museum. But, he added, “we know there will be people for whom we have to be a thing to be against.” For the first time, the history center is using a “truth recovery project” model developed in Northern Ireland, which Spock said features outreach to gather a fuller sense of what happened, “rather than assuming all we have to do is sit down, do some research and cook it up ourselves.” Emotions high in the valley The Minnesota River valley, where the war unfolded, is dotted with living descendants of settlers whose family trees wind back to 1862. In that area, and among the Dakota, interest in the war is intense. But many Minnesotans remain largely unaware of the tragic story. “You can get through the Minnesota school system and never hear about the Dakota conflict, and at a national level people are completely clueless,” said Jessica Potter, the director of the Blue Earth County Historical Society in Mankato, where the hangings took place after President Abraham Lincoln signed the orders. “Even in this community, we have major community leaders who say: ‘Lincoln was involved, really?’” Blue Earth County’s collection includes a wooden beam reputed to be part of the scaffolding from which the hanging ropes dangled. It remains out of view because of questions about its authenticity. John LaBatte — a New Ulm descendant of a Dakota warrior, a Dakota who opposed the war and a slain white trader — will lead battleground tours this summer and is on the state historical society’s descendants advisory panel. It surprises him how deeply the war still resonates, noting that it took only decades after World War II for the United States to develop friendly relations with Japan and Germany. But that war involved a unified America fighting an enemy on foreign soil, said Sasha Houston Brown, academic adviser for indigenous students at Minneapolis Community and Technical College and a
21 A THE LAND, FEBRUARY 17, 2012
a detour. See it on Page 40B.
Many unaware of the history