risoner there, wrote:
“We were so crowded and confined that an epidemic broke out among us and children were dying day and night, among them being [Solomon] Two Stars’ oldest child, a little girl…. The news then came of the hanging at Mankato. Amid all this sickness and these great tribulations, it seemed doubtful at night whether a person would be alive in the morning.”
The captivity and suffering of these women and children is an unfamiliar story to most white Minnesotans, and, until recent years, was even unfamiliar to some Dakota Indians whose families did not speak much about the lost war, their lost homeland or the travails of their ancestors. Much as many World War II veterans did not share the stories of combat with their families, many Dakota stayed silent about the suffering they had experienced. It was too horrible to discuss.
“Every Sioux found on our soil should get a permanent homestead, 6 feet by 2,” wrote the St. Cloud Democrat as the prisoners were arriving at Fort Snelling. “Shoot the hyenas … exterminate the wild beasts, and make peace with the devil and all his host sooner than with these red-jawed tigers whose fangs are dripping with the blood of innocents.”
The newspaper was edited by prominent frontier crusading journalist Jane Grey Swisshelm, a champion of abolition and women’s rights. The irony of her demand for native blood may have been unknown to the Dakota, but the sentiment was clear: White Minnesota wanted an end to them.
“These vermin are not fit to live on the face of the earth,” wrote the St. Paul Press, echoing the St. Paul Pioneer’s call for the “utter extermination” of the Dakota. “The sooner they are totally extinguished as a race, the sooner one of the greatest of all nuisances will be abated.”
No wonder this history remains difficult to confront. Minnesota wanted a “final solution” for the Dakota. And it came close to accomplishing that goal.
The weight of racism, retribution, rejection and — in the end, somehow — survival, hung in the air Tuesday as elder Phyllis Redday, from Sisseton, South Dakota, led the ceremony in the damp woods below the recreated Fort Snelling. Praying and smudging attendees with clouds of smoke from a burning sweetgrass bundle, Redday moved and prayed clockwise, reading the names of the women prisoners from stakes set in a circle. The Dakota sang traditional songs, and cried out in anguish, and cried tears. I stood among the silent crowd of non-Indian supporters, watching from the tree line near a pipestone marker that was dedicated by departed Dakota spiritual leader Amos Owen in 1987. I was at that ceremony, on the 125th anniversary of the war, a year that Gov. Rudy Perpich had declared to be a “Year of Reconciliation” between the Dakota and the white majority.
It was an optimistic idea. A quarter century later, the work of reconciliation remains undone.
Grace LaMere and her sister, Pat, only began to discover their Minnesota roots in recent years, as they began to hear for the first time of the hardships and exile that had led their Dakota ancestors from the Fort Snelling concentration camp to a remote reservation in Nebraska where there mother was born. On Tuesday, they watched at Fort Snelling as the ceremony honored the exiles, including their great-great-grandmother, who had been one of the imprisoned who spent the winter beneath the walls of the Fort, literally below the weight of U.S. military authority. Grace LaMere, 62, worked in the City Clerk’s office in Omaha for 34 years before learning a bit of her family’s history. She drove up from Nebraska with Pat, who is a paraplegic, Tuesday. As they watched, they were overcome by emotion, and by a feeling of deep connection to a land their ancestors had known as home.
“I don’t remember my mom ever saying anything about all of this,” Grace said. “We never talked about it. But something just called to me — I had to come and be here.”
Her sister, Pat, who has needed to use a wheel chair since a 1973 auto accident, felt the same pull.
“You can just feel the presence of the spirits that are here,” she sai