Story by Nick Coleman; video by Jacob Wheeler
A pair of bald eagles floated high above the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers Tuesday as a line of Dakota Indians, following in the footsteps of their exiled ancestors, rounded a highway curve in Mendota and marched toward Fort Snelling. And toward a spiritual healing of Minnesota’s most painful chapters — the executions, imprisonments and forced removal of the Dakota from their homeland in the wake of the Dakota War of 1862.
The marchers — about 100 Indians, trailed by another 100 or more non-Indian supporters — were finishing a week-long Dakota Commemorative March, a 150-mile-long tribute to 1,700 Dakota captives — most of them women and children, along with some elderly men — who were marched by soldiers from the Lower Sioux Reservation near present-day Morton, Minnesota, to Fort Snelling. The forced march is the story of Minnesota’s own Trail of Tears as innocent Indian civilians — non-combatants in the six-week war that raged up and down the Minnesota River Valley — were harshly removed from their homes and put on the road to imprisonment and exile. At every mile post along the road retracing their steps — the 10th year the march has been recreated — descendants of those Dakota exiles placed stakes in the ground bearing the names of the Dakota women who had been left as the heads of their families during a time when state authorities had proclaimed that the Dakota must be “banished or exterminated.”
During the forced march and internment, it was hard to tell the difference between the two things: Although official histories say there were few deaths along the march, oral Dakota histories say there were many, including a death of a baby snatched by a mob near New Ulm, and, at Henderson, a mob that hurled rocks at the captives. And there is no question about the many deaths that occurred in the prison camp at Fot Snelling — sources say 150 to 300 died in the place some soldiers called “the squaw camp.” Gabriel Renville, a mixed-blood Dakota held prisoner 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, f