d. “This is very spiritual, and very sad for me. I want to touch the ground, to feel connected to this place. I feel we are home here.”
From her wheelchair, she couldn’t physically touch the earth. But, as she had done at another ceremony in August marking the start of the 1862 war, she reached out and waved her hands over the soil of <em>Mni Sota Makoce</em>, the Dakota words for the this place, the land where the waters reflect the clouds.
Both sisters were wearing red sweatshirts. On the back, they said, “Proud Descendant of The Exiled.” On the front, they said, “Damakota:” I am Dakota.
A simple statement — I am Dakota — can seem radical in a place where, following a short but bloody war, no Dakota was permitted to remain where, in fact, the state paid bounties for Dakota scalps. But some Dakota worry that the 150th anniversary observances of the war and its punishments might obscure the larger truths about Minnesota and the culture and history of its original inhabitants.
“Sometimes, it seems as if we didn’t exist before 1862, or after 1862,” said Darlene St. Clair, a Dakota scholar who is a professor at St. Cloud State University and a visiting professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of American Indian Studies. St. Clair participated in the long march to Fort Snelling and says it is important to observe the 150th anniversary of the war. But she says she hopes it “won’t mean we will fall off everyone’s map again next year.”
“There’s been a crazy interest in the conflict, but that, in itself, is troubling,” St. Clair said during a communal meal at St. Bonaventure Catholic Church in Bloomington that followed the Fort Snelling ceremony. “People seem fascinated by every detail of what happened during the six weeks of war, but not so interested in understanding the context of what led up to it, and the consequences that followed. So you hear a simple story: It was a tragedy for everyone; both sides were at fault; ‘Mistakes were made.’ But that doesn’t really cover it. When you understand it fully, both sides weren’t equally wrong, and one side, the Dakota people, suffered a greater injustice.”