rom 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 said. “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, bo