Recently, I read an excellent history of Minnesota titled North Country by Mary Wingert, University of Minnesota Press, 2010. She writes of the pre-inception, inception, and infancy of Minnesota beginning with frontier and territorial days when its first inhabitants did as yet not think of themselves as Minnesotans. As I read this history I began to realize the focus on one seminal character in the basic conflict between aboriginal populations and the European settlers who would supplant them in the State.
This character was not one of the first to find himself in conflict with the Europeans who came into tribal regions to take possession and to remove native populations. He just happened to be a chief of the Mdewauketon band of Dakota people, a chief who was manipulated by the agents of the United States who wanted concessions of his band during the pre-Civil War period.
With time and consequence of unfulfilled treaty obligations, Little Crow learned by experience the betrayal of his own people by his own hand because he had furthered relations with the United States and its agents. Faced with a crisis in his band for leadership of his people, he resolved to die if die he must. He took up a forsaken role as warrior and accepted that death was his lot as the leader of consequence of his people. He is remembered by history as the person who started the Dakota War of 1862, sometimes referred to as Little Crow's War.
I find that Little Crow is an important exemplar of the "lightness of being" I find in those who take responsibility for the community and its welfare. They expend all energies in doing what they regard as right for them to do in support of that community, and then when they realize the futility of their efforts resolve to trust in God to finish the unfinished work or in other words trust in the work being finished by other hands than his or her own hands.
As I have written earlier in this blog, the best example of this is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Because Little Crow trusted in his earlier conditioning as a warrior, he wanted to die fighting the military forces that he had come to believe were about the work of a race war against his Dakota people by ouster, starvation, and slaughter. The higher order conduct of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., is of course the true change agent, but not all leaders have seen this pathway to justice and progress nor a modern media to publicize the racism and injustice of the oppressor.
The purity of the warrior is that in killing another warrior one accepts the groundrules that his opponent is bound by the same code of kill or be killed. Viewed in this light warriors are locked not only in mortal combat but in acceptance of the outcome as not determined by one's personal fate, but rather one is open to the outcome of trial by combat by putting oneself at risk of death by the sword.
In the course of human conduct, the course of warfare is that non-combatants are victimized by warriors who fail to live by chivalry's higher course of conduct. Because Little Crow in starting the Dakota War in Minnesota in 1852 (not causing it just starting it) can not wash his hands of either the fate of his own people or the fate of innocents in a time of war, he has to be viewed as a tragic character (by which I mean both noble and flawed).
The really fine point on this is made by Dee Brown in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Metaphorically, Black Kettle wrapped himself in the American Flag. He trusted in the Great White Father in Washington and he and his wife were slaughtered by the U.S. Cavalry at Washita Massacre. Had Little Crow the same fate as Black Kettle, then it really did not matter what posture the Native American took, the Europeans were about removal and destruction of Native Peoples.
These European Americans spoke of Manifest Destiny and the white man's civilization as the wave of the future for world domination. It's a terrible, terrible legacy for this country, and it lives with us yet as the imperial mindset which is capable of "justice" for others, but lastly for itself and its own criminal acts.
Today, the day I learned of the death of Osama Bin Laden, I fear my own country's capacity to hunt down and kill the dissenter's to capitalism and neo-colonialism as a new world order. If Osama had been brought to trial for his misdeeds on which evidence substantiated his criminality, it would have at least tracked a civilized response to terrorism by an extremist.
The War on Terror is ultimately about our own practices of terrorism by smart bombs and satellite imagery and interrogation by torture. War is not pretty. Little Crow oddly stands a little taller in my perceptions today not because he chose like Osama to take the war to his enemies, but because his dissent was premised on nobility, not hatred of his enemies. I do not agree with the perceptions of Little Crow or Osama, I just believe that the U.S. is no different than these two who can be termed paranoid, or realists, depending on one's point of view. The United States in its War on Terrorism can never prevail when its internal compass is predicated on paranoia, specifically fear of the victims of capitalism and neo-colonialism.
Without an adequate system of justice, victims, driven by the anger of the victim, take the law into their own hands (which is what Osama, and Little Crow, and the U.S. did in seeking military retribution). Osama started the War on Terror its true, but we can not be so glib as to conclude that he caused it! Our demand for oil has made the strangest of bedfellows: western democracies in bed with oligarch's and dictators! As long as these do our bidding we label them friend, and when they dissent we label them evil! Go figure.
In a truly ordered society a trial would have put Osama's conduct up for examination as well as the conduct of those who claimed clean hands before prosecuting him for his misdeeds. The reason trial by the sword works for us is that we won. Osama is dead! Osama is ennobled because he had to know that in taking up the sword he would die by the sword. We have made a hero for the disenfranchised Muslims of the world. Again, go figure! But now we stare in the face the Muslim world across Asia and Africa in which our "friends" are dictators, oligarchs, and butchers. The causes of Osama taking up the sword and having martyre supporters is with us yet.
Note on preferred use of Dakota: Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota people are known to most of America as the Sioux people but that name Sioux is used by competitors of of the woodland Dakota peoples, the Chippewa, to whom Sioux means "enemy."
