Year of the Dakota Series.
Today, I begin publication of a series of articles on The Year of the Dakota. Richard J. Hilber
1862, the Year of Months of the Hard Moon
by Richard J. Hilber
In Minnesota in 1862, the farmers among the Dakota people and the Christians among the Dakota people were faced with the crisis in Dakota identity as to the proper means and degree of adapting to European ways. Also, they were challenged by their own dissenters who persisted in addressing the impropriety of adapting at all to European culture. For the dissenters, the split in the bands and people of the tribe had in point of fact led to betrayal of the Dakota way of life. Those who abstained from assimiliation, the traditionalists, had a clear conscience and knowledge of what was required of them, war.
There was a reason a young brave thus should turn away from "civilization" and join a soldier lodge that would fight to the death to recover the Dakota way of life. Deluded perhaps in their quest, but then wasn't America settled by the dissenters, protestants, outlaws, indentured servants, and rebels. I wish to focus on the reason today as a means to generate sympathy and understanding of those who rose in rebellion. I do not provide herein a list of atrocities committed by some among the rebel Dakota (denominated as renegades and criminals), nor the atrocities committed on any Indian who inhabited the State of Minnesota or Dakota Territory (perpertrated by those considered heroic by the Whites of Minnesota and elsewhere in the U.S.).
How did the the bands become so fractured with divided loyaties? The number one reason is that accommodation of the Whites in their lands had led to ouster, deprivation, and starvation (all of this before the period of active genocide of the Dakota of 1862-1864). The enormous conquest of European settlement of the hunting grounds of the Dakota was fast apace as early as the 1840s with missionary attempts to restrict the tribes to civilization and farming. The United States Congress was derelict and immoral in its provisioning of reservation bands of the Dakota people, in essence reneging on the treaty upon which the Dakota were removed from traditional hunting grounds south and west of the Mississippi River in Minnesota Territory.
By 1858, the brand new State of Minnesota essentially was free to treat Indians of any band or tribe as non-citizens, essentially outlaws. Speculators in land, timber, and minerals could expect a hands free non-interference from the federal government and the state governments where the theft of Indian wealth was occurring.
The immediate and "last straw" trigger though for the violence that ensued was deprivation. If the Indians were to be prevented from hunting as widely as accustomed to feed their families, then staples grown on federal land on "reservations" had to suffice along with such meat and related products from hunting on "reservation" lands. The realities of subsistence farming and hunting were coming to bear upon the Dakota and also the Winnibago of the State.
Chief among the Dakota on "reservations" were the Mdewauketon band led by Little Crow. Little Crow adapted especially well to Western trade, dress, culture, and even religion as he was churched Episcopalian although he also insisted on his Dakota culture and spirituality too. He in essence was the bridge between the soldier-bands who resisted acculturation and christianization and the farmer and Christian Dakota.
For the Dakota, members of the same family could find themselves divided by the events leading up to 1862, and the divide in the families and bands would become a gulf as a result of what happened at the Upper and Lower Agencies of the "sioux" reservation lands. In the mix of Dakota were the mixed-blood children of the bands who were treated as family members and for whom separate provisioning had been negotiates in the treaties which preceded the 1860s. A mixed-blood might actually be a soldier-band adherent or a farmer or a Christian.
The ignition of the tinders of deprivation and starvation for the Dakota Uprising turned out to be pride and the hunger of young braves who had failed in the hunt and having been refused by a settler in request for assistance, committed murders upon the settler and his family, and quite simply just took the foodstuffs they needed.
As a result of these murders on a farmstead near Acton, Minnesota, on Sunday, August 17, 1862, there was a division among the entirety of the Dakota. Were the braves guilty of murder to be turned over to the White authorities as criminals or were the Dakota to stand upon their rights and protect their sovereignty and their young braves from criminal prosecution? The last person to hide out on this question of divided loyalties was Little Crow. Why? At his feet was laid the blame for the degradation of the Dakota by the Europeans, and the blame well placed as the warriors knew their leader well. They could shame him into dying with them if die he must. He had afterall signed the treaties, the abhorent treaties of dispossession and betrayal by the government of the United States of America.
The soldier-lodges and their leaders prevailed upon Little Crow to take up the proverbial sword and lay waste the common enemy, the United States of America, the thief and oppressor and its Congress. Thus, after attending Episcopalian Sunday services and returning to his home proximate to the Lower Agency, Little Crow sitting not in his western style house but in his tipi in the yard heard out the leaders who wanted war and had brought word of the killings at Acton to him.
The efforts made by Little Crow in advance of that pow wow in his tipi were sincere efforts at peace and insistently made. He simply had stood his ground that his people were starving to death and that treaty payments which could have averted the crisis for his people had been delayed and siphoned off by creditors who wanted payments from the fur trade days settled up with them first.
Conclusion in Red. It should be remembered that Little Crow did not start the violence and that genocide on his people was already in progress against his people when he did decide to go to war against the U.S. As for all leaders in war, atrocities would result which can be laid at the feet of the leader.
War is not kind. There is no place to hide for George W. Bush, or Barack Obama for that matter, on the innocent killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The nobility of the warrior to kill or to be killed by his opponent in hand to hand combat is a nobility that melts down to sundries for Presidents who do not pay the price in blood of their own children in battle. Presidents of course claim the soldier as his son, as his daughter; indeed more sacred is the soldier who needlessly dies for one's policies and directives than your own blood son or daughter who continues to live into the light of day.
No man should ever agree to be President who does not understand the peril in which his soul lies. To wit, Abraham Lincoln, hero and martyre for the salvation of the federal union.
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