By Michael E. Randall
Dakota Journal
December 30-January 06, 2006
Vol. 7, Issue 2

FT.THOMPSON –Recently on the Crow Creek Reservation at Fort Thompson, Dakota, Lakota and non-native people helped each other in a big way, assisted by a boost from the Diversity Foundation of Minnesota, an organization which attempts to improve inter-cultural understanding and heal past wounds. The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe and the cities of Winona and Rochester, Minnesota, Minnesota also partnered in the effort.

Identified by the U.S. Census Bureau as the poorest country in the United States, Buffalo County is part of the Crow Creek Reservation, home to perhaps 3,000 people. Most are Dakota descendants of the Santee people driven from Minnesota by whites in 1863 after the war of August 1862.

When Diversity Foundation Executive Director Lyle Rustad called Crow creek to ask what people need, Marcella Big Eagle, Director of Elderly Nutrition Programs on the reservation, said, “We need whatever you can bring.” As a result, on December 20 and 21st, several trucks full of toys, clothing, furniture, mattresses, bedding and other donated items rolled up to the door of the Golden Age Center at Fort Thompson.

Also, Council member Ray Red Wing of the Flandreau tribe, brought Christmas baskets and a check from his tribal government.

Throughout the project, native and non-native Minnesota-based volunteers worked to load and unload the trucks, including the Lower Sioux Reservation’s Bob Larsen and his son-in-law, Ryan Dixon, a Pine Ridge Lakota. Larsen is a Diversity Foundation Dakota advisor and is directly descended from the major historical figure, Mdewakanton Dakota Chief Wapasha, whose life has been part of the focus of the Foundation’s work.

Identifying themselves as ambassadors of the City of Winona, Minnesota, volunteers Bruce Fuller and Steve Jasnoch drove in with a huge trailer of goods and helped to unload it.

Local Crow Creek volunteers that day included Marcella Big Eagle, Doris St. John, Jeannie Eagle, Curt Harrison, Leroy McGhee, Skeeter Walker, Verlyn Walker, Gary Ross, Jr., and several other men and women too shy to allow their names in print.

The Diversity Foundation’s mission—through its charitable activities, its annual “Winona/Dakota Homecoming and Gathering,” its Dakota historic documentary film projects, and its archives of Dakota elders’ oral histories—seeks to foster reconciliation between people who are often unable to “…bridge the barriers of race, culture and conditioning” on their own. Spirit Lake Dakota, Ed Lohnes, chairs the Foundation board.

Due to efforts by a Chief Wapasha Descendant, Rod Steiner, last Christmas’ gifts of clothes, food, and appliances came from people in Kansas. Over the next few months the Diversity Foundation will try to bring more items, such as mattresses and bedding. According to Executive Director Rustad, this effort will not be the last. “In the future,” Rustad said, “We hope to address medical and economic development issues, as well. This is a just a small step of what we hope will be others’s efforts to help heal the past and atone for injustices committed,” Rustad said. “It’s part of larger reconciliation efforts between the City of Winona and the Dakota Nation, as facilitated by our Foundation.”

One hundred forty three years ago, Dakota people along the Minnesota River in western Minnesota were starving because the U.S. Government was months behind in its payments for the land Dakotas has sold to the government for white settlement. Hunger and frustration drove them to the war in August of 1862.

After the six-week war’s end, 500 to 1,000 whites and an uncounted number of Indians lay dead. Although both sides committed many atrocities, white survivor’s vengeance exploded upon the Dakota people. Whether or not particular native families and individuals were involved in the uprising meant little to the dominant culture.

St. John’s University History Professor, Annette Atkins, writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (August 15, 2002), said, “Race, not behavior, was the criterion that determined guilt or innocence, because, as whites understood it, it was a racial trait—the Indians’ “inherent savagery”—that caused the outbreak.”

Although many Dakotas fled west or up into Canada, most were herded together and imprisoned. Hundreds were tried in military tribunals, with individual trials lasting only a few minutes. Finally, 307 Dakotas were sentenced to hand, though President Lincoln commuted all by 39 of these sentences.

On December 26, 1862, the condemned men sang their death songs and were hung at Mankato. Others were kept in chains at Fort Snelling or in a Gerry-rigged and squalid prison at Mankato until spring, then virtually all were sent down the Mississippi. On the way out of St. Paul, white citizens shot and killed or wounded a number of captive Dakotas. The surviving Indians eventually were shipped up the Missouri to Yankton, Crow Creek, and other places in Dakota Territory. That first year at Crow Creek, hundreds died from disease and starvation.

As Atkins wrote, there was plenty of blame to go around. “When we’re most enraged we’re least able to make good judgments. Rage and fear don’t engender justice. The Indians did not find justice through slaughter, nor did the whites by violating their own principles (and Constitution) through miscarried trials and executions and cruel and racist exile.”

Also, to this day, many Dakota families at Crow Creek and elsewhere harbor grudges against other Dakota families because of their respective ancestors’ perceived roles during that six-day war long ago. Some are bitter about other’s ancestors being quislings for the whites, while others resent being judged for that their ancestors might or might not have done to participate in—or avoid—the violence 143 years ago.

Chronic Indian resentment of whites’ indifference to old debts that were owed—and some still owed—to Dakotas; present-day whites’ indifference to current Indian poverty and struggles for cultural revival; Indians’ interfamily resentments and spiteful behavior, where does it all end?

Or do we want it to end? Maybe we prefer to nurture the resentment within us so that we feel victimized by—and morally superior—to those we consider our enemies. Perhaps we like the drama and self-righteousness we feel, even a the cost of stunting our own growth as humans. Forgiveness can be too daunting, for with no one to blame we’d have to be responsible for our own lives and actions.

St. John’s University’s Atkins wrote, “The haunting lesson of the U.S. –Dakota War is how destructive –of ourselves and our enemies—it is to meet outrage with rage, however warranted or justified it seems, then or now.”

Organizations like the Diversity Foundation, a partnership between native and non-native people, seek to counter such negative human behaviors and old resentments with understanding and active help.