By Nick Coleman, Columnist
Minneapolis Star/Tribune
June 27, 2004

WINONA, MINN.—THE BIG BOATS ARE COMING BACK. But so are the people who were here before them. And for the first time, they will share the spotlight.

In an extraordinary confluence of troubled history and romantic myth, this city of 27,000 on the Mississippi River is preparing to welcome an anniversary flotilla of riverboats while at the same time attempting to find reconciliation with the Indian tribe that was displaced by the civilization that sent the original flotilla 150 years ago.

On Saturday, the mayor of Winona, the Roman Catholic bishop and several other representatives of government and church groups apologized during an outdoor “truth and reconciliation” ceremony to members of the Dakota (Sioux ) tribe, including direct descendants of the hereditary Dakota chiefs known as Wapasha, or Wabasha, whose Mdewakanton band of Dakota lived for generations beneath the Winona bluffs.

“I am hurt and I am truly ashamed of the injustices inflicted on the Dakota nation,” Mayor Jerry Miller told a gathering of several hundred people who listened to two hours’ worth of testimony from tribal members who recounted family stories of suffering during more than a century of war, removal and racism. Miller, saying he was speaking on behalf of Winonans past and present, offered “our sincere, heartfelt apology for what happened” and said Winona wants to welcome the Dakota back home.

Old Millard Fillmore would never have guessed he’d see the day. Fillmore was the unremarkable ex—resident who led the 1854 “Grand Excursion,” an elite steamboat flotilla that brought wealthy Easterners to view the Upper Mississippi Valley shortly after it had been nearly cleared of its original inhabitants.

This week, a re-creation of Fillmore’s flotilla will bring another armada of riverboats up river, through Winona and on to St. Paul.

Like the original flotilla, which was conducted in the belief that God had finally made the valley fit for its rightful heirs, the recreation seems likely to bypass the rich history of relations between whites and Indians.

But that history was painfully confronted Saturday, in a part below the jagged bluff known locally as Sugar Loaf but which was once called “Wapasha’s Cap,: and stood above a village whose succession of chiefs resisted the steady incursion of whites.

After deceptive treaties wrested most of Minnesota away from the Dakota, the Indians were rounded up and removed to a small reservation on the Minnesota River. The money and supplies promised under the treaties never arrived; starvation stalked the tribe. And in 1863, a war led to the deaths of hundreds along the frontier, the execution of 38 warriors, the dispersal of Dakota bands to prison-like reservations and a declaration by Governor Alexander Ramsey that the Dakota must be banished or face extermination.

Old Millard Fillmore had presided over changes to the treaties that were made in the Senate and forced on the Indians—changes that led to war and caused Chief Wabasha III to say there was just one more thing the “Great Father” could do to the Dakota; “Gather us all together on the prairie and surround us with soldiers and shoots us down.”

By the time of the executions and extermination efforts, more than eight years after Fillmore’s “excursion,” all that was left as reminders of the Upper Mississippi’s original inhabitants were the place names that were appropriated by the newcomers and romanticized for the tourist trade.

“It was an ethnic cleansing, “ says St. Olaf College Prof. Carolyn Anderson, who has researched Dakota history, “Except they didn’t really go away. They’re still here.”

Still here, but still overlooked and invisible, just as they were when Fillmore’s flotilla arrived to enjoy the pristine beauties of the river valley.

“We never were ‘together,’ so how can we reconcile?” asked David Larsen, a former tribal chairman on the lower Sioux reservation near Morton, Minn. “We can’t tap-dance around the truth anymore. We have to really get to know each other in a really honest way, and let go of the anger and let go of the pain.”

A local volunteer committee, working with tribal representatives and the Diversity Foundation, helped organize the “Dakota Homecoming” or “hdihunipi” a Dakota work meaning “they are returning back home.” Saturday’s speakers included staff representatives of Senators Norm Coleman and Mark Dayton as well as federal judge Joan Erickson, who asked those in attendance if they had heard the stories of the Dakota and had believed them to stand and render their verdict.

Every person stood, despite the fact that, as in many homecomings, reconciliation can produce some painfully awkward moments. Such as the one Saturday when Dakota spiritual leader Ambrose Littleghost, 72, told the gathering—which included Winona Bishop Bernard Harrington—how he was beaten in Catholic schools as a child, disciplined for not speaking English.

“Every little mistake we made, we got a whupping.” Littleghost said, standing just 15 feet away from Bishop Harrington. “Sometimes when I see a priest, I still want to go out and punch him in the nose.”

Harrington, wearing a black cassock to recall the days when Catholic missionaries were called “black robes” by the Indians, took it in stride, offering an apology on behalf of the church and noting that he, too, experienced corporal punishment as a Catholic schoolboy.

“We do see your pain, and feel your pain and understand your pain,” Harrington told the gathering, seated in a circle on chairs near a smoldering wood fire and an encampment of teepees marked by eagle-feather staffs. “We apologize.”

Littleghost and other speakers, some from as far away as Canada, recounted a litany of hurts known everywhere among the Dakota Diaspora. There were tearful stories of starving Indian women forced to prostitute themselves to soldiers in order to obtain food for their children. Stories of relatives imprisoned for defending their farms against white encroachment, or grandmothers picking undigested corn out of animal droppings to boil for soup, of the skulls and bones of ancestors kept as souvenirs or museum pieces.

“The Holocaust started in THIS country, “ Littleghost said, pointing emphatically at the ground. “If somebody hurts you –again and again—you can’t forget. We want to hear, ‘Sorry; forgive us.’”

The ceremonies, modeled on international truth and justice commissions that have helped heal the wounds of conflicts in countries such as South Africa, continue today with a 9 a.m. reconciliation session and an ecumenical church service in Winona’s Lake Park. But organizers hope this weekend’s Dakota Homecoming will be just the first in an annual series of meetings.

Ernest Wabasha, the great-great grandson of the chief who defended his people during Millard Fillmore’s time, was on hand to signal his approval Saturday, along with his wife, Vernell, and their son, Leonard Wabasha, the eighth in a family line whose leaders still are honored by many Dakota as chiefs of the tribe..

“It’s starting to feel like we can get along,” said Ernest Wabasha, 75, of Lower Sioux, who was making only the second visit in his life to the home of his ancestors. “ I don’t know if you can say that things are smoothed over, but they’re in the past, and maybe we can get along better now.”

His wife, Vernell, was not as hopeful. She noted that the late Gov. Rudy Perpich proclaimed 1987, the 125th anniversary of the Dakota war, as a “Year of Reconciliation,” but that Indians still suffer from incidents of ignorance and outright racism.

“The attitudes of some of the people are still the same,” she said. “And you can tell that just by looking at some of the legislation they try to pass in St. Paul.”

Many Indians yesterday mentioned Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s attempt to take away tribal exclusivity on gaming, but others also were upset by this week’s scheduled closing of the Minnesota Historical Society’s small museum on the Lower Sioux Reservation that tells the story of the 1862 conflict and the suffering of the Dakota. The historical society, pressured by financial cuts, has offered to give the unique museum to the tribe, which has agreed to operate it. But local non-Indian governments have refused to approve the plan, balking at the idea of Indian sovereignty over the museum and the 220 acre site.

The museum is set to close Wednesday, the same day the boats of the recreated Fillmore flotilla are scheduled to reach Winona and the ancient home of the Dakota.

So once again, the big boats will come up the river. And once again, Minnesota’s first people will be overlooked. But in Winona this weekend, a small start has been made to change hearts and to open the possibility of a future that may be better than the past.

Today on Wabasha’s Prairie, the last word should go to Ernest Wabasha: “It is good.”