Mini Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota by Gwen Westerman and Bruce White (review)

Gwen Westerman and Bruce White begin their book with this statement: “Minnesota is a Dakota place” (3). This is a simple sentence with a complicated meaning. In Mni Sota Makoce, the authors, as well as the contributors of essays included as sidebars, use written and oral sources and information “coded in landscape”—what they call “collective voices”—to explain its meaning (8, 223). The oral sources are “presented … as a continuous Dakota narrative from creation to the arrival of the first Europeans” (235). The title of the book is the Dakota name for the Minnesota area; the Dakota translation of the major land cession Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, dated 1851, begins with these words. The words translate as “land where the waters are so clear they reflect the clouds” (10).

Research for this book began as a project of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation (ILTF), a national, community-based organization focused on American Indian land recovery, designed to seek information for recovery of historic Dakota lands. It continued, stretching to a total of four years, with support from Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund administered by the Minnesota Historical Society. For the first several years, the project focused on archival research, collecting oral information from Dakota in Minnesota, Canada, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota, and regular discussion meetings among authors and essay writers. During the second phase, additional interviews were completed, and the book was written and published.

The book begins with a chapter titled “Homelands” and continues with chapters that tacitly use written and first-person sources to define Dakota ties to Minnesota as a place, describe Dakota use of the land, and discuss the impact of treaties on the Dakota people. In the latter, the authors describe, in four intense pages, the several-months-long war in 1862 between the Dakota and Minnesota’s white settlers that resulted from treaty difficulties, cultural misunderstandings, and rapid white settlement. They also describe the war’s aftermath: the December 1862 mass hanging in Mankato, Minnesota, of thirty-eight Dakota men identified as having been involved in the war; the years-long incarceration in Iowa of hundreds of other Dakota men; and the removal by May 1863 of most Dakota people from Minnesota. The book ends with a chapter called “Reclaiming Minnesota.”

Most of the thirty interviews used in the book were done by Glenn Wasicuna and Gwen Westerman. Westerman describes the interview process: “We had a series of interview questions and an approach to conducting the oral histories, but mostly we listened to what our relatives wanted to tell us” (225). In addition to oral information, the authors drew on other first-person accounts. Detailed information in journals kept by Indian agents and traders were sources, even though writers of the journals, as the authors point out, did not fully understand what they were describing. Transcripts of Dakota speeches made during formal councils, which Thomas G. Shaw in his essay describes as oral histories, also provided information, as did accounts of informal conversations written down by various agents. About using this information, Bruce White writes, “I sought to show that written records could be combined with the Dakota oral tradition to shape new understandings of Dakota history” (226). The research was thorough and the presentation of the information is clear. Even so, and perhaps reflecting the difficult history of the 1862 war, the authors do not include some well-documented first-person information describing divisions among Dakota at the time, atrocities and deaths on all sides, and actions of some Dakota after the war, all of which are part of the story.

Of note to oral historians, Thomas Shaw’s description of early council transcripts as oral histories, while they contain much first-person information, probably are more correctly described as meeting or council transcripts. They were records of public comments made in the context of a council, not...