Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life

Clifford Canku

He leaned back, feeling the cool dampness of the wall through his thin shirt, his long legs stretched before him on the floor. Outside the window that opened high above his head, he could hear the measured cadence of a soldier who called out the changing of the guard. For a precious few minutes he would have peace from the inevitable routines of prison. He began his letter with a pen borrowed from the missionary who visited every few days, using the written words he had learned. The missionary wished him to accept the white man’s religion. Before the war, he had laughed, and his brothers had laughed with him . . . We sat in stunned silence; not a cough, not a whisper broke the utter stillness in the room. On a gray afternoon in late winter, a group of students, Dakota community members, scholars, and historians listened as Clifford Canku read out loud from Dakota letters that were written by prisoners held at Camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa, after the Dakota War of 1862. As he read each sentence slowly with his distinct Dakota accent, we were hearing the voices of our ancestors. We sat in the dim light, staring at a magnified image of a man’s handwriting on the screen, the faint shape of his words echoing across the years, almost as if he were speaking directly to us. The letters revealed that prisoners were under great pressure to convert to Christianity. Others told harsh stories. “We’re very cold, and they took the stove away from us,” one prisoner wrote. “A lot of people have died.” Another letter told how the 69 Clifford Canku 03_Layout 1 6/6/2011 10:19 Page 69 70 Beloved Child guards raped Dakota women who worked at the prison, cleaning and cooking for the prisoners. The men couldn’t protect them, so they sang to let them know they were praying for them. Other letters are painful to families because they talk about Dakota men who collaborated with the U.S. Army. Did the prisoners hear rumors of the suffering at Crow Creek? Perhaps they wrote only to assure their wives and sisters and mothers that they were still alive and to learn whether their families had survived. They may have written to offer courage for the women, to maintain a slender thread of continuity in lives that had been torn apart by a war that was already lost before the first shot was fired. Because they were Indians, the men were punished with prison regardless of their role in the war, and the women and children were treated as less than animals, paying with their health, their dignity, and their lives. For Clifford, translating these letters is about truth telling, even if they make people uncomfortable. In spring 1863, about 265 men were shipped to this federal military prison in Iowa, several months after thirty-eight warriors had been hanged at Mankato as punishment for their alleged role in the 1862 Dakota War. A quarter of these prisoners would die before the survivors were finally released three years later. During that time, their only communication with their families at Crow Creek was through letters written to Stephen R. Riggs and John Williamson. The letters were saved at the Minnesota Historical Society in the papers belonging to Reverend Riggs, a Presbyterian missionary who spent much of his life working with Dakota people. The letters sat untouched for decades until a group of five elders, all first language speakers, began the laborious process of translating each letter. Led by Clifford Canku, at that time a professor at Sisseton Wahpeton College, the original group included William Iron Moccasin, Davis Robertson, Michael Simon, and Hildreth Venegas. “It is rediscovering the history,” Clifford said. “It is a living history for us.” In late 2008, Clifford presented the Dakota Letters Project at a conference on the ethnic cleansing of Native people held at Southwest Minnesota 03_Layout 1 6/6/2011 10:19 Page 70 Clifford Canku 71 State University. This two-day conference was part of a series called “Difficult Dialogues” that was organized by Dr. Chris Mato Nunpa, associate professor of indigenous nations and Dakota studies at Southwest Minnesota State University. An impressive roster of speakers included Ward Churchill, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, and Chris Mato Nunpa, who gave powerful, electrifying lectures on the genocide of Dakota people. But it was the simple language...