Dakota Women's Work: Creativity, Culture, and Exile

Chapter 4: Separate Survival

T here is no fancy work remaining from the years immediately following the U.S.–Dakota War—no beadwork, no quillwork , no moccasins, no cradleboards. The genocidal actions of the federal government severed the Dakota from cultural expressions and everything but their most basic physical necessities. Men did not hunt. Women did not make quilled or beaded gifts for family members. Separated and imprisoned Dakota were condemned to four years of physical abuse, spiritual deprivation, and isolation from family members who would have eased some of the horror of their circumstances. In a special address to the Minnesota legislature on September 9, 1862, Governor Alexander Ramsey vowed to destroy the Dakota, adding that “if any escape extinction, the wretched remnant must be driven beyond our borders.” To implement Ramsey’s plan, Minnesota paid bounties to whites who killed Dakota people and brought in their scalps as proof. Yet the actions taken against the Dakota in the years after 1862 were also more sustained and far reaching. Many of these fall within the definition of genocide established by the United Nations in 1946: “the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.” U.S. policy called for the deliberate attempt to eradicate Dakota culture.1 The years between the war’s end and the establishment of the new Dakota reservation at Santee, Nebraska, embody one particular aspect of genocide: “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the 93 chapter 4 Separate Survival group.” This purposeful e¤ort to destroy the Dakota by removing adult men from the rest of the population is perhaps unique even in the history of atrocities perpetrated against Native peoples in the United States. With adult men imprisoned in Mankato and then at Camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa, and women, children, and elders interned at Fort Snelling and then at Crow Creek in the Dakota Territory, the Dakota would be unable to bring life to a new generation. Survival of the current generation was itself in question. Two thousand Dakota were taken prisoners at the end of the U.S.–Dakota War; only twelve hundred survived three and a half years later. By the time the two groups were reunited in Nebraska in 1866, nearly one half of their population had perished.2 Losses of this magnitude are impossible to grasp fully, and for several generations the experience was too diªcult even to talk about. Cora Jones’s great-grandmother, Pazahiyayewin, She Shall Radiate in Her Path Like the Sun, Ellen Kitto, had been moved to Crow Creek, but for many decades her family knew little about what happened there. “So many people wouldn’t even talk about it after they left there,” said Jones in 2007. “They didn’t want to remember any of it. They didn’t want to pass it on to their children because it was such horrible, horrible conditions.” Those who spoke of it did so “in low, mournful tones,” as Hannah Frazier did when she told her granddaughter about what the young woman’s great-great-grandmother had endured. One hundred years after the events she heard about from stories, Hannah Frazier almost wept as she recounted them for her granddaughter.3 Ending the silence on atrocities poses daunting challenges and risks, but the traumas su¤ered by the survivors and their descendants require that the silence be broken. In the final years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, the descendants of the Dakota who lived through the genocide of the 1860s have begun breaking the silence about the unspeakable experiences through ceremonies, memorials, marches, and other gatherings. Like the annual Yom Ha-Shoah commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis and their allies against the Jews of Europe, these events serve powerful 94 Dakota Women’s Work spiritual and emotional purposes. They allow survivors to reclaim their history and to give the victims of genocide the recognition, acknowledgment , and honor that their brutal deaths prevented.4 Recounting, studying, and understanding the experience of genocide asserts the humanity and dignity of those whom genocide sought to dehumanize and eradicate. Recognizing their humanity requires scrutiny of the victimization and the people targeted for destruction—those who perished and those who survived but watched others die. Understanding the experience of genocide among the Dakota involves one additional step: reckoning with the separation of husbands and wives, parents...