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

Chapter 5: Dakota Tradition at Santee and Flandreau

A round 1900, John and Mary Jane Eastman posed for a family portrait with six of their eight children and their dog. Showing all attired in their Sunday best, the photo suggests a comfortable family well-versed in the conventions of middle-class American culture. One detail, however, suggests a more complicated relationship to American culture: the beadwork ornamentation on Mary Jane’s dress. One can imagine an auntie or another woman in the Dakota community at Flandreau, South Dakota, creating this beautiful decoration to honor Mary Jane, just as generations of Dakota women who created beautifully ornamented garments had done. For this particular piece of work, the artist selected a pattern of leaves and vines characteristic of Eastern Dakota beadwork and quillwork. When Mary Jane, the granddaughter of Pelagie Faribault, wore this dress, she honored the woman who had decorated it and the women’s traditions it represented. Yet weighing against the joys of producing this beadwork for an honored relation was the horror-filled history that the women shared and the unimaginable pain of trying to reconstruct a community after nearly half of its members had perished. When the Dakota were reunited after three and a half long years of separation, they faced the task of reestablishing relationships, families, and a functioning community that could provide materially, emotionally, and spiritually for its members. 119 chapter 5 Dakota Tradition at Santee and Flandreau Wrenched from their homelands, denuded of their belongings, and grieving for their dead, the Dakota also faced an entire new set of challenges , both immediate and long term. When federal oªcials moved them from Crow Creek and Davenport to Santee in present-day Nebraska, issues of land tenure and subsistence remained. Their recent conversion to Christianity challenged past Dakota practices. People faced diªcult choices about their lives, their identity, and their culture. How to rebuild them despite the grief of the years of war and internment? How to reconstruct communities and raise new generations under the new circumstances they faced? The beadwork on Mary Jane’s dress suggests some of the ways in which they answered these questions. Despite the pervasive presence of missionaries and U.S. oªcials who pressed the Dakota to abandon ancestral traditions, men and women found avenues for perpetuating the customs by which generations had ordered their lives before the cataclysm 120 Dakota Women’s Work The John and Mary Jane Faribault Eastman Family, Flandreau, South Dakota, c. 1900. of war and displacement. Even those who pledged their faith in the church found ways, as Mary Jane Eastman did, to retain and proclaim Dakota identity. The devastating experiences at Davenport and Crow Creek were immediately compounded by new uncertainties at Santee. In March 1865, the U.S. Congress had appointed a joint special committee to investigate conditions on new reservations. The committee that visited Crow Creek that fall subsequently issued a report urging the commissioner of Indian a¤airs to move the Dakota to a location better supplied with timber and more suitable for farming. Six months later, after another long and deadly winter, federal oªcials removed the surviving families to Santee, one hundred miles down the Missouri River from Crow Creek. Around the same time, the prisoners at Davenport were also transported there. Consequently, when Dakota families were finally reunited, it was in a place that was new to all. The Santee location, moreover, was riddled with problems. Federal oªcials had selected sparsely timbered land that had already been opened up to white settlers. Although the government proposed to compensate them for their land and crops, the Dakota arrival raised a storm of protest from settlers who also complained that Indians were committing depredations on their property. The settlers’ congressional representatives in Washington pushed hard to have the Dakota removed across the Missouri River into the Dakota Territory, an area which, on the positive side, also had more timber. As a result, a few months later federal oªcials moved the Dakota once again, approximately four miles downriver, but debate over the extent and location of the reservation would continue until August 31, 1869, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed an executive order establishing the boundaries of the reservation. By then, the continuing e¤ects of malnutrition and the Dakota’s depleted health had reduced their population to about one thousand.1 Adding to these disorienting experiences was the new name the U.S...