Little Crow: Taoyateduta: Leader of the Dakota (review)

Marketed for children nine and older, Gwenyth Swain's biography of the Dakota chief Taoyateduta (His Red Nation), better known as Little Crow, paints a sympathetic and well-researched portrait of a man living during the tumultuous period of white conquest over Dakota people and lands. Swain chronicles the complex life of Taoyateduta and convincingly conveys how limited and difficult were the choices for Dakota people in this era of history. Born about 1810 into a line of Dakota leaders, Taoyateduta witnessed personally the first permanent white invasion and settlement of the Dakota homeland of Minnesota. This influx of missionaries, traders, agents, soldiers, and settlers meant that the Dakotas suffered disease, land-loss, depletion of game, and starvation, as well as severe assaults on the culture and a deep factionalism. After facing these conditions for decades along with repeated treaty violations by the U.S. government, the Dakotas were finally pushed to violence in 1862, and Taoyateduta reluctantly agreed to lead the Dakotas in war. After the Dakotas suffered a quick defeat, like many others Taoyateduta fled imprisonment at the war's end. However, after returning to Minnesota briefly in the summer of 1863 on a raiding party, he was shot by white farmers who collected a handsome bounty for mortally wounding the leader of Dakota resistance.

The strength of this work is that it maintains the complexity of Taoyateduta's life and times while also remaining accessible to young readers. Rather than simplifying the narrative into a story of inevitable white conquest over a doomed and heroic Indian leader and his people, Swain details at length the negative consequences of white encroachment, the impossible choices facing Dakota people, the compromises and lapses in integrity particularly at the time of the war, and the nastiness of the white settler population. For example, Swain surprisingly includes the often ignored quote of then Governor Alexander Ramsey who stated "The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state." In another example she provides the gruesome details about the chief's death, presenting an unflattering portrait of Minnesotans who dragged his body to the main street of Hutchinson, put firecrackers in his ears and nose, scalped and beheaded him, then displayed his remains at one of the state's most revered institutions, the Minnesota Historical Society. Children's literature often neglects such telling details because many believe that children should not be introduced to violence in historical writings at a young age. Such details also tend to undermine the usual efforts to instill American patriotism at the elementary level as well as call into question the violence with which Minnesota was wrested from the possession of its Indigenous inhabitants. Because Swain was not afraid to introduce young readers to some of the stark realities of Taoyateduta's era, this important and courageous inclusion has the potential to help foster a more critical consciousness in Minnesota's and America's children. Considering there is a dearth of more historically accurate children's books about Indigenous peoples, this work is an important, much-needed, and long-overdue contribution to the genre.

However, despite the more honest indictment of white policies and actions toward Dakota people, Swain still does not go quite far enough. Rather than using more accurate terminology to describe white actions, she frequently chose more benign terms and phrases. Thus, instead of discussing white invasion of the Dakota homeland, we learn from her version that "white people were moving into Dakota lands." Rather than learning about the devastation that whites created, we learn that "Cetanwakanmani [Taoyateduta's grandfather] did not understand what changes white people would bring." When the Dakota people of Kaposia, Taoyateduta's village begin leaving in the 1820s we learn that "The deer and other game that had been so plentiful in years past seemed to be hiding somewhere in the Big Woods to the west," rather than learning that they were overhunted by the invading white population...