Dakota Women’s Work: Creativity, Culture, and Exile by Colette A. Hyman

Before 1860, women’s creative work was a manifestation of wakan (sacred power) in Dakota life, from ornamented tools to the quill-work on ceremonial cepka pouches that held a child’s umbilical cord. Thus, Colette Hyman’s declaration midway through her study that, for the period of Dakota internment following the war of 1862, “there is no fancy work remaining” elicits a powerful sense of loss. This void, while at the historical center of her study, only magnifies the determination that Dakota women exerted in reconstituting their work and culture in the following decades.

Because women’s work served both “material and spiritual” functions within Dakota culture, it serves as a barometer for measuring economic and social change from the fur trade era to the present. Hyman’s analysis of relations with whites shifts the focus from the mediating role of traders’ Indigenous wives to the efforts of mostly anonymous women, whose work produced valuable commodities in a time of waning hunting opportunities and the transition to a cash economy. Following the U.S.-Dakota War, men and women were separated—several hundred men were sent to Camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa, while women endured internment and starvation conditions, first at Fort Snelling and then at Crow Creek. During those genocidal years, women’s work was crucial to bare subsistence. Hyman shows, however, that the wakan power was dormant rather than depleted. By the 1870s, when Dakotas were reestablished at Santee and Flandreau, South Dakota, women’s creative work was central to the rebuilding of Dakota culture, particularly through the structures provided by churches. Quilting bees and church meetings became the new places for women to gather, work, and pass on tradition; the quilled hymnal covers women made demonstrate innovations crucial to resilience by integrating Dakota tradition with new realities.

While Hyman is able to trace a number of families from the 1700s through the present, her focus on mostly anonymous women requires resourceful research. Trade records show how often women made clothing as payment on goods between 1845 and 1850, for example, and lists of names of residents of Santee in the 1880s show Dakotas’ persistent use of birth-order names years after removal. Interviews with present-day Dakota women—whose memories and family stories also constitute rich historical texts—allow Hyman to form thoughtful hypotheses about the role of women’s work in ceremonial life, collective work, and cultural memory both in the past and the present.