Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890–1930 by Karen V. Hansen (review)

Karen Hansen weaves the historical past of the Great Plains into the personal present. Encounter utilizes oral testimonies from Dakota elders, demonstrating the persistence of oral tradition and its centrality to Dakota culture. Hansen buttresses these accounts with government documents and Scandinavian immigrant oral histories, illuminating the commonalities and differences between these two groups in the northern Great Plains. What makes Hansen’s account compelling is that the book details the intersections between race, gender, and class and how those social constructions garnered either more or less access to land-ownership and economic stability. For Hansen, the influx of northern European immigration to the northern Great Plains dovetailed nicely with federal Indian policy, unwittingly placing immigrants as part of the solution to the government’s “Indian problem.”

As Hansen clarifies, before Fort Totten, North Dakota, there was Minnesota. In signaling a longer relationship between the groups, she demonstrates how the Dakota Wars were related to the Homestead Act and the Dawes Act. Once both groups were firmly situated on Spirit Lake Reservation, Hansen replaces the faceless bureaucratic legislative juggernauts that dispossessed the Dakotas with dynamic on-the-ground historical actors in the Great Plains. There, with titled land and an outstandingly high rate of naturalization, immigrant women like Bertine Sem no longer viewed marriage as mandatory. Land equaled new options for these immigrant women. Dakota women viewed immigrant agricultural practices as part and parcel of a larger puzzle that left many Dakota peoples reliant on governmental programs for food security.

What scholars of the Great Plains will find most interesting is how kinship and mutuality provided a food safety net for both groups and how Dakota women relied on their traditional elevated social status to ensure sur-vival for their people and their Scandinavian neighbors—especially during the Great Depression.

Although Hansen’s use of settler colonialism needs a deeper bibliography, this should not keep you from reading one of the most innovative books on the Great Plains since Pekka Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire. In detailing the rich sociocultural interactions between Scandinavian settlers and the Dakota Nation, Hansen moves beyond simply recounting how the Dakota Nation lost land in the Great Plains. This monograph gives voice to those who lived together on Sprit Lake, and in doing so, it becomes a book that seeks reconciliation with Hansen’s familial past by explaining how the Scandinavian and Dakota families faced what both groups viewed as uncertain futures.