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

Karen V. Hansen’s groundbreaking study of the interwoven lives of Dakota Indians and Norwegian immigrants on the Spirit Lake Reservation chronicles an untold story of coexistence during the first four decades of North Dakota’s statehood. Hansen’s Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890–1930 juxtaposes the forced migration and assimilation of the indigenous population with the voluntary migration and colonization of the Northern Europeans. Both groups suffered consequences from the pressures of Americanization projects, and Hansen plays on the harmony and discord between the neighboring peoples as they built communities on the reservation. Private land ownership, the expectations for its stewardship, and economic productivity demanded steep investments; unequal treatment by federal, state, and local authorities disadvantaged those unwilling to fit the dominant white American mold. Hansen distills policy and political decisions into a coherent narrative of chain reactions that tracks the progression of the dispossession and land-taking in North Dakota as homesteading opportunities began to wane. Grounded in meticulous archival research and analysis of plat maps and photographs, as well as archived oral histories and interviews with tribal elders and long-term residents, the eloquent personal narratives of Hansen’s “contact zone” spring from the page to break the silence surrounding the encounters of the men and women who populated this swathe of prairie.

The introduction foregrounds the events that brought these peoples together geographically. In the tumultuous aftermath of the 1862 US-Dakota War, allied bands of Dakotas forced from their homes united and settled in Dakota Territory near Spirit Lake. They negotiated a treaty for that land with the United States five years later. By 1904, the Dakota agreed to relinquish unallotted reservation lands to the federal government; following the transaction, the government promptly released tracts of the reservation to eager homesteaders. Scandinavian immigrants made up the majority of the land seekers, and by the time this study ends twenty-five years later, they owned one-third of the reservation lands. Karen Hansen’s great-grandmother was one of the Norwegians who homesteaded and successfully “proved up” a claim on the Spirit Lake Reservation. The author’s alternating fascination with and incomprehension of the Scandinavian American guilt and privilege of her own matrilineal legacy of land-taking fueled an indefatigable curiosity to give voice to the women and men of these symbiotic relationships.

Divided into three parts, the book begins by contextualizing the competing frameworks that initiated the encounters, transitions to the ebb and flow of everyday interactions, and concludes with the increasingly divergent political paths of the two groups’ parallel lives on the reservation on the eve of the Great Depression. Hansen, a historical sociologist, devotes particular attention to gender, and skillfully teases out the complex intersections of oral narratives, historical memory, and federal and state policy. At the same time, she weaves in histories of Native Americans, Scandinavian immigration, and the American West. One of the many values of her scholarly contribution is the clear articulation of the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and citizenship during this half-century of cautious coexistence amid the indigenous dispossession.

Chapter 1 employs visiting rituals to display how the sincere hospitality and generosity valued by the Scandinavians and Dakota among themselves were lost in translation as they met in each other’s homes and communities. Mutual wariness and suspicion reigned, often based on reported accounts from target-language newspapers or transmitted via kinship networks; with the wars of the recent past fresh in the minds of many, fearful engagement with the exotic Other raised the stakes of interaction on the isolated prairie. Scandinavian immigrants’ letters cite few accounts of Indian and immigrant relations on non-Indian land, even during the US-Dakota War, and Hansen probes that silence to learn more about the proximity.

The immigration trajectory of the Norwegians to the American Midwest...