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The Battle of Birch Coulie and the Dakota War of 1862 were extraordinary events in American history. In the days following the battle and the war, one of President Lincoln’s private secretaries wrote that “there has hardly been an outbreak so treacherous, so sudden, so bitter, and so bloody, as that which filled the State of Minnesota with sorrow and lamentation.” It was war waged so fiercely and dramatically that the issues and controversies underlying it would persist long after the conflict ended. The decades-long court battle to see the eventual restoration of annuity payments to the Dakotas resurrected disagreements from the war between those who argued that the annuity system only led to a government paternalism that frustrated Indian independence and those who argued that without economic help Indian nations would disappear. As the twentieth century drew to a close, what the white man called “education,” however well-intentioned, continued Preface viii . . preface to threaten Native American culture. Whether or not to receive education at the hands of the white man was framed as a choice between ending Indian poverty by joining the American mainstream in which there was no room for Indian customs and beliefs and that “ground away at what made Indian people different,” or preserving Indian heritage at the risk of separatism. By the 1980s that choice would split Native American communities into “ethnic Indians” versus “tribal Indians.” That same division had separated the “cuthairs ” from the “blanket Indians” in the Dakota War. Succeeding generations, not just of Minnesotans but all Americans, were torn between admiration for their hardy white ancestors who had carved farms and towns out of the frontier and regret for how Indian culture and history had been nearly destroyed in order to build those white settlements . After the Dakota War that equivocation hung in the air for decades like a moral smog. Yet in 2009, with a black president and a New America supposedly enlightened about race, there were those who clung to the stereotypes of the Dakota War and insisted that the Indians who had nearly wiped out 153 soldiers at Birch Coulie were nothing but “Fighting Sioux,” a bloodthirsty and warlike race. ...

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