Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota

5. Reclaiming Minnesota—Mni Sota Makoce

WestermanWhite.indd 196 7/16/12 8:31 AM 197 “By putting forth our stories we are exerting this belief in ourselves, in our history, and our ability to transform the world.” Waziyatawiå Angela Wilson, Remember This! Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives T he treaties of 1851 marked the beginning of the Dakota’s exile from their homelands in Minnesota. The Dakota people were not given a permanent home in which to live, and efforts to confine them to the region of the Upper Minnesota River began before the treaties were even ratified. Willis A. Gorman, who succeeded Alexander Ramsey as governor of Wisconsin Territory in May 1853, took official charge of the removal beginning in August of that year. Although the Dakota did not have full possession of their reservation and preparations to receive them at their new locations were far from complete, Gorman persuaded the Red Wing and Wabasha bands to move as far as Kap’oża in September. By November he had succeeded in getting all but a few of the Bdewakaåtuåwaå, Sisituåwaå, and Wa®petuåwaå who lived on the Mississippi and lower Minnesota rivers to move to the Upper Minnesota. Gorman noted, however, that “A portion of Wabasha’s band left the Village near Lake Pippin [sic] on the Mississippi R and hid themselves in the country on the Red Cedar river near the Iowa line. But every soul of every other have been removed.” An agency was established on the south side of the Chapter five Reclaiming Minnesota— Mni Sota Makoce WestermanWhite.indd 197 7/16/12 8:31 AM 198 reclaiming minnesota—mni sota makoce Minnesota River near the mouth of the Redwood, about fifteen miles above Fort Ridgely, the new military post.1 During the removal process, Gorman recognized the difficulty of defining a reservation consisting of ceded land in which the Dakota resided under the sufferance of the president. Writing to the commissioner of Indian affairs, he stated that there were places in the ceded lands the Dakota were leaving that were “quite as much out of the reach of the white settlements as on the purchased reservations,” which were actually, by the original terms of the treaty, reserved from the lands ceded. If the reservation was to be open “to all to come and go at pleasure,” then there was no way to protect Indian occupancy through the laws generally applied to “Indian country.” Gorman declined to authorize extensive improvements on the reservation lands until the matter could be settled. Despite these difficulties, he was determined to keep the Dakota on the reservation.2 Plowing and the construction of a few houses for the Bdewakaåtuåwaå and Wa®peku™e bands began in 1854. But supplies and food were lacking, due in part to government appropriations that did not fulfill the 1851 treaty provisions and to continual delays in the delivery of annuities. To support themselves, many Dakota continued to return throughout the 1850s to areas in which they had lived, hunted, and harvested for generations. In January 1855, Gorman allowed Dakota to hunt deer along Rice Creek and at Rice Lake. The St. Paul Daily Democrat reported on January 27, 1855, that they had “killed five hundred deer, in addition to a large amount of smaller game.” A well-known daguerreotype of tepees adjacent to the John H. Stevens house, in the area of present-day downtown Minneapolis, was probably taken during one of the removed Dakota’s return visits. Meanwhile Sisituåwaå and Wa®petuåwaå bands located farther up the Minnesota River had received very little assistance on their reservation. They continued hunting as a primary form of subsistence during the winter.3 Even before ratification of the 1851 treaties and removal of the Dakota from the ceded lands, whites predicted the Dakota would disappear from the landscapes in which they had lived for thousands of years. And, at this point, the Dakota began to disappear from the written history of Minnesota. In February 1853, just before the treaties were proclaimed by the president, Governor Alexander Ramsey, acting as president of the Minnesota Historical Society (which was founded in 1849, within the first months of the territory’s existence) wrote a letter, with the historian Edward D. Neill, to the commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington: “The Dakota Indians having ceded their territory on the Mississippi and Minnesota...