Isaac Heard's Recurring Vision of Sudden Death: The U.S.-Dakota War as "Anti-Indian Sublime," 1862-Present (original) (raw)
Related papers
Settler Ideology as Public Pedagogy: Erasing Moral Facts with Common Core Principles
This presentation examines dominant discourses driving southern Minnesota's white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 (Lybeck, 2015), focusing specifically on a regional ideology that enforces a hardline separation between facts and opinions. Supported by objectivist discourses enshrined today in the state's K-12 Common Core Standards, this separation reveals highly situated white-supremacist roots when historicized. These roots include a body of primary-source materials that frame white "victimhood" and Dakota "savagery" as objective facts in order for white citizens and descendants to suspend judgment about injustices committed during their state's founding, events interpreted as acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing today (Mann, 2005; Kiernan, 2007; Waziyatawin, 2008). The presentation proceeds then to review current historiographic work produced by members of a regional settler discourse community (Swales, 2016) that seeks to keep historic separations between "the facts" and moral "opinions" in place, the purpose being to warn the public off knowledge about regional genocide. In the course of reviewing this work, the presentation reveals the ongoing persuasive power of the primary sources' dominant discourse, the anti-Indian sublime (Silver, 2008), a discourse that, as argued, plays a significant role in reproducing public ignorance on the war.
Fear and Reconciliation: The U.S.-Dakota War in White Public Pedagogy
2015
This study examines closely related public discourses like balance, neutrality, objectivity, and fairness, analyzing the collective barrier they pose to social-justice education. Taking the recent sesquicentennial of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 as a case in point, this study gives an overview of the public pedagogy (Sandlin et al., 2011) that prevailed in southern Minnesota in 2012, encouraging educators to present perspectives on the war in ways commonly considered “balanced,” “neutral,” etc., all while urging citizen-scholars to commemorate sacrifices made by the Dakota people and white settlers equally. As I argue, this public pedagogy mediates justice as fairness (Rawls, 1993; Steele, 2005; Seth, 2010), a sense of justice that has a long colonial history in America, promoting the suspension of social contingencies like race so that the historically empowered may make sense and derive comfort from the violently unequal past. To better understand justice-as-fairness discourses as antithetical to critical social-justice education (McLaren, 1995; Grande, 2004; Giroux, 2006; Waziyatawin, 2008), this study proceeds to explore relationships between classroom pedagogy and 2012’s larger public pedagogy. Analyzing data collected from fieldnotes, informal conversational interviews, and classroom artifacts, I look carefully into dilemmas these conflicting senses of justice presented to a group of 15 college students and two instructors as they co-authored a successful traveling museum exhibit on the U.S.-Dakota War. Conducting their work at a private, liberal-arts institution located near where the fighting once took place, I investigate various ways students and instructors resisted, negotiated, and reproduced justice-as-fairness discourses that have long encouraged local citizens to suspend moral judgment about how their communities were made. What emerges is a portrait of educators and student knowledge workers setting aside critical prior knowledge about colonialism and racial oppression in order to accommodate the creation of a museum exhibit that would safely mediate a common sense of justice for them and their implied white audience. The study concludes by theorizing pedagogical support for a critical museum-exhibit project on the U.S.-Dakota War that would advocate for regional social change, an exhibit variously envisioned by students but one that ultimately went unwritten for deference to local ideological demands.
Proceedings of the Tenth Native-American Symposium. Durant, OK: Southeastern Oklahoma State University., 2015
2012 marked the 150th anniversary of the U.S.-Dakota War in Minnesota, the decisive moment when settler society drew the color line through Dakota homeland (Mni Sota Makoce) by means of exclusionary legislation, extermination campaigns, and violent removal. In What Does Justice Look Like? (2008), Dakota scholar Waziyatawin anticipated the state’s sesquicentennial period as “an ideal time to initiate a new era of truth telling in Minnesota to counter the 150 years of myth making” (p. 11), her contribution being to challenge white readers to acknowledge the crimes against humanity through which their state was made — including genocide — so that restorative justice for Mni Sota Makoce and its people could become imaginable. By analyzing ethnographic data collected as participant-observer of a college course taught in 2012 near where the fighting once took place, I identify salient barriers to Waziyatawin’s decolonial project as experienced by a group of young, white Minnesotans oriented favorably toward her vision. Interview data collected as these students co-constructed a successful traveling museum exhibit on the war, purchased by groups as varying as the Flandreau Santee Sioux Community in South Dakota and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., reveal a growing sense of ambivalence wherein students struggled to retain critical voices amidst a white social order demanding “balance” and “neutrality” in representations of its settler-colonial past. The ideological constraints exerted by this public pedagogy (Sandlin et al., 2011) will be analyzed.
The Dakota-US War of 1862 led to the removal and exile of Dakota people from their ancestral homeland. Integral to this process was the forced march of 1,700 women, children and elders from the Lower Sioux Agency to Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Despite the siting of numerous memorials related to the War and its aftermath, few mark the forced march and its legacies. Since 2002, however, the seven-day Dakota Commemorative March (DCM) has been held biennially to remember and honor Dakota ancestors on the original forced march. Following a brief overview of extant place-based memorials at sites along its path, we draw on documentary sources to explore the significance of the DCM as a distinctive Dakota intervention in the commemorative landscape. Through a process we call 'affective participation'—an intense bodily, emotive and transformative engagement in an event—participants on the DCM not only seek to remember but also strive toward healing and justice in the present and the future. Our hope is to expand the focus of current geographical work on discrete site-based memorials to consider the social-and cultural-geographical significance of alternative (particularly Native) forms and scales of commemoration.
Karl Jakob Skarstein's "The War with the Sioux: Norwegians against Indians, 1862-1862"
The US-Dakota War stands among the most overlooked conflicts in American History. Contemporary with the American Civil War, the US-Dakota War, featured significant fighting, tactical brilliance, and strategic savvy set in the open plains of Minnesota and North Dakota. Karl Jakob Skarstein's "The War with the Sioux" tells the story of Norwegian immigrants, American soldiers, and Dakota and Lakota Indians as they fought to protect their families, communities, and way of life. Translated from Norwegian and supplemented with a preface and new introductions by Danielle Mead Skjelver, Richard Rothaus, Melissa Gjellstad, and Dakota Goodhouse, this work draws on the diaries, letters, and newspapers of Norwegian immigrants for a new perspective on the Northern Plains during these tumultuous years. Skarstein's work makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on this conflict and offers an accessible and surprisingly intimate view of the conflict through the eyes of the Norwegian settlers in the region. All of the introductions are Open Access, and the full text, including the English translation by Melissa Gjellstad and Danielle Skjelver is available here. https://mediterraneanworld.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/the-war-with-the-sioux-the-book/
ARCHEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE WOOD LAKE BATTLEFIELD, YELLOW MEDICINE COUNTY, MINNESOTA
The Wood Lake Battlefield is the location of the last armed conflict between the Oceti Sakowin and the U.S. Military in 1862. Investigation of the material patterns of asymmetric warfare on the battlefield combined with oral history and documentary sources provide new ways of understanding the complexity of the conflict. Dakota traditional warfare was adapted to fight against the U.S. Military, which was technologically better armed with a numerically greater force. An examination of artifacts recovered through sub-surface geophysical survey and metal detection, and a GIS analysis of artillery shows that the U.S. was relatively ineffective when using shoulder arms and gained their advantage through the use of anti-personnel weapons fired by artillery.
An examination of the speech of Little Crow, leader of the Dakota Indians in the US-Dakota War of 1862. The emphasis is on the manner in which the speech was constructed after the US-Dakota War and how it was passed into contemporary history.
Territorialization, science and the colonial state: The case of Highway 55 in Minnesota
Cultural Geographies, 2003
This paper examines a recent conflict over the rerouting of Highway 55 in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. During a three-year struggle over the project, a group of indigenous people argued that the space where the highway would pass was sacred and of historical importance. We analyse a Cultural Resource Assessment prepared by a team of scientists that responded to these claims and cleared the way for the reroute. Our reading, which draws from the literatures of postcolonial studies and sociology of science, examines the way scientific claims are made to evaluate the sacredness of the site. We find that science works to produce the effect of state territorialization – or the iterative making of the space of the state – by placing ecological phenomena and indigenous testimony ‘within’ a non-sacred Minnesotan space.
Finding Fort Fair Haven: Archaeological Investigations of an 1862 Settlers' Fort
The goal of this thesis is twofold. The first step was to perform archaeological test excavations on the Fort Fair Haven site in order to confirm that we had, in fact, located the 1862 historical site of Fort Fair Haven. Once we successfully determined that it was indeed the fort, then the second step was to analyze these findings and use them in conjunction with archival research in order to better understand what kind of actual defensive function it could have provided. A specific way of doing this is to compare the civilian fort’s design with those of military fortifications of the period. The data recovered strongly suggests that we did indeed successfully locate Fort Fair Haven. Because of the somewhat haphazard placement of the posts and their overall lack of uniformity, however, the so-called fort may have better been considered a makeshift barricade. With this in mind, the structure contrasts greatly with contemporary military fortifications, though it does share some similarities with other frontier outposts and palisades of the same period. The fort’s structure may have therefore served some practical function of slowing down—if not entirely repelling—potential intruders.