Part 12: Minnesota forgets her history

By John Biewen

No photographs of the hangings in Mankato have ever been found, but images of the scene were engraved on such items as souvenir spoons and beer trays.

Little Crow was shot and killed six months after the hangings. His scalp, skull and wrist bones were displayed at the Minnesota Historical Society for decades.

For a short time after the war, Wingerd says, Minnesotans were triumphant at having beaten back the savage Indians. They relished the story.

"So there's lots of dime novels coming out and panoramas that are created, and the whole country is fascinated and mesmerized by this horrible thing that happened," Wingerd said. "It doesn't take people in Minnesota very long to figure out afterwards that this is really, really bad [public relations]. This is not good! And how will we encourage people to come to Minnesota if they think they're going to be scalped the minute they step out of their cabin?"

So, she says, Minnesotans clammed up about the nastiness of 1862. Instead, they embraced a gauzy, fantastical version of the state's Indian heritage.

"The message that boosters wanted to portray of Minnesota is that Minnesota was this beautiful, natural place, and that we have these lovely legends of ... long gone, noble savages," said Wingerd.

Which helps explain how I could grow up in Mankato, Minnesota, 100 years later, and not hear anything at all about this story.

"I think that explains a good part of it," Wingerd said. "I think people of your generation and my generation never really felt that Indians were really part of the past of this place. They were stories, like Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox."

Today, visitors to Minneapolis can drive on Hiawatha Boulevard and visit Minnehaha Falls -- references to Longfellow's romanticized poem, "Song of Hiawatha."

Countless Minnesota businesses use Native names and imagery -- Land o' Lakes butter, with its Indian maiden on the box; there's a Little Crow country club. For years, the logo of the gas company Minnegasco was an Indian girl with a blue flame as the feather in her headdress.

There are probably other reasons why white Minnesotans don't spend much time remembering the U.S.-Dakota War. I suspect one big one is -- we won.

Mary Wingerd and Gwen Westerman both say they routinely meet students who've grown up in the area and arrive at college with no knowledge of the Dakota War. They've never heard of it.

MANKATO STUDENTS LEARN ABOUT THE WAR

But things have changed some since I was a kid. Every sixth grade student in Minnesota is now supposed to learn about the war -- at least a little. A week-long unit in the state's Minnesota history textbook covers the subject.

Back home in Mankato this fall, I met a teacher at Garfield Elementary School, Elizabeth Zarn, who spends twice as much time teaching about the Dakota War because of the local connection.

"I think a lot of the students are shocked. I think they really are," Zarn said. "Basically, what it boils down to, that people would treat each other like that. No matter their race, culture, creed."

In addition to the sixth-grade history curriculum, every third grader in Mankato attends a powwow each September that's devoted to education and reconciliation between Dakota and non-Dakota people. But the quality of the teaching varies.

At Monroe Elementary School, just across the Minnesota River from the hanging site, Patricia Hammann is prepping her third grade class for the powwow. While standing with her in front of her students, I asked her how she presents the war of 1862 to them.

"We just talked about, a conflict is a disagreement. And we talked how the Dakota Indians didn't know how to solve their conflicts? And the only way they knew how to solve their disagreements was to fight," said Hammann. "We know, we don't fight when we solve conflicts, we use our words. But that was their only way that they knew how to solve a conflict -- they fought. And so then the white settlers needed to fight back to protect themselves, and we talked about ... people were killed."

My guess is that no Dakota children were in the room to take offense.

In 1863, Congress passed a law confiscating all the Dakota's land in Minnesota. President Lincoln signed it, effectively banishing the Dakota from the state.

About 25 years later, Congress allowed some Dakota who were considered "friendly" to return and establish small settlements in the state. So today, four Dakota communities are dotted across southern Minnesota.

But for Gwen and all the other Dakota who grew up elsewhere, the federal expulsion from Minnesota, their homeland, is still on the books.

Part 13: A step toward healing >>>

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