Remembering the Dakota 38

December 26, 2018 8:58 AM

The Dakota Sioux Execution Was The Largest In U.S. History — But America Has Forgotten It.

The author, Ruth H. Hopkins (@RuthHHopkins) wrote a Twitter thread about this today: "Remember the #Dakota38, hanged in Mankato, MN on Dec 26, 1862, under the orders of President Abraham Lincoln. It is the largest mass execution in U.S. history..."

posted by homunculus (24 comments total)

The Hanging of the Dakota 38 and the Troubling Legacy of President Lincoln
posted by homunculus at 9:14 AM on December 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

Also, this Scene On Radio podcast.
posted by kneecapped at 9:39 AM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

This is the first thing I think of whenever I see hagiographies of Lincoln.
posted by maxsparber at 10:12 AM on December 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

Here's a related story about Chief White Dog's pipe from just this year . See also this story about a sculptural piece that was designed and constructed without native input, and has consequently been ceremonially burned after the outcry.

This event is still very raw even several generations removed.
posted by Think_Long at 10:54 AM on December 26, 2018 [7 favorites]

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posted by ChuraChura at 11:17 AM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

This was the subject of an episode of This American Life, which was re-broadcast on November 23rd, 2018: Little War on the Prairie.

"Growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, John Biewen says, nobody ever talked about the most important historical event ever to happen there: in 1862, it was the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged after a war with white settlers. John went back to Minnesota to figure out what really happened 150 years ago, and why Minnesotans didn’t talk about it much after."

posted by amf at 12:06 PM on December 26, 2018 [8 favorites]

I'm about a mile from the execution site in Mankato and there's little public awareness of it. Neither the Dakota War nor the executions were covered in school that I can remember. The city dedicated a "Reconciliation Park" with a monument and informational plaque, but it's more of a tiny plot of land than a park.

Every year the Dakota 38+2 Wokiksuye Memorial Riders travel 330 miles on horseback from Lower Brule Indian Reservation in South Dakota to Reconciliation Park, they pass right through town but traffic is only stopped for a few minutes. I watched the riders go by this morning and there more cars behind them than there were riders. The streets are blocked off for a couple hours around Reconciliation Park itself, but the city announces it ahead of time and everyone avoids that area like it's a construction site or something.
posted by Woodroar at 12:24 PM on December 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

The Dakota War was a terrible thing resulting from the heinously cruel local Indian agent, who not only refused to disburse needed supplies to the Indians, but when he was told they were starving, callously retorted, "If they are hungry, let them eat grass." After he was killed, the Indians stuffed his mouth full of grass.

Even so... To get a fuller perspective of the War, one has to read about the ordeal from the settlers' point of view. Indians attacked multiple settlements and farms, killing not just men but entire families. Panicked settlers set off to nearby towns for refuge, but not all of them made it. Hundreds of settlers were killed, and many women and children were taken hostage. Pretty much all of Southern Minnesota was in terror as a result of the sudden attacks that to them seemed to have come out of the blue. They didn't know the Indians' plight. To them, it was life as normal until suddenly, with no warning -- it was war.

Once the troops came in and began capturing Indians, the settlers' mood (and that of pretty much everyone in pioneer territory) was "kill them all". Small wonder that they wasted no time finding hundreds of Indian men guilty on the flimsiest of evidence. Lincoln, by comparison, did not want revenge, nor unjustified killings. It is to his credit that he ordered the review of the cases and brought the number of executions down to only 38 (plus two). That order made him extremely unpopular in Minnesota, which up till then was solidly Unionist and supportive of the President.

Lincoln wasn't the only unpopular person as a result of the war. Sarah Wakefield was a doctor's wife who, along with her children, was captured by a pair of warriors. One of the men wanted to kill them; the other, Chaska, prevented the man from doing so. When Sarah and her children were taken to the Indian encampment, Chaska protected them from harm. He treated them with great kindness.

Sarah, seeking to save herself and her children, cooperated with her captors. This made her extremely unpopular with the other captives, who soon began to circulate rumors that she was having an affair with Chaska. When the captives were rescued and Chaska was condemned to death, she fought unceasingly for his exoneration and release, insisting he had not harmed her and had in fact saved her and her children from death. If anything, her strenuous defense backfired, as it confirmed the general belief that she had been Chaska's lover. And yes, Chaska was hanged. And yes, Sarah's marriage was irretrievably damaged by the rumors. Even so, she wrote a book, Six Weeks in the Indian Teepees, an account of her capture and treatment by the Indians, which strongly defended the Indians. That didn't add to her popularity, either.

Sarah ended up moving to my town, buying land on the lake which now bears her name. Last year, several us of asked our town to have a memorial plaque erected in Wakefield Park, describing this gallant lady and her efforts to defend the Indians of the Dakota Uprising.
posted by Lunaloon at 12:47 PM on December 26, 2018 [27 favorites]

I'm a little fuzzy on the details these days, but the locals were originally going to hang over 300. For his part, Lincoln consulted with his generals, and commuted 264 of the death sentences. He'd reviewed the records to see which were warriors and which criminals. None of the indians were represented by an attorney.
posted by Twang at 12:53 PM on December 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

I didn't know this and I am ashamed. I also want very badly to show this to my parents because Lincoln is a very important person to them for a lot of different reasons, but I have spent so much time this year bringing up "your favs are problematic" stuff already that I think they have reached a point of fatigue with it all. But crimes against native populations has always been somewhat of a weak area for them because they definitely care but not in the same way that they care about other things like BLM or LGBTQ+ rights. They need to expand, or rather I want to encourage them to expand so they can better understand the depths of destruction that have happened and are still happening.
posted by Hermione Granger at 1:02 PM on December 26, 2018

Yeah, I'm generally uncomfortable with hagiography, but Lincoln seemed—best as we are able to tell from this distance—to be more concerned about fairness than many others involved. He doesn't come off looking like a tyrant; in addition to being the largest mass execution in US history, I suspect it was also the largest mass commutation of death sentences by a US President. Executing only those thought to be guilty of war crimes, as opposed to every captured Dakota warrior (the original plan) may well have been the furthest Lincoln thought he could go without inviting vigilantism or continued reprisals.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:19 PM on December 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

So Sarah Wakefield should get a memorial plaque in her park, while Wica..pi Wasteda.pi was murdered and the state of Minnesota is STILL debating if they should pardon him (for the crime he didn't commit) posthumously, 150 years later?

Settler, please.
posted by elsietheeel at 1:21 PM on December 26, 2018 [11 favorites]

This event is still very raw even several generations removed.

I worked with members of the Dakota and other tribes on a historic documentation project at Fort Snelling, and can testify that this is accurate. In addition to the hanging of the Dakota 38, the subsequent internment of over 1500 Dakota people at Fort Snelling in 1862-63 killed upwards of another 300. Adding another level of outrage, the confluence of the Mississippi and the Minnesota where Fort Snelling is located is sacred to many Dakota as their place of origin. Some of the people we worked with felt that historic Fort Snelling should be demolished, while others wanted it to become a place of teaching and memorialization. The consensus was towards the latter course, but the state has a long way to go to balance the decades of erasure of this history at one of their premiere historic sites.
posted by Preserver at 2:15 PM on December 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

I was at the Fort Snelling site in October when I went on the B'dote walk with two tribal guides. As Preserver notes the confluence (b'dote in the Dakota language - which means both confluence and first breath) was and is a sacred site to the Dakota people so siting the concentration camp there was an intentional desecration. Ramona Kitto Stately - one of the two guides is also one of the people involved in the reinactment walks which follow the route that the 1600 people were forced to walk - 150 miles in 6 days. She told us that when they started these walks a decade ago people threw stones and were very unwelcoming but that today it's somewhat better with communities hosting them and providing meals and places to sleep. The b'dote site was wrenchingly painful to visit - there is a memorial and prayer flags - but it's a stark and painful reminder of an ugly history.
posted by leslies at 7:29 PM on December 26, 2018 [9 favorites]

There’s a thin hardcover book about the historical events that are the backdrop for Kristen, the American Girl doll who lives in Minnesota during this era, and it features a two-page spread of the famous painting.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:37 PM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

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posted by otherchaz at 11:08 PM on December 26, 2018

My great grandfather was as a small boy of 5 or six a witness to this execution. He never forgot. Many years later he was a carpenter and he worked at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. My mother told me how one day he walked home early with his lunch bucket. And it turned out he was assigned to paint the room in which the gallows is displayed. He looked in there, turned around, went to his boss and said ‘You’ll have to find someone else to paint that room. I’m not going to’ this was the middle of the Great Depression. The boss respected my great - grandpa, so he asked why. My great - grandfather told him he’d seen the execution. I was raised to mostly love and respect Lincoln but also to know that he did allow this mass murder of Native people. The boss told my great grandfather to go home. He was not fired though. He was back at work the next working day, someone else painted that room.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 1:12 AM on December 27, 2018 [13 favorites]

I suspect it was also the largest mass commutation of death sentences by a US President.

A smaller act of genocide is still genocide.
posted by maxsparber at 4:31 AM on December 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

@RuthHHopkins: [Yesterday] "the Si Tanka Wokiksuye Sunk Akan Akupi (Big Foot Ride) travel through the cold and snow from Kyle to Red Owl, on their way to Wounded Knee."
posted by homunculus at 12:00 PM on December 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thread by @RuthHHopkins: "On December 29, 1890, Miniconjou Chief Spotted Elk, and about 300 additional Lakota, were ruthlessly slaughtered at Wounded Knee by the 7th cavalry. Many were women and children..."
posted by homunculus at 1:29 PM on December 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

@ Kadin2048: I'm not into hagiography much either. Lincoln did plenty of despicable (by modern standards) things. For just one example, this (long, Alternet.org) article explains his role in making the West safe for the railroads, and for making them *very* profitable for 'a dynasty of American families' and 'many Republican members of Congress.'

As Murray Rothbard points out, Dodge “helped swing the Iowa delegation to Lincoln” at the 1860 Republican National Convention, and “[i]n return, early in the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Dodge to army general. Dodge’s task was to clear the Indians from the designated path of the country’s first heavily subsidized federally chartered trans-continental railroad, the Union Pacific.”

But Sherman (of Atlanta infamy) didn't get his orders to head to Missouri until a scant two months *after* Lincoln was shot. He was not as friendly as Dodge.
posted by Twang at 4:40 PM on December 28, 2018

Here's the Wounded Knee thread unrolled: On December 29, 1890, Miniconjou Chief Spotted Elk, and about 300 additional Lakota, were ruthlessly slaughtered at Wounded Knee by the 7th cavalry. Many were women and children.
posted by homunculus at 9:43 AM on December 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

We are Wounded by Wounded Knee: A People Remembers & Hopes for Reconciliation During Christmas
posted by homunculus at 7:47 PM on December 29, 2018

Thread about #WoundedKnee from a descendant of Spotted Elk, who was killed in the massacre.
posted by homunculus at 12:19 PM on December 30, 2018 [1 favorite]