eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948908733 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Nevada Press |
| Publication date: | 10/14/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
BEGINNINGS War distorts childhood. Children who survive war carry memories of violence, dislocation, hunger and the search for refuge and safety. They also carry memories of the people who kept them alive and the stories that held them together. The collective memories that helped them survive desperate physical circumstances become closely held truths for the rest of their lives. When he was only four years old, Ohiyesa—later called Charles Alexander Eastman—witnessed the Dakota War against the United States of America that began the 18th of August 1862. For his family that war was the central event of their lives. It forced them to flee their ancestral home in Minnesota and separated them from family. Some of them were killed. Some were imprisoned. Some died of exposure and hunger. Others, including Ohiyesa, became refugees in Canada. The same month that the Dakota in Minnesota went to war against the United States, half a continent to the east, Henry and Deborah Goodale began married life at Sky Farm near the small New England town of Mount Washington in western Massachusetts. A little more than a year later, on October 9, 1863—while Dakota families fled the U.S. Army’s campaign of extermination or tried to survive as refugees in Canada and South Dakota or as prisoners of war in Iowa—Deborah Goodale gave birth to the first of their four children. They named her Elaine. The Goodales were intellectuals and writers. Henry’s heritage was Puritan. Deborah’s ancestors were Anglicans who had received land grants from King George, as Elaine wrote in her book, Journal of a Farmer’s Daughter (1881). Deborah was accustomed to prosperity, but Henry’s attempts to support their family through farming proved unsuccessful. Eventually, his wife left him. Their hard times meant that their precocious eldest daughter had to seek paid employment rather than attend college. Despite this acute disappointment—and her parents’ separation—eighteen-year-old Elaine remembered her childhood in the 1860s at Sky Farm in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts as a time of “delicious abandon.” She cataloged the delights of each month— maple sugaring, collecting wild strawberries on the mountainsides, picking cherries, picnicking by wild streams, hunting partridge nests in the woods, preparing abundant home-grown food, gathering nuts, snaring rabbits, attending autumn county fairs. G.P. Putnam published her nostalgic narrative of life at Sky Farm when she was only twenty-five. Although they grew up half a continent apart, both Ohiyesa and Elaine idealized their difficult childhoods and wrote about them, Ohiyesa in Indian Boyhood, Elaine in Journal of a Farmer’s Daughter and Sister to the Sioux. Both experienced dislocation as teenagers that helped them identify with Indigenous people who were repeatedly dispossessed of their land and forced to move. Elaine learned of her heritage from the papers and artifacts stored in an old trunk in the attic of the farmhouse that she explored with her mother. Ohiyesa learned his heritage from the stories passed down within his family about his great-grandfather, Mahpiya Wiasta, and the Dakota People. Prominent among those stories were Dakota War stories, stories of the war against the United States that had divided his family and made him a refugee. Mahpiya Wiasta, who the settlers called Cloudman, had raised his children and mentored his grandchildren with the conviction that the Great Mystery (God) always has a good intent for those who seek him. He was in his late sixties in 1862, as the whites counted. Nine years had passed since his band had made its fourth removal to 1,000 square miles of land on the south bank of the Minnesota River. They had given up 23,000,000 acres of farmland and woodland during his lifetime. His people especially felt the reduction in land for hunting in the lean months of spring and early summer, before the annual harvest of crops and the arrival of annuities. Thin bodies, drawn faces and the high number of deaths among infants, children and the elderly made them acutely aware that their survival was at risk. Ohiyesa’s great-grandfather, Mahpiya Wiasta, was respected by both whites and Indians for his progressive views. As was not uncommon, three of his daughters had married prominent white men, traders or military men, and settled nearby their parents. His eldest daughter, Anpetu Inajinwin, had married Major Lawrence Taliaferro, the Indian Agent in charge of the agency near Fort Snelling, a man respected by both Indians and whites. She had a child with him, but the marriage, like so many of these marriages, did not last long. His second daughter, Hanyetu Kihnayewin, married Scottish fur trader Daniel Lamont. His daughter Wakaninajiwin, also called Stands Sacred and known for her beauty and generous spirit, had married the American soldier Seth Eastman and had a girl child by him. When Eastman was reassigned to Louisiana—long before he would become famous for his paintings of the Dakota people, one of which hangs in the U.S. Capitol—this daughter had moved with her baby into her parents’ home. 1 Mahpiya Wiasta’s family with its mixture of Native and European American bloodlines was not unusual on the Great Plains, nor was it unusual for some of the family, including the granddaughter they called Nancy Stands Sacred Eastman, to be baptized Christian. Nancy Eastman married Tawakanhdiota, a man from another Dakota band, and moved with her extended family to the ten-mile strip along the south bank of the Minnesota River that was the last remnant of Dakota land in Minnesota. There they expected to raise their children. Before the birth of her fifth child, a white man from Baltimore, Maryland, named Frank Blackwell Mayer, visited Mahpiya Wiasta’s village and made sketches of the residents, including Nancy Stands Sacred, granddaughter of Mahpiya Wiasta and daughter of Seth Eastman. Mayer published his sketch of Nancy in his book, With Pen and Pencil on the Frontier in 1851. Sadly, a few months after the birth of her fifth child, during the hungering season of spring, 1858, the beautiful young woman died of strep throat. She was only twenty-eight. Death was all too common in the reduced circumstances of the Lower Sioux Reservation, especially for children, the elderly, and women who had recently given birth. On her deathbed Nancy directed that her husband’s mother, not her own mother, should be the one to raise her four-month-old son. Nancy’s grandmother, Mahpiya Wiasta’s wife, was furious with their granddaughter’s decision. Their band followed a matrilocal pattern of residence, meaning married couples lived with the wife’s people. Nancy’s deathbed decision meant that their great-grandson would move from her band to his father’s band. The community respected the dying mother’s decision. The baby was raised by his paternal grandmother, whom he would call Uncheedah (Grandmother). Had the child lived with his mother’s people, he likely would have died in the concentration camp outside Fort Snelling that held them by the end of 1862. Uncheedah swore she would not let her newest grandson die, and she didn’t. They called him Hakadah [The Pitiful Last] because of his slim chance of surviving, but he responded to her determined ministrations, ate the gruel of pounded wild rice that she gave him in place of his dead mother’s milk and, against all odds, survived. In late 1862, Uncheedah would flee to Canada carrying her grandson on her back, traveling more than four hundred miles to refuge. She would save his life. His extraordinary achievements began with her.
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTSPreface
List of Illustrations
PART 1
1 Beginnings 3
2 Retribution
3 Lincoln’s “War of Races” and Dakota Conscientious Objectors
4 Mis-Trials, Death Camps, Flight, Mass Execution, and Removal
5 Refugees
PART 2
6 Sky Farm, Western Massachusetts, and Homesteading in South Dakota
7 Military Pacification, the Churches and Dakota Resistance
8 Reunion
9 The Black Hills and Little Big Horn
10 Parallel Policies: The South and The West
11 Nonviolent Forms of Resistance
12 The Politics of Indian Policy
13 Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee: 1890
PART 3
14 The Consequences of Whistleblowing, a Pan-Indian Identity, and Lobbying Congress
15 “Scholarship” and the New Racism
16 Working for Pratt, at Crow Creek, and Writing
Endnotes
Bibliography
About the Author