If good triumphs over evil, when did evil become good?
In less than 160 years, U.S.-Dakota War facts, accounts, numbers, and narratives have been judged and altered by 21st Century expectations. The 450 innocent people forced into filthy and unsanitary confinement in Hutchinson’s current library square, along with their eyewitness accounts, family histories, and oral traditions have been extinguished from Minnesota history.
Innocent settlers, pioneers and Whites of the past are now called Colonizers by the Minnesota Historical Society (MnHS). Colonizers is a derogatory term used to describe White people. The popular MnHS website – www.MNOpedia – has systematically changed words referring to early Minnesotans as “settlers” to “settler-colonists” and “colonizers.”
The warrior society Sioux of the past is now referred to as the Dakota. Four Sioux men from a renegade Mdewakanton tribe, who killed five White settlers are not killers in 2020. Today, they are heroes of the Bdewakantunwan Dakota tribe and praised for their self-sacrifice to save Dakota land and tradition and documented as such by MnHS Press, the sister publishing company of Minnesota Historical Society.
Colonizers are connected to slavery and judged by 20th and 21st Century morals. Dakota do not discuss their long history of kidnapping, revenge killings and slavery of other native tribes or European and U.S. colonizers.
Languages of 1862 included English, German, French, Norwegian, other European languages, and Eastern Santee Sioux. Twenty-first century Minnesota history does not share the communication challenges of Colonizers; Minnesota history states Dakota spoke no English.
Sioux traditions of 1862 were accommodated by White people. Food was shared upon uninvited entrance by Sioux to a settler dwelling. On Sept. 4, 1862, the Bielke and Spaude families fed Sioux men who entered their cabin. Within minutes after eating, the Sioux as called for by 1862 Sioux tradition, the Sioux killed and mutilated the Bielke and Spaude families and left a few members as witnesses.
The innocent White people barricaded in 1862 stockades are now viewed as colonizers, villains. The terrorized Bielke and Spaude family members who found their way to a stockade and told their story of victimization and brutality are now villains; their stories no longer belong in Minnesota history. Stories like theirs “are not representative of the Minnesota Historical Society” according to the MnHS managed website,
www.usdakotawar.org.
The 21st Century has reinterpreted 1862 and Minnesota continues to be a leader of the movement.
The Sioux who murdered unarmed White women and children at Acton are now interpreted as brave and courageous Dakota. The Dakota who killed White people for the color of their skin (an act of genocide) are interpreted as victims of genocide. The leaders of a renegade village of Bdewankantunwan Dakota guilty of murder, abandonment of their tribe and rape are interpreted as heroes.
Minnesota taxpayers have paid for a new monument to honor two of these Dakota heroes. Dakota men Shakopee and Medicine Bottle are interpreted as symbols for healing. The monument will be located at Historic Fort Snelling, Minnesota’s first National Historic Landmark.
Steph Chappell is a Glencoe resident interested in the interpretation of topics that include pioneer life on the Minnesota prairie in the 19th Century.
