From the University of Nevada Press, publication date October 30, 2020
Preface Colonization rearranges the thinking of those living under its rule, both Indigenous people and settlers. According to its dominant myth, people fit into a binary world of Us or Them, ally or enemy, “superior” or “inferior,” European or Other. Military technology determines who fits where. Words create and reinforce the myth. Today the myth is reinforced by the names the U.S. military gives weapons systems and military operations. Enemy territory is called “Indian Country.” Osama bin Laden’s code name was “Geronimo.” Weapons systems are named Iroquois (UH-1B/C), Mohawk (OV-1 S-58/H-34), Kiowa (OH-58D), Black Hawk (UH-60), etc. Operations are called “Thunderbird” and “Rolling Thunder.”12 For descendants of settlers the myth says that land was provided to their ancestors by God because those who were here before were not using the land efficiently. History, to them, begins with God-chosen settlers, be they immigrants to the American West, British prisoners sent to Australia, Dutch migrating to South Africa, or Jews settling in Israel. There are markers and monuments to the “first” settlement, as if the only inhabitants were European settlers, as if wars to exterminate the original inhabitants never happened. The myth views the past as a “Single Story,” as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie lays out in her brilliant 2009 Ted Talk, “The Danger of the Single Story” (YouTube.com). The myth of the single story is filled with incomplete stereotypes about the Other, who experiences only catastrophes and deserves pity. Indigenous “Others” are depicted as not equal and unable to speak for themselves. Conquerors expanded democracy, freedom and economic opportunity.
Most of us believe the myth and don’t ask questions. This book is a story of the United States from the Civil War to World War II told through two people: Charles Ohiyesa Eastman, a Dakota/Sioux physician who was the best known Native American of his time, and Elaine Goodale Eastman, his Puritan-heritage wife. In binary thinking one member of this couple was of the dominant “white” Us and the other was part of the subjugated Them. They were a mixed-race couple living in a highly racialized time. From the 1890s through the 1930s they were at the center of conflicts over how Native Americans should be viewed and treated. Both Eastmans were activists and writers, producing between them twenty-two books and dozens of articles that invited readers to enter their experiences and their historical time. The history of this era is told here through their lives and writings. You will also meet in these pages other Others—“red,” “white,” and “black”—whose stories are interwoven with the Eastmans’. The Eastmans used their writing to expose the damage done by government policies that were intended to confine, silence and even exterminate Native Americans. They were progressive reformers who named the corruption that kept most native people in poverty and enriched those who exploited them. Their stories and the history they lived help unwind the myth that continues to dominate many people’s understanding of the American past. My hope is that you will find these people and this history fascinating. May this book help you see the American past with decolonized eyes.
Chapter 1 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 catalogued 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.
3
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.iv 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.v
On July 14, 1862, when the child Ohiyesa was four, five thousand Dakota camped at Redwood Agency hoping to receive their annuities. Agencies were the administrative centers of reservations, where traders and U.S. government officials lived. A U.S. government appointed Agent was in charge and distributed the annuities the U.S. government promised to reservation inhabitants as payment for surrendering their land to the U.S. However, the annuities were late, again. Two weeks later the Dakota returned to the Agency to receive the promised foodstuffs and cash. Again, they were turned away. White observers commented that the Dakota waiting around the Agency for their annuities, were so pinched for food that they dug roots to appease their hunger, and when [seed] corn was issued to them they devoured it whole and uncooked. Several died from want of food. They determined that when the annuities arrived, [if they were given to the traders who kept the only records of who owed them money—a practice that had occurred regularly in the past] the traders should not receive them [the annuities], and if they insisted, then the Indians would rob the stores, chase the traders from the reservation, or take their lives, as they might deem best.vi Frustration multiplied each time the hungry Dakota were turned away empty handed.
Mahpiya Wiasta’s great-grandson was four-and-a-half in August 1862, when his father, Tawakanhdiota--called by the English, Many Lightnings--made a third trip to the Agency of the Lower Sioux Reservation with the other younger men of the band to collect the U.S. Government annuities so crucial to their survival. The annuities were now two months late. Again, their trip was unsuccessful. Two weeks later, desperate for food, they made the trip once more, a fourth time, returning frustrated and angry. Agent Galbraith was a Lincoln political appointee with no experience working with Indians. He had been on the job only a year. He refused to distribute the supplies that had arrived because he didn’t want to go to the trouble of making two distributions. He insisted they must wait until everything arrived. He had not calculated how his refusal to distribute any of the provisions that had already arrived would affect the starving Dakota.vii The hereditary leaders of the bands and the young warriors engaged in much intense conversation about how the agent treated them. One of their leaders, Taoyateduta [Little Crow], had been present at the Upper Sioux Reservation at Yellow Medicine a few days earlier. There the agent had distributed some provisions to the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of Dakota. Taoyateduta asked Agent Galbraith to treat the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands the same way because they were hungry. But Agent Galbraith refused, insisting it was inefficient to make two distributions and saying the cash annuity was expected any day. He seemed oblivious to how “inefficient” and infuriating it was for the Dakota to make four fruitless journeys to the reservation. In earlier years traders who lived among the Dakota and took Dakota wives would be generous, knowing how desperate the Dakota were for food. But not in August 1862. Now the traders who served the Redwood Agency refused to sell supplies to the Dakota on credit. Some
of the warriors threatened to prevent the traders from continuing to take unreasonable profits off the top of the people’s annuity money. Some Dakota predicted that no annuities would arrive because the Civil War was consuming all the United States government’s money. Everyone was talking about what Taoyateduta said to Agent Galbraith after he and the traders refused them relief: “We have waited a long time. The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry, they help themselves.” Trader Andrew J. Myrick had told the Dakota, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass!” The entire gathering fell silent at these insulting words. Then the Dakota men, in a mighty chorus, began making war whoops and left the agency.viii The agent and the traders at the Lower Agency who had denied sustenance for the families of the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands would pay a high price for their hard hearts. Two days after this exchange between Taoyateduta and Agent Galbraith, four teenaged Dakota, hungry and debating the rights and wrongs of eating a white settler’s hen’s eggs, provided the spark that ignited the Dakota War against the United States.ix
Early on the morning of August 17 word came to the Dakota bands that four young men from Shakopee’s band had returned from the white settlement at Acton greatly agitated. They had found a nest of hen’s eggs. One of them had proposed they eat the eggs because they were very hungry. Another cautioned him not to, that he would get them in trouble since the eggs belonged to a white man. The first youth taunted the others. They must be cowards, afraid of white men. This they hotly denied. To demonstrate their bravery one proposed they enter the
white man’s house and shoot him, which they did. The gunshot roused a nearby household, leading the youths to kill those whites as well. They boasted that they had killed four white men and two women. Then they hitched up a team of horses and rode back to Shakopee’s Village. Late that night after a long meeting, the warrior society leaders went to Taoyateduta and insisted he support an all-out war against the whites and their mixed-blood allies for the purpose of taking back the Dakota’s land. The timing, they argued, was auspicious with the U.S. Army’s war against the states of the Confederacy going badly. Taoyateduta was reluctant, but their anger and arguments were persuasive to many. Eventually he agreed to declare war on the United States of America.x Elders more experienced with whites, including Mahpiya Wiasta, viewed war with the U.S. as shortsighted and dangerous. Yes, the territorial governor had recruited mixed-bloods as well as whites to fight in the Civil War in the South. But that did not mean there were no men left to fight an Indian uprising in Minnesota. Yes, the papers reported reverses and defeats for Mr. Lincoln’s army, but that did not mean that the United States would lose its war against the Confederacy. Yes, the Dakota had fought with the British in the War of 1812, but that did not mean that the British would defend Dakota rights to Minnesota. What was more likely was that the Dakota would be defeated, and, as had happened so often in the past 200 years, and the whites would then seek revenge against all Red Men, regardless of whether they had supported or opposed this Dakota war. The toll would be terrible. Even this slim strip of Minnesota land would likely be lost to the Dakota. During the years of treaty-making with the Great Father in Washington, the elders, a.k.a. principal chiefs of the Dakota bands, had exercised their power by being the negotiators. However, their exercise of authority had not prevented drastic reductions in Dakota
landholdings. Collusion between the Great Father’s agents and the traders had resulted in great hardship for the Dakota people, which discredited the principal chiefs. The decision to go to war with the whites--made against the judgment of most of the principal chiefs and without consulting them--marked a shift in power to the younger warriors who insisted on war, rejecting their elders who seemed to them timid and fearful.xi Mahpiya Wiasta and the other elders knew that the young warriors would anticipate the elders’ opposition to declaring war on the U.S. They understood Taoyateduta’s predicament. After all, four years earlier, Taoyateduta had signed an agreement that reduced Dakota land to only a ten-mile strip on the south bank of the Minnesota River, forcing them to give up the rich hunting grounds on the north bank. It was an unpopular decision and the people blamed him for this. If Taoyateduta opposed the majority sentiment of the warriors’ society, now with the Agent withholding their missing annuity of food and $71,000 in gold coins, the people might replace him with another.xii Many years later Charles Ohiyesa Eastman wrote about this turning point in his biography of Taoyateduta/Little Crow in his book Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains: My father, Many Lightnings, who was practically the leader of the Mankato band (for Mankato, the chief, was a weak man), fought desperately for the lives of the half-breeds and the missionaries. The chiefs had great confidence in my father, yet they would not commit themselves, since their braves were clamoring for blood. Little Crow had been accused of all the misfortunes of his tribe, and he now hoped by leading them against the whites to regain his prestige with his people, and a part at least of their lost domain. There were moments when the pacifists were in grave peril. It was almost
daybreak when my father saw that the approaching calamity could not be prevented. He and two others said to Little Crow: “If you want war, you must personally lead your men to-morrow. We will not murder women and children, but we will fight the soldiers when they come.” They then left the council and hastened to warn my brother-in-law, Faribault, [a mixed-blood] and others who were in danger. Wowinape, son of Taoyateduta, heard his father’ speak to the warriors. The boy memorized his father’s words, words that foresaw the probable consequences of going to war: “Yes, they fight among themselves [in the Civil War], but if you strike at them they will all turn on you and devour you and your women and your little children just as the locusts in their time fall on the trees and devour all the leaves in one day....You are fools…your ears are full of roaring waters. Braves, you are little children—you are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon (January). [But] Taoyateduta is not a coward; he will die with you.”xiii Once Taoyateduta and the warriors of the Lower Sioux Reservation declared war on the United States, anyone sympathetic to the whites and their mixed-blood allies became “enemy.” There was no room for neutrality. Tawakanhdiota, the widower of Nancy Stands Sacred Eastman and father of the child who would become Charles Eastman, joined the war along with his two brothers, breaking with the elders, including his deceased wife’s grandfather, Mahpiya Wiasta. Ironically, at noon on August 18th, $71,000 in gold—the long-awaited annuity payments—arrived at the Fort and the agent was ready to begin the distribution. It was too late. The largest Indian uprising in the history of the United States had begun.xiv
1
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States: ReVisioning American History
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 56.
3
See Roy W. Meyer, History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial, (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska, 1993), Chapter 4 on the taking of Dakota land. iv
William Beane, telephone interview (July 26, 2007). Sketch is in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society,
St. Paul, MN. Charles Eastman saw the sketch of his mother in 1924, sixty-six years after her death. v
Charles A. Eastman, Indian Boyhood (New York: Dover Books, 1971/1902), 6-7.
vi
Daniel Buck, Indian Outbreaks: Indian Wars in Minnesota, (Amazon reprint, 1904), 73.
vii
Meyer, History of the Santee Sioux, 112. Meyer says the provisions had arrived but not the cash, which would
arrive, ironically, hours after the attack on Redwood Agency. viii
Meyer, History of the Santee Sioux, 114.
Meyer, 114. $71,000 is the figure used in The Board of Commissioners’ Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars,
ix
1861-1865, Official Reports and Correspondence, Vol. I (St. Paul: Pioneer Press Co., 1899), 181, in author’s possession. x
Composite from accounts in Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R. Woolworth, (eds.) Through Dakota Eyes:
Narrative Accounts Of The Minnesota Indian War Of 1862 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1988) and Gary Clayton Anderson, Little Crow (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1986). Charles Eastman’s account of Little Crow in Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (New York: Dover Publications, 1997), interprets Little Crow as a friend of traders and Charles’ father Many Lightnings as opposed to the war but, when it was clear the pacifists would not prevail, advising Little Crow to lead the warriors and pledging that he would only kill soldiers. xi
Meyer, History of the Santee Sioux, 118.
xii
Anderson, Little Crow, 135. Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars, contains a wealth of material on the Dakota
War. xiii
Taoyateduta’s son Wowinape stood beside his father when his father spoke to the assembled Dakota who wanted
his endorsement of war against the U.S. and its settlers. The image presented here of Mahpiya Wiasta’s vision is drawn from the words of Taoyateduta included in two books by Hanford L. Gordon and reprinted in Through Dakota Eyes, 41. xiv
Buck, Indian Outbreaks, 141. Buck, a former judge of the Minnesota Supreme Court, reported that, “The
government was able to have paid the money when it was agreed to and when it was due. It had ample time for it was an annual payment, and it was due to its wards, who were starving and suffering.” See also an August 23 letter to the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, from James Craig at Fort Laramie (Wyoming Territory) that increased the alarm: “Indians from Minnesota to Pike’s Peak and from Salt Lake to near Fort Kearny committing many depredations…If I concentrate my force to go against Indians, mail line, telegraph, and public property will be destroyed.” The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Official Reports and Correspondence (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1899), Series I, Vol. I, 181, and Series III, Vol. II, 449. Metacom’s or King Philip’s War in 1675-6 in New England and the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico in 1680 both lasted longer than the Dakota War but were waged against the British and Spanish colonial presence in what would become the U.S. See Dunbar Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History and Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).