150 years later, Dakota remember executions
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The day after Christmas will be somber for Dakota Indians marking what they consider a travesty of justice 150 years ago, when 38 of their ancestors were executed in the biggest mass hanging in U.S. history.
Overshadowed by the Civil War raging in the East, the hangings Dec. 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minn., followed the often-overlooked six-week U.S.-Dakota war earlier that year — a conflict that marked the start of three decades of fighting between Native Americans and the U.S. government across the Plains.
President Abraham Lincoln intervened in the case, demanding a review that reduced the number of death sentences. But he allowed 38 to be executed, including two men historians believe were hanged in error, even as Lincoln was preparing the Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves in the South.
This month, in an annual event that started in 2005, some Dakota are making a 300-mile trek on horseback in frigid temperatures to revive the memory of this moment in U.S. history.
“It was just a terrible trauma that they had to endure, and we continue to have to endure this generational trauma to this very day,” said Sheldon Wolfchild, former chairman of the Lower Sioux Indian Community in southwestern Minnesota.
This year’s ride began Dec. 10 in Crow Creek, S.D., the reservation the Dakota were exiled to from Minnesota after the executions. It ends Wednesday in Mankato, where riders will attend a ceremony to remember the hangings.
Some ride the entire route, others join as their schedules permit. Support vehicles follow them.
The ride was captured in the documentary film “Dakota 38,” which won a special jury award this year at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival.
“During the ride … it feels as close to how we might have been in a camp,” said Gaby Strong, who has participated in the ride or support for it each year.
Strong, 49, who lives in Morton, Minn., near the site of a key 1862 battle in the U.S.-Dakota war, said the ride has helped form bonds among the Dakota Sioux, especially the young.
“It’s about healing, not only just for me, but for my community,” said Vanessa Goodthunder, a rider and participant each year.
“We are just bringing home our ancestors. You meet a lot of new people, and I get a lot of different perspectives.”
Goodthunder, 18, who is majoring in American Indian studies and history at the University of Minnesota, said the rides have helped young Dakota connect with one another and their history.
“It’s your identity. It who you are,” she said.
During the next three years, Americans will commemorate the 150th anniversary of a host of Civil War battles. Often forgotten are the conflicts with Native Americans in the second half of the 19th century as the United States expanded west.
Few of those conflicts are well known, with the exception of “Custer’s Last Stand” — when flamboyant officer George Armstrong Custer and his men were killed by Sioux leader Crazy Horse and his warriors in 1876 — and the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, which many historians consider a massacre and the end of the Indian wars.
Thousands of Native Americans, white settlers and U.S. soldiers were killed in the wars. Native Americans were coerced to cede their lands and then forced onto reservations.
In summer 1862, the Dakota, who had become dependent on government treaty payments that were long delayed, were starving. On Aug. 17, young Dakota men out hunting killed five
is white settlers.
The hunters pressed Chief Taoyateduta, known as Little Crow, to back a war. Some Dakota, but not all, fought soldiers and settlers in the short, bloody war in August and September 1862.
Hundreds of settlers were killed and hundreds more taken hostage in the war during attacks on forts, federal Indian agencies, cities and farms around southwestern Minnesota. Thousands of settlers fled east, fueling a statewide panic, and federal troops marched in to quell the Dakota fighters.
The U.S. was victorious on Sept. 23, 1862, and Little Crow left Minnesota.