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More Tragedy Reported Every Day; the Horrors of The Boarding Schools.

             
July 1, 2021

Yesterday morning, after reading in Indian Country Today: https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/182-unmarked-graves-found-at-3rd-former-residential-school/ I found this article in Paper Bridges: https://www.paper-bridges.org/post/the-road-after-indian-residential-schools-a-part-of-u-s-history.

Further on-line, I found a 2018 article that had been re-published that very day, of June 30th, 2021, by The Journal in New Ulm, Minnesota: https://www.nujournal.com/opinion/columns/2018/03/28/weeds-no-regrets-over-golf-course-battle/ about the closing of the Fort Ridgely Minnesota Golf Course.

Although the two events are seemingly totally unrelated, the latter’s mention of Fort Ridgely and the Dakota Uprising of 1862 reminded me that the single mind-numbing entity that ruined the site experience for me, beginning in 1974, was the existence of a golf course and obtrusive golfers on golf carts only a few yards from the Fort Ridgely Visitors Center where the Dakota, White settlers, and soldiers died, and how the golfer’s disrespect had infuriated me. I left a comment to that extent in the fort’s Visitors book, but what did I know? I knew nothing of Minnesota history really, at that time; I was never taught anything about it in school in Iowa, where I was from. Who knew that in sleepy Minnesota, of all places, such a gigantic historical event had occurred in 1862 that became the powder-keg for the proposed total annihilation of all the Dakota people?

http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2012/12/a-tale-of-two-massacres

I immediately recalled the 2009 video titled,“The Dakota 38 +2,” about the first Dakota 38 +2 Reconciliation Ride from Crow Creek, South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota, in 2008, by Jim Miller, commemorating the thirty-eight plus two Dakota men who were hanged on December 26, 1862 for their alleged part in the Dakota Uprising. The "plus two" remembers two additional Sioux leaders who managed to flee to Canada and were later caught, brought back to the United States and executed in 1865. https://vimeo.com/45619690

Crow Creek was where the Mdewakanton Dakota Tribe of south and central Minnesota, who were defeated in the Dakota Uprising of 1862, were exiled. These were same people who had been held in a concentration camp in the Minnesota River bottom at Fort Snelling, where close to 300 people died, for over two years in insufferable conditions, before being literally shipped out of the state on steam boats via the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers all the way to and from St. Louis. Crow Creek was where more than 1,300 people died of malnutrition and exposure over a three-year period in the 1860s following their arrival to this reservation.

The late Jim Miller, a Mdewakanton Dakota descendant of one of the Dakota 38, and Vietnam War army veteran, who was the main organizer, described over the course of the ride how his boarding school days and PTSD kicked-in during the ride and how he had to deal with them both, poignantly paralleling the two as equal evils. "We can't blame the wasichus anymore. We're doing it to ourselves. We're selling drugs. We're killing our own people. That's what this ride is about, is healing."

At 55:25 in the video, a Crow Creek Marine veteran talks about when during a particularly negative time on the reservation, he asked an elder, “Why do these bad things always happen to us? Why do we do bad things to each other?”

And at long length, she replied in Lakota, “[We suffer] a deep embedded genetic depression.”

 “Intergenerational Trauma: Understanding Natives’ Inherited Pain”  By Mary Annette Pember.


 https://www.brainerddispatch.com/news/4839706-Memorial-ride-to-honor-38-Dakota-hanged-in-1862-concludes-in-Mankato

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Comments

Joe - Wednesday's Child said…
So few Minnesotans are aware of these circumstances, as yet another example of why we need more writers and activists supporting critical race theory. On this July 4 holiday, we need look no further than our own Declaration of Independence for the ways that our country has turned its back on the rights of the native and enslaved peoples:

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
July 2, 2021 at 9:01 AM
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