Tue Mar 26, 2024 12:24 am
Almost nothing about today's popular understanding of the history of this state in regards to Indians is what actually happened.....what people believe? Pure myth turned into mythology.
The three groups = Sioux, Chippewa/Ojibwe, Settlers
The Chippewa didn't arrive to what is now MN until the 17th century, which means they've called MN home for the same period whites have. Back then the whites were French and were here along with the Chippewa to make money in the fur trade. A main route from Superior to Mille Lacs (obviously French named) was where the Chippewa first engaged in conflicts with the Sioux. Armed by the French to fight the British alongside them, the Chippewa were superior at fighting and massacred the SIoux.....first at their encampment at Big Sandy, then onward down to Mille Lacs. The Lakota Sioux had inhabited the area North of Mille Lacs and were driven Westward to the Dakotas by 1800. The Dakota Sioux were driven Southward....Kathio, Vineland, Onamia, Wahkon, etc.....all Sioux villages/encampments the Chippewa massacred and took from the Sioux...women & children taken as captives and the ones that weren't taken as wives were enslaved, which was common practice. The Chippewa elders who voluntarily signed the treaties with the US Government to create the Mille Lacs reservation....those elders either weren't born in MN or were first generation Minnesotans. The US Government respected the Chippewa and didn't want to fight them. The treaties they eagerly signed were done as equals to the US Government in terms of being a respected party.
The Sioux were not respected....by the US Government or anyone else. They were universally disliked by all other Indian tribes before Europeans got here. They were the only tribe to start shit with Lewis & Clark & the Corps of discovery (the issue with the Blackfoot later in the journey was far different). The Sioux fought everyone they encountered, and lost. They were a shitty people despised for fighting dirty and killing women & children in horrific fashion was their calling card.... and why both the Chippewa and Settlers ultimately ended up despising and reviling them.
The Sioux never had any land taken from them prior to the US-Dakota war....when their atrocities were so unprovoked and heinous that the US Congress (and everyone else) knew there was no way the Sioux could exist in MN with Settlers, and this is what lead the US Congress to pass an act that exiled all Sioux from the state of Minnesota.
Leading up to this was... well, the Sioux ended up on reservations willingly. The Sioux were never conquered....never had their "land stolen," they willingly sold out in 1852. Got paid a bunch by the feds for the area of the state that is now Southern MN and elected to have the money put into an annuity where the feds would manage and provide payments from via gold. The Sioux that stayed and lived on either upper or lower Sioux agencies (open reservations they could openly travel on and off) wanted to do nothing but live off of federal payments from the annuity funded by the sale of their portion of the state to the federal government.
The Settlers that arrived to MN were devout Christians coming in the hopes of the opportunity to work hard and build a better life for their family....free of any religious persecution. What brought them here was free land. They came oblivious to any notion of their being Indians here still wandering about on and off said land. They settled land and built farmsteads by hand and largely....the vast, vast majority of them unarmed. They didn't come here to engage in skirmishes with Indians....the possibility of this happening is something that never crossed their mind when deciding to come to MN. Prior to settlement, you could've driven a line from any spot to another in MN and traveled it, and then done that a million times over, and never once would've you crossed something resembling a road that would've caused you to stop, look up and down it, and go,
"Whaaaat?! There are people here!? No Way!"
The state was for all-intensive purposes...uninhibited. There were people here prior to European settlement, but they were barely surviving in numbers just enough to exist, but not thrive or increase in significant numbers.
In 1850, MN had a population of 6,000 whites.....by 1860 it was 120,000. So when the Sioux inked their deal with the US Government in 1852 they did it so they didn't have to fight (knowing they'd lose), to have financial security, did it aware of what was coming, and willingly chose to stay....live on the rez...and exist off of payments owed to them by the federal government. They always had the option of leaving and going West to the Dakotas, where a lot of Sioux already had, and going back to what they did previously living with their people. The ones who chose to stay here were given every opportunity to assimilate. Whites felt bad for them. They interacted peacefully with whites in the coarse of normal life. Many whites tried to convert them to Christianity, it wasn't uncommon to see Indians present at church due to a family in the congregation bringing them....often times wearing whites clothing....and as part of the deal in 1852 the US Government put in on their own accord.. the Sioux were annually provided with seeds for planting crops, along with young white farmers working as part of a US Army Corps were present on the rez (as unarmed teenagers) to teach the Sioux how to farm.
It's easy to look at these efforts today and take them out of context....as some sort of evil white way of cultural genocide. But when you put things into perspective.....imagine yourself arriving to a new land where you and your family painstakingly suffer to and sacrifice to build a farmstead in the middle of nowhere, in a very inhospitable land, and to your astonishment.....you see some Indians aimlessly moving about on the horizon...they're unsure of what to do, or what to make of all the whites arriving and parceling out the entire landscape they used to roam.
Whites felt awful about displacing the Sioux. Nothing they had been told prior to coming here would've allowed them to anticipate of this being part of their reality. Their attempts to help the Sioux were all 100% sincere...and were legitimately the best conceivable solutions at the time. It's easy today to see why preserving the Sioux's culture in the forms of language, religion, beliefs, and way of life....but back then, when discussing these same concerns was quite literally the difference between life and death, survival for the Sioux going forward meant becoming farmers....their nomadic way of life was gone forever. Being pragmatic, converting Indians to being Christian farmers was their only way of survival in MN. The whites didn't try doing that out of any sense of evil....or hostility towards Indian culture....it was based in reality, and looking at it under a better context....why would they try to help Indians be like them if they hated them? The opposite is true. As devoted Christians, they welcomed the Sioux into their communities, into their homes, and into their churches....the most sacred thing that existed in their lives. The whites that settled MN were very compassionate Christians who were thrust into a life living alongside the Sioux not to their choosing.....they were unaware of that aspect of coming to MN until they got here and experienced it, and they did their best as Christians to treat the Indians as fellow children of God.
Later, it was these efforts that account for why they Sioux knew the easiest time to massacre a whole town of whites was when they were all gathered together at Sunday church services (two MN state parks exist on such sites, where the Sioux massacred an entire town of whites while at church)....this explains why it was possible for the Sioux to enter a farmstead and knock on the doors of Settlers and ask for water, and know the whites would welcome them into their homes to accommodate them.....it's because that's what they'd experienced for a decade....whites were that accommodating to the Indians....they lived alongside them and tried to always help them and be good neighbors...they had compassion for the people they never intended to displace, who they acknowledged they unknowingly did.
From 1852 to 1862 the Sioux on USA & LSA (upper & lower Sioux agencies) lived lazily off of annuity payments from the federal government. These payments allowed the Sioux to live on the reservations without having to do anything....their payments covered the food, supplies, and liquor they purchased from the trading posts they did business with the same as the whites. Not caring to take up farming, despite being provided with seeds and educational resources to learn to farm....and being enthusiastically encouraged to do so. At Upper Sioux Agency, the state park just given back to the Sioux (1200 acres of private land whites made an effort in the late 1950's and early 60's to raise funds and acquire to become the state park and preserve a historically significant site), the winter of 1861-62 was brutal and called "the starving winter." No Indians actually starved to death....they starved and lost weight, some to emaciated, but none died. This was in contrast to scores of whites across the country starving to death, and 15K soldiers in the Civil War starving to death. 1862 was maybe the worst and most difficult year in our nation's history. The Sioux inked their deal in 1852, and the reason their annuity payment was late in 1862 was due to something the US Government had never anticipated at the time of signing....the South succeeding and the resulting Civil War. The US Government was unable to honor a lot of previously made commitments.....due to having to supply the millions that enlisted into the war to fight on behalf of the Union/North with clothing, munitions, and provisions. The Sioux weren't one of these parties...their annuity payment in gold coins arrived a day after the Sioux started to massacre scores of white Settlers on August 18th, 1862. It should be noted that the previous "Starving Winter" could've been avoided....had the Sioux chosen to grow any crops like they'd been encourage the previous growing season.
There were several factors that lead to the US-Dakota war, but nothing justified the Sioux going on the rampage, without warning, and killing 250+ whites during the first three days of the conflict before whites could mobilize and form an adequate defense/resistance to the hoards of attacking Sioux....who targeted women and children (defined as age ten and under). 200 of the 250 they killed those first three days were unarmed women and children. The Sioux lost no women or children in the war. Later, 250 women and children who were taken and held captive by the Sioux were liberated by the US Army towards the end of the conflict.
There is no definitive numbers for whites killed...over 600 are accounted for by name and age, Lincoln himself considered 800 a conservative estimate.....over 20,000 white Settlers were driven off their land and displaced....many to never return. The city of New Ulm was evacuated by federal orders at one point. Numerous small towns were massacred and wiped off the map.....and attitudes towards the Sioux changed and became much different afterwards. Any hostility they experienced from whites afterwards was done so for good reason. How else would anyone feel after the Sioux massacred hundreds of women & children who had done nothing but be nice and try to help them?
Not coincidentally, one of the last great battles between the Sioux & the Chippewa occurred on the banks of the Minnesota River at Shakopee, and was the result of the Chippewa retaliating to the Sioux who had gone into one of their homes at night and killed eleven sleeping women and children.....
That's who the Sioux were....what they were known for.....killing unarmed women and children. There were never any conflicts between the Whites and the Chippewa. No one killed more Sioux and actually took territory (i.e. they didn't purchase it like the whites did) than the Chippewa. To this day the Sioux and Chippewa are considered by most under each umbrella to be mortal enemies. The Sioux ended up being hated and despised by both of the two other parties at the time of statehood (Chippewa & Settlers) for killing unarmed women & children....and their unprovoked slaughter of unarmed white women & children is what lead to a congressional order exiling the Sioux from the state of MN.
So why those fukcing snake bastard fukcs their most enemies the Chippewa nicknamed the Sioux ("little snakes")....why they would claim that state park as sacred ground to them is beyond absurd. That's the land where Little Crow convinced and lead their people to the most disgusting and dishonorable acts possible that lead to them justifiably being banished from the state.
Why Lincoln pardoned the majority of the 330 Sioux taken captive after they surrendered during the last battle of the US-Dakota war.....they probably waved the white flag as soon as they saw they were up against armed men that day......who then marched their asses to Mankato where they were all to be executed before Lincoln gave presidential pardons to all but 38 of them. Shocking the "terrible whites" didn't just massacre them for what they'd done to their people in the unspeakable acts they did.
All the shit the Sioux bitch about today is either a lie, a fabrication, or grossly taken out of context. Like "the starving winter" where none of them actually starved, which is quite remarkable considering how many others starved nationally (a couple summers when countless farmers were fighting in the Civil War instead of farming....the destruction of crops and farms across the east....there was a massive food shortage that lead to everyone starving that winter, the Sioux weren't special). Or the winter where a hundred Sioux died at Fort Snelling....sounds terrible right? Until learning there was 500 whites who also died that same winter at Fort Snelling. Any time the modern day Sioux point back to some injustice or hostility towards them? You can guarantee whites in our state experienced much worse than they did.
So genocide of Indigenous Peoples???
Give me a fukcing break....then why the fukc do they still exist? Whites could've easily committed genocide if they wanted to, but that was never their M.O. The nation was heavily Christian....they treated the Indians the best they could in ways only good, devoted Christians would.
Had I been around back then?
You better believe I would've killed every Sioux I possibly could.
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