Rez Life. David Treuer

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      In the 1840s, on the heels of the 1837 treaty, the U.S. government tried to do to the Ojibwe north and east of Mille Lacs along Lake Superior what had been done to the Cherokee in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama in the 1820s and 1830s: removal. And this was done for the same reasons. Large and valuable mineral deposits, mostly of copper and iron ore, had been discovered in the Lake Superior watershed, and the government wanted them. In 1850 President Zachary Taylor ordered the removal of the Ojibwe living near the ore deposits to new homes in the West. The ostensible reasons for removal were to prevent “injurious contact” between Indians and whites, to move the Indians out of the reach of whiskey traders, and try to concentrate the Ojibwe into one or two small areas so as to better “civilize” them.

      Chief Buffalo and others tried to enable the Ojibwe to stay in their homeland and cited the treaty of 1842, which guaranteed them access to their land and the right to stay. In a cruel move, the governor of Minnesota Territory and the subagent for Indian affairs for northern Wisconsin moved the site for annuity payments and services (these included food, blankets, traps, and money) from La Pointe (present-day Madeline Island near Bayfield, Wisconsin) to Sandy Lake (just north of Mille Lacs). They did not provide any way for the Ojibwe of Wisconsin to get to Sandy Lake, a distance of 300 to 500 miles from Ojibwe settlements in the disputed area. Faced with starvation or death, the Ojibwe of Wisconsin paddled and walked to Sandy Lake, where the promised payments failed to appear. More than 630 Ojibwe men, women, and children starved, froze, and died of disease at Sandy Lake in the winter of 1851.

      In part because of the callousness of this maneuver and also because of hard lobbying by various chiefs, the removal order was suspended. And in 1852 Chief Buffalo, then over ninety years old, led a delegation to Washington, D.C. He traveled by canoe and train for months until he reached Washington, where he presented President Millard Fillmore with a list of grievances. Fillmore had become president after Taylor died of gastroenteritis; the best thing that ever happened to the Wisconsin Ojibwe might be that Taylor died of stomach flu—a fitting disease after so many Indians had suffered similar deaths. Fillmore, who grew up in poverty, the second of nine children, was much more sympathetic to Indians than Taylor had been. He agreed with Chief Buffalo’s claims, and promised that annuities would be paid in Wisconsin rather than at Sandy Lake. Chief Buffalo would not agree to Fillmore’s terms until permanent reservations had been established in Wisconsin for his people. Fillmore agreed. Permanent reservations were made for the Mississippi and Lake Superior Ojibwe bands. Other rights were included in the treaty as well—these bands would have the right to hunt, fish, and gather up to 100 percent of the available resources in order to maintain a modest standard of living within the treaty area. This, in effect, gave them an easement to all the land of northwestern Wisconsin and northeastern Minnesota, regardless of what happened to that land later. Fillmore’s last words before dying—directed at his soup—were the same sentiments expressed by the Ojibwe chiefs he treated with so fairly: “The nourishment is palatable.”

      The Mille Lacs Band went back to the table again in 1855 and signed another treaty with the government, trying to salvage what it could of its rights and sovereignty. The band members were guaranteed 60,000 acres at the southern end of Mille Lacs Lake. But while they were assured a homeland on the southern portion of the lake, the north half was opened to logging—and the loggers weren’t necessarily willing to stop at the reservation boundary. Then 1862 arrived.

      To the south of Mille Lacs, along the Minnesota River, the old dividing line between Dakota and Ojibwe tribes, the former enemies of the Ojibwe were experiencing similar difficulties. More and more white settlers were creeping into the fertile Minnesota River valley with the encouragement of the U.S. government. Just as to the north loggers were claiming more and more forest, farmers were squatting in larger numbers in Dakota territory. The Dakota were facing starvation. The promises made by the U.S. government regarding treaty annuities and food had proved empty. There is some disagreement about whether the conflict was a spontaneous development or a strategic decision. Either way, the Dakota, having had enough and realizing that the United States was tied up in a war with the Confederacy, which the Union might very well lose, decided it was time to kick all the whites out of their territories. Such was the situation when, on August 17, 1862, a Dakota foraging party attacked a farm near Acton, Minnesota. Three men and two women were killed.

      The Dakota quickly convened their leaders, who decided that the settlers and the U.S. Army would be sure to come down on them. So they went on the offensive, with the Dakota chief Little Crow in the lead. The next day, August 18, a party of Dakota warriors attacked the Lower Sioux Indian Agency near Redwood Falls, killed all those present, and took control of the agency. A relief party had been sent from Fort Ridgely. The Dakota surprised them and killed them all. Attacks continued over the next week. Fort Ridgely was besieged and the settlement of New Ulm was attacked. New Ulm was so badly burned that the residents who survived the attack fled. The Dakota killed all the men they encountered—settlers and soldiers alike—and took the women and children captive. General Sibley sallied forth from Fort Snelling at the head of a contingent of 1,400 soldiers. They chased Little Crow up the Minnesota River and a standoff ensued. Meanwhile, some Ojibwe bands, mostly Pillager Band warriors from Leech Lake, decided to lend support to the Dakota and swept down from the north.

      But not all Dakota or Ojibwe thought war was a good idea. Some Dakota near Shakopee didn’t fight, and many protected their white neighbors. Likewise, the Ojibwe at Mille Lacs decided that they would not join the Pillagers. What’s more, they refused to let the Pillagers pass through their territories and sent them back north, thereby protecting their neighbors. The Dakota and Ojibwe who refused to fight might have done so out of neighborliness and out of self-interest, feeling that their relatives would be defeated and judgment would be harsh. They were, and it was.

      When the conflict was over, between 400 and 800 whites were dead, along with many more Dakota. It was the largest loss of civilian life as the result of a “foreign attack” on U.S. soil until the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Three hundred Dakota warriors were sentenced to death. Eventually thirty-eight were hanged at Mankato, in what was the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. In the wake of the conflict the U.S. government abrogated all of its treaty obligations to the Dakota in Minnesota, and a conflict that began because of hardship led the Dakota to a century of the most abject living conditions on the margins of American life during a time of unprecedented prosperity among their white neighbors. Some of the Mdewakanton Dakota near Shakopee who hadn’t been removed and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe seemed to fare well: during subsequent rounds of treaties they were each given assurances of their continued existence and land as a payment for their noninvolvement in the violence of the preceding year. As for Little Crow, he was shot by a white farmer near Hutchinson, Minnesota, on July 3, 1863, while picking raspberries. His skeleton and scalp were put on public display in St. Paul, Minnesota, until 1971, when they were repatriated to his grandson.

      But the assurances and land that both bands received were short-lived. Business as usual resumed shortly. The Department of the Interior authorized private companies to cut timber on Mille Lacs Reservation, against the terms of the treaty Mille Lacs had signed with the U.S. government. Five years later they were still cutting, and white settlers had begun farming the areas that had been cut over. Mille Lacs Band members complained to the government, to no avail. This tension continued until the Nelson Act turned land held in common by many tribes into smaller parcels allotted to individual band members, with the “extra” parcels given to white lumber companies and farmers. Many Indians lost their allotments because they were not educated about such things as loans and tax forfeiture. Many from Mille Lacs were removed to the newly established White Earth Reservation to the west.

      The story of relations between Indians and whites in the Midwest and West during the early nineteenth century is a story of war: armed conflict, forced removals, and death marches. Whatever lessons the federal government might have gleaned from the Seven Years’ War and the French and Indian War—that Indian tribes were powerful and could mount powerful resistance to white encroachment, and that even СКАЧАТЬ