Dakota 38 + 2 Wokiksuye
http://lastrealindians.com/dakota-38-2-wokiksuye-by-matt-remle/
On December 26th 1862, the United States Army hung 38 Dakota warriors in Makato, Minnesota. It was, and remains, the largest mass execution in American colonial history. Two Dakota warriors who had escaped into Canada were eventually captured, returned to the United States, and hanged at Fort Snelling in 1865.
The mass execution followed the Dakota War of 1862, or the Dakota Uprising. Throughout the 1850’s, the combination of the United States breaking many of its treaty obligations with Dakota tribes and Indian agents unfair distributing of annuity payments, which often came either late, or not at all, led to a state of hunger and hardship.
List of warriors hung at Makato execution site. Photo By Dawn Eagle
Several meetings were held between Dakota tribes and the U.S. government and local traders regarding the distribution of annuities. At one meeting, Dakota representatives asked the representative of the government traders, Andrew Jackson Myrick, to sell them food on credit he responded, “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.”
In mid-August 1862, Dakota men out on a hunting trip had taken eggs from a white settler and killed them. Shortly after, a Dakota war council was convened and their leader Little Crow agreed to continue the attacks on white settlements in attempt to drive them out of their lands. The next day, August 18 1862, Little Crow led an attack on the Lower Sioux Agency. Andrew Jackson Myrick was among the first to be killed. Myrick’s body was found with grass stuffed in his mouth.
Little Crow
This was the start of the Dakota uprising which would result in the deaths of roughly 1,000 settlers and US soldiers. After a month of battles, Dakota warriors laid down their arms in late September bringing an end to the uprising.
Following the surrender, 1,700 Dakota women, children, men and elders were marched over 150 miles from the Lower Sioux Agency to Fort Snelling, an internment camp, hundreds died at the internment camp.
Dakota internment camp, Ft. Snelling 1862
On the week long march to Ft. Snelling many Dakota’s would die. When they were marched through towns, white settlers would often attack them with rocks, clubs, knives, and throw boiling water on them. In one instance, a government employee reported a white woman grabbing and murdering a Dakota baby by slamming the baby on the ground.
President Lincoln, a lap dog for the rail road companies who built his early law career by defending rail road companies, ordered the execution. Much of the conflict between tribes in the Northern and Southern Plains was a result of the rail road companies desire to expand west to open lands for both European immigrant settlement and resource exploitation.
Following the day after Christmas execution, Dakota’s stayed at the internment camp until the Spring of 1863, when they transported by boat to the current day Crow Creek reservation in South Dakota. It is reported that hundreds more died while being transported.
In 2005, Jim Miller (Dakota) dreamed of riding on horseback across the great plains to the riverbanks in Minnesota where he saw the Dakota 38 being hanged. Four years later his dream was manifested as he and other riders retraced the 330-mile route from his dream from Lower Brule, South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota arriving on the day of the anniversary of the execution. He has said that the ride is about healing, “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.”
http://lastrealindians.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/38rider-1024x640.jpg 1024w, http://lastrealindians.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/38rider-600x375.jpg 600w, http://lastrealindians.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/38rider.jpg 1280w" alt="Chandler Sheppard, Dakota 38 Rider. Photo by Sarah Weston." width="210" height="131"> Chandler Sheppard, Dakota 38 Rider. Photo by Sarah Weston.
Download the documentary Dakota 38 + 2 here http://smoothfeather.com/dakota38/
The healing ride has taken place every year since. To the Dakota 38 + 2, and the hundreds of Dakota elders, women, men and children who lost their lives due to the mistreatment of the US government and its policies of greed and deception we remember.
Mitakuye oyasin
Wakinyan Waanatan (Matt Remle)
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Not a movie theater or mall or school - but a government sanctioned mass killing.
ted States Army hung 38 Dakota warriors in Makato, Minneso
Correction. 38 rapists and murders were hung. Calling them warriors is an insult to honorable warriors.
Lincoln pardoned hundreds of actual warriors whose supposed crime was killing troops in battle. Lincoln only allowed those with evidence of either committing murder or rape to be hung.
Lincoln deserves plaudits for his handling of the matter.
Lincoln knew well that the lust for Dakota blood could not be ignored; to prevent any executions from going forward might well have condemned all 303 to death at mob hands. Lincoln asked two clerks to go through the commission's trial records and identify those prisoners convicted of raping women or children. They found only two [cases 2 and 4 ]. Lincoln then asked his clerks to search the records a second time and identify those convicted of participating in the massacres of settlers. This time the clerks came up with the thirty-nine names included in Lincoln's handwritten order of execution written on December 6, 1862. -
What is your source?
Lincoln by Pulitzer Prize winner David Donald:
"The President deliberately went through the record of each convicted man, seeking to identify those guilty of the most atrocious crimes, murders of innocent farmers and rape. He came up with a list of 39 names, which he carefully wrote out in his own hand."
Considering the attacks killed more American citizens than any single event prior to 9/11, I'd say Lincoln should be applauded for risking further unpopularity for showing unpopular clemency at a time the Civil War was going badly.
Civil War - 1861 - 1865 - 620,000 lost their lives.
Next fact please.
Oh - Donald may have been a winner - but not with this book nor his facts ( He also wrote nearly three-dozen books and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (for his biographies of Charles Sumner and Thomas Wolfe).
Lincoln then asked his clerks to search the records a second time and identify those convicted of participating in the massacres of settlers. This time the clerks came up with the thirty-nine names included in Lincoln's handwritten order of execution written on December 6, 1862.
Sham Trials: The Traumatic Truth of What Happened to the Dakota 38
A ghost of Christmas past haunts the Dakota to this day—the ghost of a great injustice to 38 men hanged the day after Christmas in 1862, of injustice to 265 others also convicted in sham military commissions, of injustice to more than 3,000 Dakota people held captive and then forced on a death march west out of Minnesota.
“The Dakota have been dehumanized… and the injustices continue to the present, there still isn’t any justice,” Angelique EagleWoman (Wambdi A. WasteWin) told ICTMN.
The Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota woman who is a professor of law at the University of Idaho College of Law knows about those past injustices. Besides growing up with stories of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and its devastating aftermath for her people, she has studied the history of the trials that followed.
When looking back across time at the largest mass execution in U.S. history, guilt or innocence for each individual cannot—and need not—be determined, but the judicial system itself can and should be judged, agreed EagleWoman and Carol Chomsky, a professor at University of Minnesota Law School who also researched the military commissions that handed down the verdicts.
And the echoes of the U.S.-Dakota War and the handling of its aftermath still reverberate, EagleWoman wrote in her 2013 article published in the William Mitchell Law Review . “The quality of life for the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate (SWO) continues to be far below the level enjoyed by the majority of citizens in the United States… The human rights of cultural and economic self-determination, recognition of the ownership of a permanent homeland, and freedom to live in peaceful integrity have all been denied to the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota by the U.S. government and its component state governments.”
It is hard to summarize in a few words the multiple strands of the complex web that ignited the U.S.-Dakota War in late summer of 1862 in southwestern Minnesota. Some of the story is too familiar in Indian country.
A series of treaties restricted the living space of the Dakota people to an area that could no longer sustain their traditional hunting economy. Promised payments and other remittance to compensate for the concessions were slow to emerge, withheld all together, or syphoned off by unscrupulous traders and others, leaving the Dakota people with nothing to live on—many facing starvation heading toward the long Minnesota winter.
With the Dakota people buffeted by the increasingly dangerous poverty and by the overt racism expressed by many of the white settlers and traders in the region (one trader infamously quipped “Let them eat grass” when informed of the pending starvation), it should not have been surprising when conflicts arose between the two races. The spark that would ignite the war came August 17, 1862, when four young Dakota hunters killed five settlers. In the past, wrote Carol Chomsky in her 1990 article “The United States-Dakota War Trials: A Study in Military Injustice” published in the Stanford Law Review , the young men might have been turned over to the Americans, but the Dakota people were in no mood for ignoring their situation. Instead, a war council was held that evening and a decision was made to go to war, though not supported by all the Dakota leaders. Even the war leader, Taoyateduta, Little Crow, reluctantly endorsed the action.
“In the 37 days of fighting, 77 American soldiers, 29 citizen-soldiers, approximately 358 settlers and an estimated 29 Dakota soldiers had been killed,” Chomsky wrote.
Attempts were made toward a peace, Col. Henry H. Sibley even contacted Taoyateduta, but Sibley’s demand for hostages before negotiations was rejected. By late September with Dakota support waning for the war, the main war leaders left the main camp with their families and those who wished to continue fighting. The remaining leaders agreed to surrender to Sibley, who had promised punishment only for those involved in attacks on settlers. Sibley set up the ironically named Camp Release across from the camp and eventually took more than 2,000 into custody.
Almost immediately, a three-member panel was set up as a court of inquiry, Chomsky wrote, but the court became a military commission, eventually judging 392 prisoners, convicting 323, of which 20 were sentenced to prison and 303 sentenced to death.
This commission, which blazed through all 392 trials in the 42 days between September 28 and November 8, epitomized the mockery of justice for the Dakota people that essentially began with the perverting of the treaty promises.
“There were a very large number of trials in a very short period of time,” Chomsky said. “They were fast, they were repetitive, they focused on the same question… I think it became routine… It was a veneer of fairness, and just because there are trials does not mean there is fairness.”
There were numerous violations of the judicial procedure—whether public or military—in the creation and procedures of the commission, the two law professors pointed out. Both question whether a military commission was legitimate in cases where the main charges were murder, rape and robbery.
In addition, all six of those appointed to the commission had fought in the war. While that may have been legal, Chomsky indicated, it raises questions about the bias of the panel. It was not legal to have Sibley convene the commission. “Because the officer who convenes a court-martial is the first to review the proceedings for error, it is important that he be free from bias or the appearance of bias,” she wrote. He could not be both the accuser, as he was in these cases, and the convener of the trials.
Another point against justice being served was the basic lack of understanding by the Dakota prisoners of what they were being charged with and what the consequences of the trials might be. “Most of them did not speak English,” EagleWoman said. “They did not even know that they were being tried for crimes.” Most also did not have counsel defending them.
Cultural differences likely also played a role, Chomsky believes. One example is that the Dakota prisoners themselves might have spoken with pride of touching an armed soldier, “counting coup” in battle, which may have been misinterpreted as killing someone.
Witnesses, who testified in multiple trials, often were themselves facing charges and possible execution. One defendant-turned-witness gave evidence in 55 cases, though he himself was later sentenced to hang (but was not among the 38).
“It was a sham,” EagleWoman summed up the proceedings.
Apparently President Abraham Lincoln also felt that potential. Since this was a military proceeding, he had the ultimate say on the punishment, and asked to review all 303 cases bound for execution. At first, he considered approving execution only for those cases where rape had been proven, but that would have reduced the number sentenced to death to only two men. He decided instead to condemn those convicted of participating in civilian massacres and approved 39 executions, later suspending the execution of one on Sibley’s recommendation that new evidence brought his guilt into question.
EagleWoman has a harsh assessment of Lincoln’s decisions. “I think he should have followed general military practice at the time. They should have been released. He made a political decision, made based on the racial hatred… Lincoln was a lawyer, knew that this was improper.”
The hatred was aflame, as Chomsky reported in her article. “Indeed, as the wagon train of prisoners moved through New Ulm on its way from Camp Release to Mankato, a crowd of men, women, and children pelted the shackled Dakota with bricks and other objects, seriously injuring some prisoners and guards. A mob attacked the rest of the Dakota—the “friendly community—on their way to Fort Snelling; one baby was snatched from its mother’s arms and beaten to death.”
The 38 executions, originally scheduled for December 19, were further delayed for fear of mob reactions. After a massive scaffold had been built in Mankato to hold all the condemned, though, the hangings did take place December 26. It was not until December 22, EagleWoman said, that the prisoners would told of their impending deaths. On the 23 rd , the condemned men danced and sang and the next few days were permitted visits with relatives.
One of the condemned, Hdainyanka, Rattling Runner, sent an angry letter to his father-in-law expressing his feeling of being deceived into surrendering because no innocent man would be injured. “I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man or any white persons… and yet today I am set apart for execution.”
Indeed, EagleWoman points out, the 38 executed were those who voluntarily surrendered: “They had gone there because they wanted to end the war, and they protected the whites.” Those who wanted to continue the war already fled, though two war leaders, Wakanozanzan, Medicine Bottle, and Shakopee, Little Six, were later kidnapped from Canada, tried and executed in 1865.
It is believed that at least two men were executed at the mass hanging by mistake—one man answered to a name “Chaske” or “first son” that was not him and another young white man, raised by the Dakota, who had been acquitted but was hanged.
More than 4,000 people crowded the square where the hanging was done, cheering when the execution was done.
A section of the Minnesota Historical Society’s U.S.-Dakota War website describes what followed: “After dangling from the scaffold for a half hour, the men’s bodies were cut down and hauled to a shallow mass grave on a sandbar between Mankato’s main street and the Minnesota River. Before morning, most of the bodies had been dug up and taken by physicians for use as medical cadavers.”
In the days that followed, several of those earlier condemned would be given pardons when it appeared the evidence was not sufficient against them. Others would be eventually taken to a prison camp in Iowa.
The end for these men seemed to mark a beginning to renewed suffering for the Dakota people. More than one-quarter of the several thousand who surrendered to Sibley would be dead before the end of 1863. Thousands of others were exiled to the Dakotas, Montana or as far as Manitoba.
Telling history as it truly happened, capturing the full complexities, doesn’t only honor the past, it can help for the future, EagleWoman said. “It’s traumatic, but we still have to know the truth.
If the Warrior hung Sean were murderers and rapists, what did that make the U.S. government/white settlers? Did you forget it was our land that the U.S. government invaded. The Dakota were starving and were told to ''eat grass''...
Do you not think that when your land is invaded, and the treaties sign were broken that they would fight?
You may want to do a little research on the whole subject, put some of research into Ramsey, as well.
Interesting note on the treaties - there was a general clause included that stated if any bad man of the Indians did anything against the whites, the Indians would capture the bad man and turn him over to the whites. The whites were to do the same.
The military stepped way outside of the treaty rights and conducted policing, arresting, trying and convicting without Tribal/nation input/assistance as was required.
The whole thing was totally futched up.