Wilson - Spirit car: journey to a Dakota past

Spirit Car

Spirit Car

Journey to a Dakota Past

DIANE WILSON

For Lucille

Borealis Books is an imprint of the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

www.borealisbooks.org

2006 by Diane Wilson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to Borealis Books, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 551021906.

The Minnesota Historical Society Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.

International Standard Book Number

ISBN 13: 9780-873515706

ISBN 10: 0873515702

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilson, Diane

Spirit car : journey to a Dakota past / Diane Wilson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-87351-570-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-87351-570-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-87351-699-0

1. Wilson, Diane.

2. Dakota IndiansBiography.

3. Dakota IndiansHistory.

4. Dakota IndiansGovernment relations.

I. Title.

E99.D1W84 2006

978.0048975243dc22

2006009894

The lines from Pauline Danforths For My Grandmothers on page 3 are reprinted with permission of Pauline Danforth. Photographs on pages 8, 43, and 194 are from the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society; the photograph on page 199 was provided by Waziyatawin Angela Wilson; all other images are from the authors collections.

Spirit Car

November 6, 2002, Lower Sioux Reservation, Minnesota

August 15, 1862, Lower Sioux Reservation, Minnesota

August 19, 1862, Fort Ridgely, Minnesota

April 1884, Santee Reservation, Nebraska

August 1991, Holy Rosary Mission School, South Dakota

March 27, 1926, St. Helena, Nebraska

October 1931, Lead, South Dakota

August 1936, Rapid City, South Dakota

April 1940, Holy Rosary Mission School, South Dakota

August 1991, Golden Valley, Minnesota

March 1940, Rapid City, South Dakota

March 1940, Mendota, Minnesota

October 1992, Richfield, Minnesota

July 1997, Burke, South Dakota

July 1997, Rapid City, South Dakota

July 1997, Santee Reservation, Nebraska

1997, South Dakota

November 1999, Minneapolis, Minnesota

May 2000, St. Paul, Minnesota

August 2001, Lower Sioux Agency, Minnesota

October 2001, Cannon Falls, Minnesota

November 7, 2002, Lower Sioux Reservation, Minnesota

November 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Authors Note

This book contains a variety of material: stories, facts, speculation, and insights. The stories in Book One are based on real people whose lives have been reimagined on a bedrock of facts. I wanted to bring the facts alive, to see and feel history transformed into a living, breathing reality with human beings who cared deeply about their families, about their lives. My familys stories of the 1862 Dakota War, for example, have been lost, but a great deal of information exists about the war and its aftermath. Using a technique that writer LeAnne Howe once described as intuitive anthropology, writers can extrapolate stories from the historical record. I used extensive research to make these stories as historically accurate as possible, while I tried to imagine how it would feel, for example, to take refuge at Fort Ridgely in 1862. In a sense, these are ghost stories, written to re-create a family history that has been lost over time, or repressed as too painful, or simply set aside as the gritty issues of survival demanded attention. Re-creating certain moments in history and reliving them through my own imagination has allowed me to know earlier generations of my family as human beings.

Readers can trust the information in these stories as having come from solid, dependable sources: scholarship, historical research, interviews, and firsthand experience. The small detailseating fry bread after school, drinking goats milkcame from interviews or research. The letters quoted are real, all of the people existed, and I visited each place that I wrote about. I imagined conversations and feelings based on plausible assumptions and the intuitive understanding I gained of these people after burrowing inside their lives.

Book Two continues the narrative with stories from my life, especially those drawn from the long search to understand my familys Dakota identity. My intent was to write a memoir in which I serve as a guide through a larger story. The further I dug into the past, the harder I was pulled to create a narrative that would make sense of my familys history, beginning in 1862. The result: an historical or family memoir that combines a bit of everything in telling a story that spans five generations. In the process, I discovered just how deeply our identities are influenced by the forces of history.

For a more detailed explanation of the sources of information used in each chapter, see the Source Notes section at the end of the book. In the text, there is a shift in tribal name from Sioux to Dakota. In contemporary writing, the term Sioux has generally been replaced with Dakota, but Sioux was the tribal name often used in the 1800s, especially in government documents. As much as possible, I have used Dakota to indicate the people known as the Oceti Sakowin or Seven Council Fires, which includes the Santee Sioux or Dakota in the east (the Mdewakanton, Wahpekute, Sisseton, and Wahpeton in Minnesota, in South Dakota, and at Santee, Nebraska), the Nakota in the middle (the Yankton and Yanktonais, in South Dakota), and the Lakota in the west (the Tetons, in North and South Dakota).

Spirit Car

BOOK ONE

Grandmothers, complainers and nags,

they poke at me and tug my sleeve.

Listen to us granddaughter,

our voices are real, these things did happen.

Our time has gone by, but our pain lingers on.

Tell our stories, learn from our lives.

Keep our words with you, dont let our ways die.

PAULINE BRUNETTE DANFORTH

For My Grandmothers

Step Back in Time

NOVEMBER 6, 2002

Lower Sioux Reservation, Minnesota

The motel clock on my bedside table read 4:10 AM, too early to get up and too late to hope for more sleep. I lay still with my eyes closed, trying to recall the dream that woke me and left a feeling of anxious violence lingering in its wake. I threw back the covers, then pushed open the drapes so that I could at least see the prairie night sky and a few stars beyond the casinos bright lights.

My overnight bag sat on the luggage stand, neatly packed and ready for an early departure. I had left my notebooks on the table, along with a few reference books, to be packed quickly in the morning. My books detailed the history of the Lower Sioux reservation where I was staying at the Jackpot Junction Casino in Morton, Minnesota, about three hours southwest of Minneapolis. Before falling asleep I reread the chapter on the 1862 Dakota War, a bloody conflict between the Dakota and white settlers that had been fought in this area. Those were the images that haunted my dreams.

In the morning, just before sunrise, I would meet my younger brother Dave in the motel lobby. He told me later that he could not sleep, that he too woke just after 4:00 AM. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he spent the rest of the night quietly plucking at his guitar.