Dakota people

Glad you're here.

Mankato, Minnesota holds the record for largest public hanging, 38 Dakota Indians.

Lincoln was president.

Uh, Bart's is what Huskers was trying to say, where Bart's class had Snake? I don't know.

And both before its publication and ever since, Layli has been creating visual art, whether in parallel to or explicitly intersecting with her practice of language making.

Around the time of Whereas, she installed her star quilt exhibition of visual poetry, Obligations, at the Lakota-centric art space, Racing Magpie, in South Dakota.

Since then, she's been involved in many visual arts projects, including two large-scale sculptures for Tin Works Arts in Bozeman, Montana.

One called Day Poem Sun Mirrors, featuring lines from her Night Poems and Day Poems series, and the second made from a repurposed light cabinet from an old RV park called I Don't Trust Nobody But The Land, which itself repurposes this line from her poem Steady Summer.

Hmm.

And you know, then so they had posted this, um, digitally, um, altered poster, and then other students at the school had pressed like, and they were commenting on it.

It was extremely hurtful, and we had just lost a relative, I think that same month, um, in South Dakota, a young girl, a young relative.

And so just the fact that they didn't realize that this, this is real.

Once again, you can use our code, THELORELODGE, for 55% off your first month, and you can click the link below in the description or the pinned comment to find it.

But before you had Scentbird or Lyon County or even the concept of the state of Minnesota, the area was inhabited by the Eastern Dakota peoples.

The Dakota were a Siouan language speaking people who originally inhabited all the way into northern Minnesota and the Great Lakes region.

But during the 18th century, they were pushed further southwest by a war with the Ojibwa.

But despite these losses in the northeastern corner of their territory, the Dakota maintained a strong trade empire, which they protected through military force.

They were accomplished trappers and hunters, relying on bison to get them through the summers and then trapping beaver and other small game during the winter.

Minnesota, being a land of many, many, many, many lakes and rivers, was an ideal place for beaver trapping.

Having survived a smallpox epidemic in larger numbers than their agricultural sedentary neighbors, the Hidasta and Mandan tribes, the Dakota were able to establish dominance over the region.

Uh, let's talk about the land for a second.

Uh, the DNC acknowledges and honors the Dakota Oyate, the Dakota people, who are the original stewards of the lands and waters of Minneapolis.

The Dakota cared for the lands, lakes, and the Wakpatanka, the Great River, the Mississippi River, uh, for thousands of-

You, you, you got it.

James Carville, he watched this happen.

It doesn't exist to make people feel good.

It exists, get this through your head, to win elections.

Now, do you think that is gonna help us win elections talking about land theft from the Dakotas? We're not.

He joined the University of Minnesota in 2022 as Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies.

In 2021, he visited the No Line 3 water protector camps in Dakota and Anishinaabe territory.

There, he saw the catastrophic consequences of climate disruption and the fossil fuel economy on the tribe's sacred wild rice, called manomin.

Instead of a normal harvest of eighty pounds, the epic drought left just a cup and a half of this critical food for the community and their economy.

Nick Estes spoke at a Bioneers conference.

Anishinaabe people have an esoteric spiritual connection to manomin, which is codified within their 1855 treaty that actually protects the right of manomin to exist.

It's the only grain that is protected by treaty rights, by indigenous treaty rights, which isn't necessarily an aberration because Article 11 of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which was signed by my nation, the Oceti Sakowin, the Lakota Nation, and the Dakota Nations, also set aside territory for the continued perpetuation of the BdéOye Þíe, or the Buffalo Nation, or the Buffalo People.

And so even within these colonial treaties, these colonial laws, we inserted our rights of our relatives to exist and to continue to exist.

He then commenced to ascend the Mississippi, which was the first time it was ever attempted by a civilized man.

On the eleventh of April, they were met by a large war party of Dakotas, which filled thirty-three canoes, who opened fire on them with arrows.

But hostilities were soon stopped, and Hennepin and his party were taken prisoners and made to return with their captors to their villages.

Hennepin, in his narrative, tells a long story of the difficulties he encountered in saying his prayers, as the Indians thought he was working some magic on them, and they followed him into the woods and never let him out of their sight.

The party camped at Lake Pepin, and on the nineteenth day of their captivity, they arrived in the vicinity of where St. Paul now stands.

From this point, they proceeded by land to Mille Lacs, where they were taken by the Indians to their several villages and were kindly treated.

These Indians were part of the band of Dakotas called Mdewakantonwans, or the Lake Villagers.

I spell the Indian names as they are now known and not as they were given in Hennepin's narrative, although it is quite remarkable how well he preserved them with sound as his only guide.

Episodes of Ancient to Recent are out every Saturday and are available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

If Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull needed further evidence to win over those still amenable to compromise with the US, then they need look no further than their own Sioux cousins, the Dakota.

In 1851, the Dakota had signed treaties with the United States under pressure from Indian agents that accepted a reservation and signed away Bass Tracks.

of Dakota land.

At the Treaty of Traverseur de Sault, the Sisseton and Wapiton Dakota ceded around 21 million acres.

A second treaty was signed at Mendota by the Mediwakiton and Wapakute Dakota transferring further territory.

At Traverseur de Sault, the United States agreed to pay $1,665,000, but much of that money would never reach the Dakota directly, and the Senate later removed the reservation provision from the treaties.

Shortly, the land signed away was populated with Irish, German, and Scandinavian settlers, and what little land the Dakota still had was soon under pressure from further American encroachment.