“In Our Own Rightful Territory”: Dakota Mobility, Diplomacy, and Belonging in Mni Sota Makoce after the US-Dakota War

John Legg

Advisor: C Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, PhD, Department of History and Art History

Committee Members: Gabrielle Tayac, Christopher Hamner, and Jameson R. Sweet, Rutgers University

Horizon Hall, https://gmu.zoom.us/j/91506902044?pwd=TFQvcUxJaDhsMGlOcXRtcFp1SFZXdz09
March 20, 2024, 09:30 AM to 11:30 AM

Abstract:

In the years following the US-Dakota War (1862), Minnesotan settlers, militiamen, and the US Army pushed Dakota people (Mdewakanton, Sisseton, Wahpeton, and Wahpekute) west and north from their Minnesota homelands. Throughout this diaspora Dakota people instilled and reinforced a broader assertion of their homelands, Mni Sota Makoce, which stretched across the Great Plains in well into the Canadian prairies. Whereas many histories cast the US-Dakota War as the demise of Dakota people in Minnesota, a spatial approach towards their diasporic movement offers another view of their survival and resistance. Indeed, many Dakota people who fled were chased by the US Army, forced into prison camps like Fort Snelling, or confined onto reservations like Crow Creek. Others found safety by crossing the US-Canadian border, a fluid but hardening boundary that separated US and Canadian jurisdictions since its creation from the 1783 Treaty of Paris and reestablishment through the 1846 Oregon Treaty. Within a larger historical context of settler nations seeking to confine all Indigenous peoples, Dakota people in diaspora used mobility across their extended homelands to spark a transnational confrontation over their communal rights and sovereignty.

This dissertation approaches mobility as an analytical lens to better encapsulate the tumultuous decades that followed the US-Dakota War. Whereas many scholars approach efforts to confine Dakota people as guaranteed, “In Our Own Rightful Territory” instead focuses on the strategic movement of Dakota people across the US-Canadian borderlands to show how Dakota people strategically played the settler nations off one another. For the Dakota people who rebuilt their lives and communities across the border in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, they sustained an ongoing political relationship with the British and Canadian governments despite being characterized as “refugee” or “foreign” Indians. Additionally, these communities further participated in the social, political, and economic livelihood of the surrounding Indigenous and settler-colonial nations. While Dakota people now live on reserves in Canada, the period after the US-Dakota War lays a critical foundation for examining Dakota visibility and how they asserted rights to home, belonging, and the making of Dakota futures in Mni Sota Makoce.