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 if weak, they were better dealt with at the negotiating table—seemed to have been forgotten. But as bloody as Indian history was in nineteenth century, during the twentieth century the warfare waged between Indians and whites was of a quieter kind—instead of guns the combatants carried petitions; instead of scalps, people held aloft legal briefs.
In 1902 government representatives traveled to Mille Lacs to negotiate an agreement with the Mille Lacs Band for damages done to the reservation and its citizens during the timber grabs over the preceding fifty years. The negotiations were a disaster. Many from Mille Lacs emerged from the meetings convinced that the government would never give them justice. Disgusted, they moved their families to White Earth. But a few, led by chiefs Migizi, Shabashkung, and Wadena, held on and refused to move. They paid the price: in 1901 a posse lead by the local sheriff attacked the village at Mille Lacs, burned all the shacks and wigwams to the ground, rounded up all the villagers, and chased them out so a developer could claim the land. It took another three years for Chief Migizi to get promises of redress (in the form of forty-acre lots for the band members) from Congress, and another twelve years for the lots to be assigned. By then Congress decided that forty-acre lots were too big. Most of the Indians who stayed in Mille Lacs got five-acre land patents instead.
And there they remained: penniless, without support, without the hope of fair treatment. While the lake itself became a destination for vacationers from Minneapolis and Chicago, the Mille Lacs Band members who had endured broken promises, and every sort of indignity and violence, hid and huddled in the woods nearby.
A newspaper article in the Minnesota Star dated Monday, March 27, 1939 (alongside a dire front-page article about the Germans), shows that the twentieth century hadn’t been kind to Mille Lacs. “A century ago the Chippewa Indians roamed the plains and forests of Minnesota lord of all he surveyed. Today, in a squalid settlement near Isle, Minn., near Lake Mille Lacs, 60 members of that once famed tribe attempt to eke out an existence on a rocky, 40-acre hillside unfit for cultivation. Their settlement consists of 11 tarpaper shacks, many of them floorless. Most of them cook, eat and sleep in the same room. Their total income is about $414 a month, or around $7 apiece.” Within two years twenty-five Mille Lacs Indians would be serving in every theater of World War II—Guam, Iwo Jima, North Africa, Italy, and later Normandy and Belgium—while at home their families were starving. By contrast, though life was hardly easy for them, the Indians who agreed to move to White Earth Reservation (from reservations in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin) had schools, businesses, homesteads, and their own newspaper. But that door closed in the 1920s—even if they’d wanted to, those from Mille Lacs and elsewhere couldn’t have moved to White Earth any longer and received any kind of allotments or assistance. Even so, fifty years later the move to White Earth seemed to many to be not that bad an idea.
Sean’s family bears the mark of each and every one of the cataclysmic shifts that make up the story of Mille Lacs Reservation. In the 1880s, during the allotment period when Mille Lacs Indians were encouraged to move to the newly established White Earth Reservation, many left. There were promises of homesteads, farming equipment, seeds, blacksmith shops, schools, and churches. All of these were fine incentives. White Earth also provided a fresh start. Sean’s great-grandfather John Shingobee (southern Ojibwe for spruce) didn’t leave Mille Lacs, but John’s brother Tom did. “Some say there was an argument about a trapline,” explained Sean. “They say Tom might have killed a man. Others say it was over a woman. Maybe you should just say ‘There were reasons to leave’ and leave it at that.” Tom’s daughter Josephine was Sean’s grandmother. Tom Hill was the first chief at Mille Lacs elected under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) government in 1934. He was hit by a train on the way to a ceremony at Lake Lena. By the time Sean’s mother, Bonnie, was born to Frank Shingobee and Josephine Hill, times were tough. Josephine was left to raise her children on her own. She drank a lot. The county nurse and missionaries interceded, took Bonnie away from her, and moved to White Earth to start a mission. So even though that branch of the family didn’t relocate, Bonnie ended up at White Earth anyway. And it was there at White Earth, and Minneapolis and Duluth, that she raised her eight children—John, Dawn, Denise, Dana, Jay, Marc, Sean, and Mike. Bonnie