Bluestem Prairie

In Mankato, 147 years ago: America's largest mass execution

On this day in 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged in Mankato, after being found guilty of war crimes in charges stemming from the Treaty Conflict earlier in the year. The trials are thought by most modern historians to be a miscarriage of justice, since each trial last an average of 15 minutes.

For many years, the mass execution was celebrated on commemorative plates and commercial giveaways, but work by Amos Owen and other leaders helped begin the hard work of reconciliation.

The incident will forever remain a blot on the city's name, however.

The execution wasn't the only cruelty that befell the Dakota bands. Dakota people were marched to concentration camps, then exiled to reservations far from their homes. Children were forced to attend schools where native language and religion were banned. Dancing and other important expressions of Dakota culture were forbidden until the 1930s, and Native American religions were not secured full protection until the early 1970s.

An excellent video about the exile in the words of Dakota people can be viewed here.

Ho-Chunk bands who lived on the "Winnebago" Reservation south of Mankato were also deported. Although none of the Ho Chunk participated in the war, they were still deported to the Dakota Territory and their lands stolen. Some returned to Minnesota and Wisconsin (their original home), while others went to live on the Winnebago reservation in Nebraska.

Photo: the concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Minnesota State Historical Society

Seven years ago today: the legacy of Paul and Sheila Wellstone

Seven years ago today, a plane fell into the forest near Eveleth, Minnesota. All on board, including U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife Sheila and daughter Marcia, University of Minnesota prof and DFL associate chair Mary McEvoy, staffers Tom Lapin and William McLaughlin, and pilots Richard Conry and Michael Guess, died in the crash.

The greatest legacy of their lives and passing is the growth of robust grassroots leadership in Minnesota. I know dozens of people who changed their lives to work for change, from the young adjunct college instructor who is now a labor organizer to factory workers who started to engage in their local communities.

I like this video of Paul talking about grassroots leadership in October 2002, mostly for the fact that he speaks about ordinary people finding their voice in their communities.

It's not pie-in-the-sky talk. Seven years ago today, I was working on a state senate campaign in the Northfield. On the day the plane crashed, I attended two memorials quickly thrown together  by friends in Paul and Sheila's hometown. One was a Carleton, where Paul taught before getting elected to the Senate, and the other was at the local UCC church. What struck me most at both places was not the well-known people who praised the fallen leader, but the common people who rose to tell their stories of how their dead mentor helped them improve their workplaces and their local communities.

Here's to a man who understood that grassroots leadership isn't about someone else being a "voice for the voiceless," but sharing the tools that allow anyone to have a voice in working to make a better future.

If you like what he's saying, and you have some extra coin, the next best way for honoring the Wellstones (after your own civic engagement) is to donate to Wellstone Action.

Bluestem will publish a story in the early evening tomorrow morning about not-so-progressive local leadership in Austin, Minnesota. 

Outposts from The Small of America: Early Warning

Elegy for Samoans and Sumatrans.

By Tom Driscoll

Cold wind shreds the upper branches of a thick-waisted oak. The woods, the more dark with wet black bark, whispers loudly, “No secrets here.”

Underbrush up and evaporated weeks ago. Leaves rain brown. Cinch up my hood, hunch a shoulder into the blow and head dead north on a trail of stooped-over grass where once, as heedless dogs approached, a possum woke up with a warning hiss and bared a currycomb of teeth filed down to puncturous steel points. Should have recognized then the harbinger, but hate to admit to naturalistic superstitions.

Then, at the bifurcation of purpose near the river where the first settlers must have peeled back redheaded reeds and peered down narrow native Indian trails, one doglegging you back to where you come from, the other a point vanishing forever far into their future, I heard the foreboding crack of an overhead limb.

Wind’s ablowin’ thorns about like ice. Frozen there at the exact center of What Happens Next thinking, “October,” in a protracted, breathless instant falls faster than light an oak limb still swelling with weather heavy in its million green sails. Boom. Far enough into the future by just this much, it missed me and the dogs with unintentionally beautiful claws that could rip the hide off a deer.

Well, heh heh heh, should have seen the sign. When I was little, in the early fall when the first cold winds rattled the windows, my Dad liked to drink a cup-or-two of green tea and then read the leaves for me. But augury didn’t save him when the roar of the last big wave sat him up straight in the middle of the night, then fell him like an elm.

Whistled-here the dogs and sent them ahead around the fallen limb to reconnoiter least resistance. Thinking back, the dialogue between wind and leaves, the possum trail, and pausing where past and future part ways just long enough to let the oak talk to me, the oracle had clearly spoken. The dogs, as if in response to a forecast for more thunder, high-tailed it up the hill toward Nothing Happens while I squirmed through knotty fingers and a snaggle of raspberry fiddle bound for Safely Home.

A few minutes later, somewhere between here-and-there, a whimpering one-handed clap shivered through the forest as the great oak sprawled across possum trail, sparing nothing where once its opaque early morning shadow fell.

Minnesota writer Tom Driscoll reports on politics, economic development and life in rural America at The Small of America. He can be reached at smallofamerica@aol.com.

Sunday night vigil in Stillwater for three fallen Minnesota National Guard members

There aren't many degrees of separation in these parts of rural Minnesota. Unlike some Americans, most of us in greater Minnesota count friends and family among those most intimately mourning the 63 military deaths of Minnesotans in the Iraq War.

I didn't know Spc. Carlos Wilcox, Spc. Daniel Drevnick, or Spc. James Wertish, the three Minnesota National Guard members who died in Iraq, but the mourning isn't far removed.

A friend and former student served with Drevnick. She said he was great guy.

A dear friend in the Minnesota Farmers Union is first cousin to James' father and lives on the adjoining place in Renville County; the Wertish clan are respected family farmers. My friends Gary and Jeanne are gentle people, though passionate in their work for farm families across Minnesota.  The cousin's son seems cut from the same cloth. One paper notes:

Wertish enjoyed working on the family farm, the National Guard reported.

He was born in Redwood Falls and graduated from the Olivia high school. He enlisted in the National Guard in 2006.

The Guard said his fellow soldiers reported that Wertish "would literally give you the shirt off his back."

Read more about the fallen soldiers here, here and here. The Pioneer Press reports that there will be a vigil for the three men at 6:00 p.m. at Veterans Memorial, Third and Pine Streets in downtown Stillwater.

I thank the three men and their families for their service to our country and sacrifice.

Photo: Spc. James Wertish, 20, of Olivia, Minnesota. Photo courtesy of the Minnesota National Guard.

Note: Comments that politicize this time of sorrow for family and friends will not be approved.