A case study for
the nation, Minnesota has witnessed racial violence from its inception
as a U.S. territory
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The experiences of enslaved
people at Fort Snelling (above: Fort Snelling by J.C. Wild)
intersected with both the growing Euro-American population
and the Native peoples who found themselves on the edges of
their own lands. (© Minnesota Historical Society/CORBIS/Corbis
via Getty Images)
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This article was
originally published on the blog for the Smithsonian's National
Museum of American History as part of a
five-part series titled "Black Life in Two Pandemics: Histories
of Violence".
Minnesota doesn't typically come to mind when you think about slavery
and the Civil War. It's also not a place that's figured into the
national imagination when it comes to Black activism, eitherat
least, not until recently. However, as part of the series on "Black
Life in Two Pandemics," this post draws on several events in
Minnesota's history to help us understand the connections between
the historic and the current experiences of Black and Native people
in the Midwest. And yes, you'd expect a historian to claim that
this history matters, but it's crucial that we understand why it's
important. These encounters matter because they demonstrate the
long history of Black and Native people in what's now the state
of Minnesota, and these encounters underscore and explain critical
moments in the nation's history.
There are a number of events I could have included here, such as
the establishment of 16 American Indian boarding schools across
the state in the late 1800s and early 1900s, or the 1920 lynchings
of three Black circus workers in Duluth in the wake of what's come
to be called the "Red Summer." I could have explained how National
Guard troops were deployed in Minneapolis in 1967 when racial tensions
in the city led to protests and demonstrations, or how American
Indians in Minneapolis formed the American Indian Movement in 1968
to protest police brutality. Instead, I've chosen to center this
essay around Fort Snelling, particularly in terms of its construction
as a military outpost, the experiences of enslaved people at the
fort, its role in the wake of the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War, and its
use as a headquarters for buffalo soldiers. Fort Snelling stands
as a symbol of expansion and exploitation, but it also underscores
the intertwined histories of Black and Native people in what is
now Minnesota. The history of the fort is one of white supremacy
that shapes both Minnesota and national law and history, and it
helps us understand the interconnected histories of racist violence,
especially during this dual pandemic of police violence and COVID-19.
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"At this place, on the
point of land between the Mississippi and the St. Peters rivers,
the United States' Government have erected a strong Fort,
which has taken the name of Fort Snelling," wrote artist
George Catlin (above: Sioux Village, Lake Calhoun, near Fort
Snelling by George Catlin, 1835-1836).(Smithsonian American
Art Museum)
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Early Encounters
The Dakota people who have called this land home for centuries
have a sacred place they call Bdote,
which means "where two waters come together." Bdote is where the
Minnesota River (Mni Sota Wakpa) meets the Mississippi River (Wakpa
Ta?ka), and it's what many Dakota consider to be their place of
creation. Those who lived near Bdote tended to move with the seasons
in order to find food and resources for their communities. European
explorers, traders and missionaries reached the Dakota by the mid-1600s.
Intermarriage among Europeans, Black people and Native people led
to multifaceted kinship connections. George Bonga (18021880),
who became a fur trader with the American Fur Company and later
served as a guide and interpreter for government agents, was descended
from enslaved people on his father's side and Ojibwe people on his
mother's side.
The Louisiana Purchase, signed a year after George Bonga's birth,
included Native lands. In 1805 U.S. Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike
set out to find places to build military posts. Pike encouraged
Native leaders to sign the Treaty of St. Peters, also known as "Pike's
Purchase." The treaty allowed the United States to build military
posts and promised that the Dakota could use the land as they always
had. Pike also promised to pay the Dakota for their land, but he
left the amount blank. According to historian Roy Meyers, the Dakota
received "$200 worth of presents" on the spot and the Senate filled
in the blank spot when they ratified the treaty.
Construction on the fort began in 1820. The U.S. government had
several reasons for wanting to build a fort near Bdote. According
to historian Peter DeCarlo, the United States wanted to keep the
British out, profit off the resources in the region and stay on
top of the fur trade. The government also wanted to try to keep
the peace between the Dakota and their Ojibwe neighbors in order
to draw more Euro-American settlers to the region. Military officers,
government officials and fur traders were among those who would
spend part of their lives at Fort Snelling. However, these men forcibly
brought other people to the fort. The experiences of enslaved people
at Fort Snelling intersected with both the growing Euro-American
population and the Native peoples who found themselves on the edges
of their own lands.
Slavery, Freedom, and the Supreme Court
While the Civil War wouldn't start until 1861, several pieces of
legislation brought arguments over slavery home to Fort Snelling.
The 1787 Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory,
and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 also banned slavery in the Louisiana
Purchase north of the 36°30' parallel. However, officers in
the U.S. Army were among those who illegally brought enslaved people
to Fort Snelling. Lawrence Taliaferro, who served as the Indian
Agent at the fort from 1820 to 1839, was the biggest local slaveholder
in the region. He also imported enslaved people from Virginia to
hire them out or sell them. According to historian Walt Bachman,
the only thing Taliaferro lacked was an auction block. Colonel Josiah
Snelling, the fort's namesake who oversaw its construction, also
owned enslaved people.
While the names of many enslaved people who were brought to Fort
Snelling were never written down, enslaved people at the fort resisted
their condition in numerous ways, including four
who sued for their freedom.
Elias T. Langham, the subagent at the Indian Agency, bought a woman
named Rachel in 1830 for Lieutenant Thomas Stockton. Rachel was
enslaved at Fort Snelling and at Fort Crawford in what would become
Wisconsin. Rachel sued for her freedom in Missouri, and the state
Supreme Court ruled in her favor in 1836. Fur trader Alexis Bailly
bought an enslaved woman named Courtney in 1831. Her son, Joseph
Godfrey, is the only person who is known to have grown up as an
enslaved person in what is now Minnesota. Courtney also sued for
her freedom, and she was freed after the decision in Rachel's case.
Two others would become famous for their resistance to enslavement.
While it is not clear if Lawrence Taliaferro bought or inherited
an enslaved woman named Harriet Robinson, he brought her to Fort
Snelling around 1835. Dr. John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon, came
to Fort Snelling the following year and brought with him an enslaved
man named Dred Scott.
Scott and Robinson were married in either 1836 or 1837, and Taliaferro
either gave or sold Robinson to Emerson. Emerson took the Scotts
to St. Louis in the early 1840s, and they sued for their freedom
in Missouri in 1846 and 1847. Their case eventually made it to the
Supreme Court. In the 1857 decision in Scott v. Sandford, Chief
Justice Roger B. Taney argued
that enslaved people were not includedand were not intended
to be includedunder the word "citizens" in the Constitution.
Instead, he wrote, they were "considered as a subordinate and inferior
class of beings
[who] had no rights or privileges but such
as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant
them."
Taney also compared enslaved people to American Indians, arguing
that the situation of enslaved people was "altogether unlike that
of the Indian race." Even though Native nations "were uncivilized,
they were yet a free and independent people
governed by their
own laws." Taney's decision would have a lasting effect on American
historyand particularly on Black and Native history.
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Dred Scott and Harriet
Robinson met and married at Fort Snelling in the 1830s, where
they were both enslaved. (Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)
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Wars Within a War: The Civil War and the U.S.-Dakota
War
Fort Snelling was temporarily decommissioned in 1858, the same
year Minnesota became a state. The Civil War started in 1861, four
years after the Dred Scott decision, and the government brought
Fort Snelling back into service that same year to train newly recruited
soldiers for the Union. In 1862 war broke out in Minnesota. Known
as the U.S.-Dakota War, the four-month conflict was, in short, the
result of treaty violations by the federal government and the negligence
of Indian agents. We tend to think of the Indian Wars as something
confined to the American West, but the U.S.-Dakota War highlights
the mid-1800s contestations over lands and resources.
The Dakota, like other Native nations across the country, had been
interacting with Europeans and Euro-Americans for centuries. They
had tried different strategies of cooperation, negotiation and outright
resistance to government interference, military operations, religious
imposition and growing settlement. When that didn't work, some argued
that they should go to war.
It's important to recognize that what happened in Minnesota did not
just occur spontaneously. Decades of ever-increasing settlement by
Europeans and Euro-Americans led to continued conflicts with Native
people in the state. The Ojibwe and the Dakota were forced to sign
treaties
(most notably in 1837 and 1851) that ceded hundreds of thousands of
acres of their lands. Missionaries and the federal government also
worked to assimilate American Indians. They wanted Native nations
to give up their languages, their cultures, their religions, their
political systems and their ways of life in order to become what non-Natives
considered "civilized." The push for assimilation also divided Native
communities: some believed that assimilation was the best thing to
do, others wanted to continue living their traditional ways, and still
more Dakota tried to incorporate some new practices into their traditional
systems.
The treaties the federal government signed with Native nations
like the Dakota promised payments, goods and resources (usually
called annuities) in exchange for their lands. In the midst of the
Civil War, though, keeping their treaty obligations wasn't high
on the government's list of priorities. Treaties between the federal
government and the Dakota had outlined how the government would
provide food and goods for the Dakota in order to stop the Dakota
from continuing their traditional hunting and gathering practices.
When the government stopped providing these resources, it meant
that many Dakota were hungry. They couldn't hunt or harvest like
before, and there weren't enough resources to go around. If they
were able to get any provisions, the food was often spoiled or unfit
for consumption. By the summer of 1862, with no annuities in sight
and traders unwilling to extend credit, the Dakota had nowhere to
go and no one to turn to.
Trader Andrew Myrick told the Dakota that, if they were hungry,
they could "eat grass." In August 1862, a group of young Dakota
men skirmished with some settlers near Acton, killing five of them.
The Dakota leader, Taoyateduta (also known as Little Crow), reluctantly
agreed with the faction of the Dakota who argued for continuing
the attacks in hopes of driving out the settlers. "We have waited
a long time," Taoyateduta told Indian agent Thomas J. Galbraith.
"The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here
are these stores, filled with food.
When men are hungry they
help themselves."
The fighting raged through southern Minnesota for several months,
and there were many divisions among the Dakota as the war continued.
When the fighting ended, some Dakota moved north and west to escape
the army. Many Dakota who had not taken part in the fighting met
General Sibley at a place that came to be known as Camp Release,
and Sibley took all the Dakota into military custody. A military
commission sentenced more than 300 Dakota men to death, and the
remaining Dakota were forced to march to Fort Snelling. More than
1,600 Dakota reached Fort Snelling in November 1862, and they were
imprisoned there for the rest of the winter. On the day after Christmas,
38 of the Dakota men who had been sentenced by the military commission
were simultaneously hanged in Mankato. It was the largest mass execution
in the history of the United States, and President Abraham Lincoln
signed off on the executions a few weeks before he issued the Emancipation
Proclamation.
The men whose sentences had been commuted were forcibly removed
to Fort McClellan in Davenport, Iowa, far away from their families
imprisoned at Fort Snelling. The Department of the Interior and
the U.S. Army argued over who was responsible for the Dakota at
Fort Snelling. The Dakota didn't have adequate food, clothing, shelter,
or access to medical attention and several hundred Dakota died during
the winter. Those who survived were forced to move to Crow Creek,
a barren reservation in South Dakota, the following spring. Throughout
1863 and 1864, as the Civil War continued to rage across the South
and the West, the U.S. Army launched punitive expeditions into Dakota
Territory. Fort Snelling became the epicenter of these efforts,
serving both as a military outpost and as a prison for captured
Dakotas. The effects of the government's subsequent treatment of
the Dakota linger more than 150 years later. Dred and Harriet Scott's
enslavement at Fort Snelling, Taney's ruling, the outbreak of the
Civil War and the U.S.-Dakota War have had lasting consequences
in Minnesota and across the country.
Less than 20 years later, the U.S. Army used Fort Snelling as the
regimental headquarters for several segregated all-Black units who
became known as "buffalo soldiers." Congress passed the Army Reorganization
Act in 1866, and buffalo soldiers were tasked with, among other
things, helping control American Indians on the Great Plains and
in the American West. No one is quite sure how they got their name,
but the buffalo soldiers took part in nearly 200 conflicts, skirmishes,
and battles during the era of the Indian Wars. Their legacy is complicated,
particularly in terms of reconciling pride in military service with
the regiments' role in the violence against and displacement of
Native people.
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The U.S.-Dakota War (above:
view of the Dakota encampment on the river flats below Fort
Snelling, c.18621863) highlights the mid-1800s contestations
over lands and resources. (Minnesota Historical Society)
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The Legacy of Fort Snelling
The site of Fort Snelling had been chosen for its importance as
a military outpost, and it now sits in the major metropolitan area
known as the Twin Cities. Saint Paul, the state capital, was incorporated
in 1854, and the neighboring city of Minneapolis was incorporated
in 1867. Fort Snelling was decommissioned in 1946. It was designated
as a National Historic Landmark in 1960, and it reopened as Historic
Fort Snelling in 1970.
Its initial interpretations centered on life at the fort in 1827,
so visitors never learned about enslaved people, the U.S.-Dakota
War and its aftermath, or buffalo soldiers. However, local Black
and Native community members, activists and organizations have encouraged
the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) to offer more inclusive
and comprehensive interpretations and programming. In 2019, for
instance, MNHS updated some signage to read "Historic Fort Snelling
at Bdote." Continued activism has helped lead to a plan to revitalize
the fort and increase the number of stories that will be told, including
perspectives from Native nations, soldiers, enslaved and free African
Americans, and Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite these
changes, the historical presence of enslaved people at Fort Snelling
and the military's decision to imprison Dakota families at the fort
after the U.S.-Dakota Wartwo methods of policing and criminalizing
Black and Native peoplereverberate into the present, highlighting
the prevalence of police brutality against Black and Native bodies
in Minnesota and across the country.
Katrina Phillips is an enrolled citizen of the Red Cliff Band
of Lake Superior Ojibwe. She's also an assistant professor of history
at Macalester College, where she teaches courses in American Indian
history and the history of the American West. Her first book, Staging
Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American
History (UNC Press), is scheduled for release in Spring 2021. Her
next book project will examine activism, environmentalism, and tourism
on and around Red Cliff.
Bdote
Memory Map
The Bdote Memory Map began as a part of the "City Indians"
multi-media installation at Ancient Traders Gallery on Franklin
Avenue in Minneapolis in 2005. (Learn more at http://www.alliesmediaart.com).
On one wall of the gallery a large, stylized, painted map of the
Minneapolis-St. Paul area (centered on the confluence of the Minnesota
and Mississippi Rivers) invited visitors to add their own written
memories and stories of traditional Dakota sites to the map. A small
number of traditional sites were shown on the map by Dakota name
and historical photograph.
http://bdotememorymap.org
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