Hoping To Heal Wounds Winona will remember its earliest settlers with reconciliation ceremony
By Jeff Dankert
Winona Daily News Six Dakota Indians approached a handful of white pioneers who had settled on the sandy prairie without negotiating with its occupants.
The Indians demanded that if the whites wanted a piece of Dakota land for their shacks, they must pay for it with a barrel of flour or its monetary equivalent.
Chief Wapasha III, whose territory covered southeastern Minnesota, had issued a more severe warning: Those who refused to pay would lose their shacks to fire and the Dakota would remove them from the territory.
It was May 21, 1852, and white settlers were occupying Wapasha's Prairie on the Mississippi River at a place they would later call Winona. Whites in the region knew they didn't yet have the full backing of two United States treaties, agreed to by chiefs the previous summer but not formally approved by the U.S. Congress and President Millard Fillmore until 1853.
Whites' self-proclaimed superiority over the Sioux (French for "snake") and the promise of treaties emboldened their occupation of Wapasha's Prairie - later renamed "Wenonah," meaning first-born female in the Dakota language.
What the Dakota may not have fully realized is that their people would lose 21 million acres - the southern half of Minnesota - for about 6 cents an acre upon ratification of the treaties.
There were about 300 Dakota Sioux here in 1851 (when Winona is said to have been founded). One of the Mdewakanton Sioux tribes lived along the Mississippi River from 1810 to 1852, occupying the land from the Twin Cities to northeastern Iowa.
In 1852, near present-day Minnesota City, the Dakota managed to get four barrels of flour from 500 white settlers building a town. It was the last official transaction on Wapasha's Prairie before the Dakota folded and left.
The Dakota predicament here paralleled hundreds of plights in American Indian villages along repetitive story lines: whites and Indians met, sometimes in war, sometimes in brief and tenuous cohabitation followed by banishment or forced concentration of remaining Indians into reservations.
But new efforts will try to help heal 150 years of American Indian exile during reconciliation ceremonies June 27-28 in Winona.
Organizers met in late May in Winona and invited Lou Schoen to speak. Schoen is a Minneapolis consultant on race issues, retired commission director for the Minnesota Council of Churches and a former newspaper, radio and television journalist.
Schoen said Columbus Day, a federal holiday, reflects imperial conquest of North and South America. Spanish and Portuguese invaders conquered, killed and exploited native people of the Americas and paraded captured Indians through the streets of Madrid, he said.
Genocide of American Indians was the official policy of the U.S. government, Schoen said, forcing Indians to assimilate to white models of living with help from the church.
American society still assures "unmerited power and privilege" to white people today, he said.
"Institutional racism is perpetuated by the rules and regulations and laws that are discriminatory," Schoen said.
The Rev. John Robertson, an Episcopal vicar in the Lower Sioux Reservation of Minnesota, also spoke during the meeting in May.
White colonialists' goals obliterated opportunities for cohabitation with the Sioux and other American Indians and led to the institutionalization of racism into the education system, Robertson said.
"That's the danger. That's the power of racism and institutionalization," Robertson said. "I got a master's degree in your system."
In 1846, Wapasha's Dakota provided a home to Winnebagos being pushed northward from Iowa to a Minnesota reservation by U.S. troops. Government agents called in military weapons and soldiers from the north and south as the Winnebagos refused to continue northward to a reservation.
On June 12, 1846, soldiers and Indians faced off on the prairie and river. Nearing full outbreak of battle, the Winnebagos made a last-minute concession to move northward peacefully. For encouraging the Winnebago resistance, soldiers arrested Chief Wapasha III and took him to Fort Snelling but released him back to his people two weeks later.
The Grand Excursion of 1854 was a significant event for white leaders, who declared the opening of the West. For many of those leaders, native people only stood in the way of what they saw as inevitable and unalterable progress.
Indeed, the media lauded the trip by President Millard Fillmore and the 1,200 dignitaries who journeyed up the Mississippi River. Fillmore and railroad contractors assured the accolades by inviting 38 newspaper editors. One historical writer said the trip was a means of "showing off, hyping and otherwise marketing a new territory just ripe for settlement."
Whites in Winona recorded some of their impressions before the Sioux were gone. Mrs. Thompson said that the Indians "were troublesome" and "a nuisance." They asked whites for some of their food and held celebrations near the Mississippi River that awoke sleeping pioneers, she wrote. Thompson complained of their toilet habits.
Myron A. Nilles wrote in 1978 that Winona's white settlers used a double standard in judging the Sioux.
"Indian and white toilet habits differed little in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries … yet whites were critical of the Indian habits," he wrote. "And the Indians' use of liquor, a frequent concern of early Winona whites, was somehow more despicable than white liquor use."
Before they fled Winona, the Sioux suffered whooping cough, cholera and smallpox. The U.S. government imprisoned the remaining Dakota Sioux in Minnesota at Fort Snelling and shipped them to South Dakota and Nebraska. In 1862, near the end of the Minnesota-Dakota war, the U.S. military hanged 38 Sioux in Mankato, Minn.
In 1987, Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich proclaimed a "Year of Reconciliation" as a response to the Sioux for this episode in Minnesota and American history.
This story took some of its historical accounts from Myron Arnold Nilles' booklet, "A History of Wapasha's Prairie," published in 1978 by the Winona County American Bicentennial Committee. Nilles died in 2002 at 56 in St. Paul and was a native of Rollingstone, Minn.
