38 Simultaneous Murders

https://youtu.be/DPOWGHmu_qE
Indigenous Blues From The Sky Live
Neither indigenous nations, individual tribes nor single human beings started this war.
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“The Dakota were literally starving,” said Paul Finkelman, a historian and professor of human rights law at the University of Saskatchewan. “They had no food and people who traded with them refused to give them any.”
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The perpetrators were European invaders who persecuted, starved, brutalized and murdered millions of indigenous people. These same invaders, led by Mr. Lincoln, then went on to murder 38 more.
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Europeans proactively carried out murders of millions while stealing their resources and lands. Too many historians try to rewrite this American holocaust.
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In this specific case, 38 indigenous people were simultaneously murdered. Uncounted others died in prison. And two entire tribes were forcibly removed from their own lands, for crimes they did not commit. My ancestors were North Dakota Sioux forced from their homes by President Lincoln.
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The confederacy murdered 400 thousand people, but none of the WHITE perpetrators were executed.

⁠Here are the facts:
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“Known as the Dakota Uprising or the Sioux War, the one-month skirmish came after the Santee Sioux of Minnesota ceded their land to the U.S. and agreed to live on reservations. Then, as the federal government turned its attention to the Civil War, corrupt Indian agents failed to provide food and white settlers stole horses and timber. “The Dakota were literally starving,” said Paul Finkelman, a historian and professor of human rights law at the University of Saskatchewan. “They had no food and people who traded with them refused to give them any.”
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Largest Mass Execution in US History:
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By Jon Wiener
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“Lincoln’s treatment of defeated Indian rebels against the United States stood in sharp contrast to his treatment of Confederate rebels. He never ordered the executions of any Confederate officials or generals after the Civil War, even though they killed more than 400,000 Union soldiers.”
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“Minnesota was a new frontier state in 1862, where white settlers were pushing out the Dakota Indians—also called the Sioux. A series of broken peace treaties culminated in the failure of the United States that summer to deliver promised food and supplies to the Indians, partial payment for their giving up their lands to whites. One local trader, Andrew Myrick, said of the Indians’ plight, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”
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The Dakota leader Little Crow then led his “enraged and starving” tribe in a series of attacks on frontier settlements. The “US-Dakota War” didn’t last long: After six weeks, Henry Hastings Sibley, first governor of Minnesota and a leader of the state militia, captured 2,000 Dakota, and a military court sentenced 303 to death.”
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“The 265 Dakota Indians whose lives Lincoln spared were either fully pardoned or died in prison. Lincoln and Congress subsequently removed the Sioux and Winnebago—who had nothing to do with the uprising—from all of their lands in Minnesota.”
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⁠https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/largest-mass-execution-us-history-150-years-ago-today/⁠
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“The trials of the Dakota were conducted unfairly in a variety of ways. The evidence was sparse, the tribunal was biased, the defendants were unrepresented in unfamiliar proceedings conducted in a foreign language, and authority for convening the tribunal was lacking. More fundamentally, neither the Military Commission nor the reviewing authorities recognized that they were dealing with the aftermath of a war fought with a sovereign nation and that the men who surrendered were entitled to treatment in accordance with that status.”
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Carol Chomsky, Associate Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
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⁠https://www.usdakotawar.org/history/aftermath/trials-⁠
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“One of the condemned men, Hdainyanka, Rattling Runner, sent an angry letter to his father-in-law. “I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man or any white persons… and yet today I am set apart for execution.”
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Angelique EagleWoman, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota professor of law at the University of Idaho College of Law criticized the actions of Lincoln. She previously told Indian Country Today, “I think he should have followed general military practice at the time. They should have been released. He made a political decision, made based on the racial hatred… Lincoln was a lawyer, and knew that this was improper.”
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⁠https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/traumatic-true-history-full-list-dakota-38⁠
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“After dangling from the scaffold for a half hour, the men’s bodies were cut down and hauled to a shallow mass grave on a sandbar between Mankato’s main street and the Minnesota River. Before morning, most of the bodies had been dug up and taken by physicians for use as medical cadavers.”
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~Vincent Schilling, Akwesasne Mohawk, is the associate editor and senior correspondent at Indian Country Today

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/1226/Dakota-Indians-remember-largest-mass-hanging-in-US-history

Dakota Indians remember largest mass hanging in US history

In 1862, while the Civil War raged, the US government also fought a war against the Dakota Indians. On Dec. 26, 38 Dakota were hanged, an event memorialized by the tribe today by a 300-mile horseback ride.

Dec. 26, 2012, 11:11 a.m. ET|St. Paul, Minn.

This month, in an annual event that started in 2005, some Dakota are making a 300-mile trek on horseback in frigid winter temperatures to revive the memory of this footnote in U.S. history.

“It was just a terrible trauma that they had to endure, and we continue to have to endure this generational trauma to this very day,” said Sheldon Wolfchild, former chairman of the Lower Sioux Indian Community in southwestern Minnesota.

This year’s ride began on Dec. 10 in Crow Creek, South Dakota, the reservation the Dakota were exiled to from Minnesota after the executions. It ends on Dec. 26 in Mankato, where riders will attend a ceremony to remember the hangings.

The ride was captured in the documentary film “Dakota 38,” which won a special jury award this year at theMinneapolis-St. Paul Film Festival.

“During the ride … it feels as close to how we might have been in a camp,” said Gaby Strong, who has participated in the ride or support for it each year. “That is really what we are doing over the course of the 10 or 15 days that we are all together.”

Strong, 49, who lives in Morton, Minnesota, near the site of a key 1862 battle in the U.S.-Dakota war, said the ride has helped form bonds among the Dakota Sioux, especially the young.

“It’s about healing, not only just for me, but for my community,” said Vanessa Goodthunder, a rider and participant each year. “We are just bringing home our ancestors. You meet a lot of new people, and I get a lot of different perspectives.”

“It’s your identity. It is who you are,” she said.

FORGOTTEN WAR

Over the next three years, Americans will commemorate the 150th anniversary of a host of Civil War battles. Almost forgotten are the conflicts with Native Americans that occurred in the second half of the 19th century as theUnited States rapidly expanded west.

In the Upper Plains, that included members of the Great Sioux Nation, which comprises Lakota to the west, Nakota in the middle and Dakota to the east around Minnesota.

The seeds of the Dakota war were planted years earlier, in the 1830s, according to historians, when the fur trade that had been the basis of the region’s economy since the late 17th century began to fade and land became valuable for settlement.

Under treaties in 1851, the four main Dakota bands ceded about 35 million acres of what is now southern Minnesota, parts of Iowa and South Dakota. In exchange, the U.S. pledged payments and allowed the Dakota a narrow tract of land about 10 miles wide on either side of the Minnesota River. Settlers swarmed onto the newly opened lands.

In 1858, just after Minnesota became a state, Dakota chiefs were summoned to Washington, D.C., and told they would have to give up the northern half of that narrow reserve, said St. Cloud State University historian Mary Wingerd.

By summer 1862, the Dakota, now largely dependent on government treaty payments that were long delayed, were starving. On Aug. 17, young Dakota men out hunting killed five white settlers.

Hundreds of settlers were killed and hundreds more taken hostage in the war during attacks on forts, federal Indian agencies, cities and farms around southwestern Minnesota. Thousands of settlers fled east, fueling a statewide panic, and federal troops marched in to quell the Dakota fighters.

The U.S. was victorious on Sept. 23, 1862, and Little Crow left Minnesota.

Afterward, more than 2,000 Dakota were rounded up, whether they fought or not. Almost 400 men faced military trials, which often lasted just a few minutes, and 303 were sentenced to die.

LINCOLN’S REVIEW

Wingerd said she could understand why the Dakota fought, but the brutal killings of settlers could not be condoned and she could not agree with people who believed that no one should have been hanged.

“We have to understand it as a huge tragedy with victims on both sides,” Wingerd said of the deaths of settlers and the forced marches and scattering of most Dakota from Minnesota.

“In fact, the Dakota nation did not go to war and most of the people who were expelled from Minnesota were guilty of nothing,” Wingerd said.

About 1,700 Dakota women, children and older men who did not fight were marched to a prison camp at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, where up to 300 died that winter. They were exiled to Crow Creek, South Dakota, in 1863, but some began to return to Minnesota almost immediately.

“They continue to come home and this ride represents that,” Strong said of Minnesota. “We continue to come home. This is our homeland.”

“I would like to be buried where our people originated from,” he said.

Reporting by David Bailey; Editing by Greg McCune and Douglas Royalty
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/1226/Dakota-Indians-remember-largest-mass-hanging-in-US-history

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