Fear and Reconciliation: the U.S.-Dakota War in White Public Pedagogy
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Fear and Reconciliation: The U.S.-Dakota War in White Public Pedagogy A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA Rick J. Lybeck IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Prof. Timothy J. Lensmire June 2015 © Rick J. Lybeck 2015 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express deep gratitude to everybody listed below. Without their openness, support, guidance, willingness to share knowledge and wisdom, this work could not have been completed. The J-term students and instructors. Tim Lensmire, Cynthia Lewis, Mark Vagle, Gwen Westerman, Malinda Lindquist, Sheldon Wolfchild, Pam Halverson, Bud Lawrence, Waziyatawin, Chuck Lewis, Melodie Andrews. Carole MacLean, Bob Utke, Wonseok Choi and everyone at the EDRC/OTE at the University of Minnesota. The Blue Earth County Historical Society. Marti Lybeck. Special thanks to my wife Karen and my daughters Nora and Klara, all for remaining patient with me from day one of this journey, for loving me and accepting me for who I am and who I am trying to become. ii ABSTRACT This study examines closely related public discourses like balance, neutrality, objectivity, and fairness, analyzing the collective barrier they pose to social-justice education. Taking the recent sesquicentennial of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 as a case in point, this study gives an overview of the public pedagogy (Sandlin et al., 2011) that prevailed in southern Minnesota in 2012, encouraging educators to present perspectives on the war in ways commonly considered “balanced,” “neutral,” etc., all while urging citizen-scholars to commemorate sacrifices made by the Dakota people and white settlers equally. As I argue, this public pedagogy mediates justice as fairness (Rawls, 1993; Steele, 2005; Seth, 2010), a sense of justice that has a long colonial history in America, promoting the suspension of social contingencies like race so that the historically empowered may make sense and derive comfort from the violently unequal past. To better understand justice-as-fairness discourses as antithetical to critical social-justice education (McLaren, 1995; Grande, 2004; Giroux, 2006; Waziyatawin, 2008), this study proceeds to explore relationships between classroom pedagogy and 2012’s larger public pedagogy. Analyzing data collected from fieldnotes, informal conversational interviews, and classroom artifacts, I look carefully into dilemmas these conflicting senses of justice presented to a group of 15 college students and two instructors as they co-authored a successful traveling museum exhibit on the U.S.-Dakota War. Conducting their work at a private, liberal-arts institution located near where the fighting once took place, I investigate various ways students and instructors resisted, negotiated, and reproduced justice-as-fairness discourses that have long encouraged local citizens to suspend moral judgment about how their communities were made. What emerges is a portrait of educators and student knowledge workers setting aside critical prior knowledge about colonialism and racial oppression in order to accommodate the creation of a museum exhibit that would safely mediate a common sense of justice for them and their implied white audience. The study concludes by theorizing pedagogical support for a critical museum-exhibit project on the U.S.-Dakota War that would advocate for regional social change, an exhibit variously envisioned by students but one that ultimately went unwritten for deference to local ideological demands. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………... i Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………. ii Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………………. iii List of Figures …………………………………………………………….…………... v Transcription Conventions …………………………...……………………………... vi Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter One J-Term Perspectives …………………………………………………………………... 40 Chapter Two Framing the Discussion ……………………………………………………………….. 69 Chapter Three Reopening the Wounds of 1862 ………………………………………………..…...... 100 Chapter Four Denying Regional Genocide: An Emotional Politics of Descent …………………….. 134 Chapter Five The White Public Pedagogy I: Suspending Moral Judgment ……………………….... 177 Chapter Six The White Public Pedagogy II: Taking the Justice-As-Fairness View to History ….... 221 iv Chapter Seven Managing Perspectives, Keeping History “Good” and Safe ……………………….... 266 Chapter Eight From Below in Theory, From Above in Practice: Whites Provide Dakota Perspectives ……………………………………………...…. 306 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………... 354 References Mass Media ………………………………………………………………………….. 375 References Academic …………………………………………………………………………….. 385 Appendix A Museum Exhibit Panel 12 ……………………………………………………………. 399 Appendix B Museum Exhibit Panel 9 ……………………………………………………………... 400 Appendix C Museum Exhibit Panel 8 ……………………………………………………………... 402 Appendix D Museum Exhibit Panel 10 ……………………………………………………………. 403 Appendix E 2013 Mankato Free Press “Glimpse of the Past” Index ……………………………... 404 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 5.1: Reconciliation Park …………………………………………...……… p. 219 Figure 5.2: The Buffalo ……………………………………………….….………. p. 219 Figure 6.1: Lady Justice ……………………………………………….………..… p. 221 Figure 6.2: The Old Hanging Monument …………………………………….…. p. 236 Figure 6.3: Dakota (Sioux Memorial) — 1862 …………………………….…..… p. 248 Figure 6.4: Untitled Monument with Names of 38……….………………...…….. p. 249 Figure 6.5: Commemoration Panel Narrative ……...…………………………….. p. 262 Figure 6.6: Panel Sidebar …………………………………………………..…….. p. 264 Figure 6.7: Ft. Ridgeley Monument ………………………………………...……. p. 265 Figure 7.1: “War — Settler Perspectives” Panel Narrative ……………...……...... p. 300 Figure 8.1: Assimilation Panel Narrative ………..……………………………….. p. 310 Figure 8.2: Treaties Panel Narrative I ……………………………...………….….. p. 311 Figure 8.3: Treaties Panel Narrative II ………………………………………........ p. 312 Figure 8.4: “War — Dakota Perspectives” Panel Narrative …………………...… p. 334 vi TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS Quotes taken from study participants and printed in this text use normal punctuation. The quotes do however include symbols from time to time marking aspects of participant speech important to my analysis. The symbols used are adapted from a system developed by Gail Jefferson and published in J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage’s Structures of Social Interaction: Studies in Conversation Analysis (1984, pp. ix-xvi). [ ] brackets indicate overlapping utterances - dash indicates self interruption (.) period within parentheses indicates micropause (2.0) number within parentheses indicates pause of length in approximate seconds yes underlining indicates emphasis °yes° degree marks indicate decreased volume of words between (hhh) h’s within parentheses indicate laughter ((cough)) items within double parentheses indicate some sound or feature of the talk which is not easily transcribable (yes) parentheses indicate transcriber doubt about hearing passage ↑yes arrow indicates upward intonation of sound it precedes INTRODUCTION 1 Introduction I’ve lived in Mankato, Minnesota, for almost nine years. In case you don’t know, Mankato is the site of the largest simultaneous mass execution in U.S. history. It once made the Guinness Book of World Records for this distinction (Waziyatawin, 2008, p. 40). On the second day of Christmas, 1862, thousands came to what was then a town of only a few hundred residents to witness the event — 38 Dakota men hanged together at the cut of a single rope. Some of the 38 were reported to have grabbed each other’s hands and clothing as they struggled in their nooses and died. They hung there that way for nearly half an hour. Two sesquicentennials have come and gone since I moved here, one for the state’s founding in 1858, the other for the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. It goes without saying that these events are closely related but details telling how are often startling. Joseph R. Brown, an officer on hand at the execution whose job it was to signal the executioner when it was time to cut the rope, had once been a trader in the territory well known for dealing in whiskey (Green, 2007, pp. 24-25). He was said to have had “a penchant for young Sioux girls” and to have “kept Indian women,” (Anderson, 1984, p. 227; Green, 2007, p. 107), pleasurable for him, to be sure, but also advantageous for building kinship ties and expanding trade. Brown served for a time as Indian agent for the U.S. government, appointed to the position by the state’s first governor, Henry Sibley. He played an instrumental role in assimilation strategies that split the Dakota into white-like “cut-hair” and traditionalist “blanket” factions, a fissure that led to the threat of civil war among Dakota people (Lass, INTRODUCTION 2 1995, p. 22). By the time of the Mankato hanging, Brown had served as a founding state legislator, as had William Duley, the man who cut the gallows rope. Both were signers of the state’s first constitution in 1857 (Constitution, Democratic version, p. 37; Republican version, p. 40). Among Brown’s many accomplishments was assisting to draft Article 7,1 delineating the franchise according to the racial hierarchy of the day: “1. White citizens of the United States; 2. White persons of foreign birth […]; 3. Persons of mixed white and Indian blood […]; 4. Persons of Indian blood […]” (Constitution of the State).2 Restrictions increased moving down ladder to the point where level 4 described nonstarters. As historian William Green has written, “Indians could never be white enough to be equal” (2007, p. 109). Not long