Yesterday's War Today

1

ECOND THOUGHTon

spri

ng

132A p u b l i c a t i o n o f t h e N o r t h D a k o t a H u m a n i t i e s C o u n c i l

[the YESTERDAY’S WAR TODAY issue]

note from theexecutive director Compiling this issue of On Second Thought magazine was an interesting experience. We didn’t set out to print articles related to some of recent history’s major wars. Instead, the articles in the main section of the magazine just sort of trickled in over the last few years and stuck together by a common thread. These are not firsthand accounts by participants, but ruminations from those who came after on the very personal legacy of war in their lives. The topic of war is not popular or easy because we prefer not to think about the legacies of military conflicts. These types of hostilities are meant to be final solutions to problems; they are ugly and necessary and then they are over. Thinking about the personal and ethical repercussions of the unmediated violence of combat is an uncomfortable exercise so we ignore it as best we can, annoyed at the prodding of those voices that ponder not only the valor of military conflict, but also the chaos, fear, and corruption it engenders.

Yet, as these articles attest, in spite of our best efforts to forget, the legacy of war passes on to future generations. It comes in forms as varied as ambivalence, intergenerational trauma, or outrage. You will find each of these here, but you will also find something more: authentic voices seeking to navigate a meaningful life through the often violent stream of history. Martin E. P. Seligman, a prominent psychological scientist, defines this concept as using “your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self.” Whether that involves seeking to uncover and come to terms with an ugly truth, righting an injustice, or reimagining a community or way of life lost, the life-giving power of values and ideas bubbles up.

It is fitting then to close this issue with two articles dedicated to visions of powerful and positive change: making the places we live and work centers of innovation, creativity, and enlightenment by recognizing the power of the humanities to bring beauty to our lives, preserve and renew our stories, and sustain and enhance the diversity that makes us whole.

Brenna Daugherty GerhardtExecutive Director

SHADOWSOF WAR

Pho

to b

y Jo

leyn

Lar

son,

Man

dan

, ND

features[contents]

THE DAKOTA CONFLICT 2 The Hanging in Mankato By Claire Barliant

12 Dalliance with the Gallows: A Colonizer’s Privilege By Waziyatawin

THE CIVIL WAR AND WORLD WAR I16 The Power to Outlive Stone By Karen Herzog

THE COLD WAR22 The Cold War in the Peace Garden State By David Mills

30 After Safeguard By Marcel LaFlamme

PLAIN THINKING34 On Writing and Thinking in Science By Peter Kahn

38 Lakota Language Nest: An Immersion School A Language on the Edge of Extinction By Dakota Goodhouse

ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the North Dakota Humanities Council. Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, EditorJan Daley Jury, Line EditorDakota Goodhouse, Researcher

To subscribe please contact us:

North Dakota Humanities Council418 E. Broadway, Suite 8Bismarck, ND [email protected]

ndhumanities.org

Bismarck BOMARC – Air Force BOMARC missile displayed in downtown Bismarck, North Dakota, as part of the “Crazy Days” shopping initiative in July 1962. Courtesy of State Historical Society of North Dakota.

[the dakota conflict]

THE HANGING IN MANKATOBy Claire Barliant

Exe

cutio

n o

f the

thi

rty-

eig

ht S

ioux

Ind

ians

, at

Man

kato

, Min

neso

ta, D

ecem

ber

, 26,

186

2.

Co

urte

sy o

f the

Lib

rary

of C

ong

ress

, LC

-USZ

62-1

93.

Fragments of a living history of the 1862 mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota Indians.

2

At times, reading hereIn the library,I’m given a glimpseOf those condemned to deathCenturies ago,And of their executioners.I see each pale face before meThe way a judgePronouncing a sentence would,Marveling at the thoughtThat I do not exist yet. … How vast, dark, and impenetrableAre the early-morning skiesOf those led to their deathIn a world from which I’m entirely absent,Where I can still watchSomeone’s slumped back, Someone who is walking away from meWith his hands tied,His graying head still on his shoulders,Someone whoIn what little remains of his lifeKnows in some vague way about me,And thinks of me as God,As Devil.

—Charles Simic,

“Reading History”

I was not in the first fight at New Ulm nor the first attack on Fort Ridgely. Here let me say that the Indian names of these and other places in Minnesota are different from the English names. St. Paul is the “White Rock;” Minneapolis is “the Place Where the Water Falls;” New Ulm is “the Place Where There Is a Cottonwood Grove on the River;” Fort Ridgely was “the Soldiers’ House;” Birch Coulie was called “Birch Creek,” etc.

—Big Eagle,

Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts

of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, 1988

Early in the winter of 1854, we began to think of emigrating to America. Of any other reason than that it was God’s will, I am ignorant to this day. … We were met with sickness, poverty, and need; the money we had left, we had loaned to friends in our party and now we were in need of everything. Late in the fall we moved to Geneva. At this time my assurance that it

was God’s will that we should move to America was put to a hard test. It went from bad to worse. Home, food, money and health—all was lacking. Once I said: “If I stood on the shores of Sweden naked, I would consider myself fortunate; and if God ever would give me the means again, we would go back.” But when that time came all was forgotten.

—Pastor Peter Carlson,

autobiography, late 1800s

ONE DAY IN THE FALL of 2006 my mother, visiting from Chicago, and I were having breakfast in Brooklyn, with her rolling through updates on distant relatives who occupy various corners of the Midwest. She told me about our cousin, Helene Leaf, who was researching a Lutheran church founded in East Union, Minnesota, by my great-great-great uncle, Peter Carlson. I was until that point failing to pay attention, dutifully nodding and uttering, “Really?” every few seconds. But then something cut through the static of anonymous small towns and genealogical records: Helene had learned that another great-great-great uncle named Anders Johan Carlson had served in the Union army during the Civil War, and had been standing guard during the execution of several Indians, the sight of which had made him vomit—even, I imagined, as a crowd stood by stolidly, or perhaps even jubilantly. I had grown up in Chicago and had never heard of any such execution, and neither had my mother. The story stuck with me, though, quickly shifting into that category of things you feel like you’ve known all your life.

A few months later, I did a cursory Google search and found that the event in question had taken place in Mankato, an unassuming town in southern Minnesota, on December 26, 1862. Thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged by the army, making it the largest mass execution to ever take place in the United States.

A story began to take shape: The scaffold fell from the Dakotas’ feet, the nooses tightened around their throats, and a resounding cry went up from the throng of a thousand onlookers. Anders Johan was repulsed by the sight of inert bodies suspended from the gallows, swinging against each other like pendulums. He turned away, as did several other troops, and retched.

One year later, my mother informed me that Helene had discovered that Anders Johan, who went by A. J., had written an account of his experiences as a soldier for a local newspaper. Helene diligently photocopied the articles, and I scoured them for confirmation of the story I had imagined, but there was nothing. Carlson described his life as a soldier in great detail but he relied on third-party sources to recount the execution, seemingly erasing his own presence, whether because he was traumatized or ashamed or simply overwhelmed by the task of telling this story. I looked up additional accounts by other troops and bystanders, but they all describe the event impersonally, remotely, as if reciting from the same script; then their moral sensibilities kick in, and they reflect that the hanging had inspired in them some feeling of triumph and personal satisfaction. I’ve only come across one account that hints at the trauma of seeing thirty-eight men die simultaneously, an essay submitted to a Minnesota Tourism Bureau contest by a seventy-one-year-old woman in 1933. “The execution,” she allows, “was an awful spectacle for a girl of fifteen to witness.”

Three years from its founding, Mankato assumed its position as the leading city in population and wealth in the Minnesota Valley and it stands so today. Of thrilling interest is its history and worthy of commemoration the valorous deeds of its pioneers. Wonderful the transformation they have made in turning the wilderness


3


maze into a great orderly emporium of trade.

The lonely Indian trail of 50 years ago has become a busy street, bounded with magnificent marts of trade, the forest clad hillside has become lined with stately halls of learning and justice, the swampy valley, flood-torn and thicket-tangled, has become beautiful with palatial homes and magnificent sanctuaries, and the death-like stillness of a desolate waste has been made to pulse with commercial, educational and spiritual life. All honor to the founders of this metropolis of Southern Minnesota, and to all the time-scarred veterans of the Wilderness—the heroes of the log cabin—whose toil, courage and sacrifice have bequeathed to us such a splendid heritage.

—Thomas Hughes,

Mankato: Its First Fifty Years, 1903

A. J. CARLSON WROTE NEARLY FORTY articles for the East Union News between 1898 and 1900, most of which are saved on microfilm at the Carver County Historical Museum in Waconia, Minnesota, a few having been lost. His writing is clear and direct, with occasional flashes of that dry, self-deprecating wit so particular to Scandinavian Midwesterners. About joining the army, he wrote, “After first having received our outfit of arms which consisted of Austrian rifles taken from the Rebels at Fort Donaldson, Tenn., in the winter before, and ammunition that would only fit the Springfield rifle, which was in general use in the Infantry service all over the United States, the consequence was every bullet had to be made smaller before it would fit our new gun. As usual the Swedes had to take a back seat when selecting the officers and consequently your scribe was mustered in as ‘High private in the rear rank.’”

But when he reaches the moment of the execution, he simply bows out. After describing how his company was ordered to march to Mankato from where they were stationed in Glencoe, about forty miles away, to assist in the hanging, he writes, “I will now let another author speak about the

tragic event more fully partly from the Mankato Record published at the time, and also from the official records.” This caesura mystified me: Why was he unable to relate his own experience of witnessing the execution? Victims of trauma tend to repress the memory of an event—was his inability to describe the hanging a form of denial? Or was it shame and disgust, a feeling of being complicit that rendered him mute? Whatever the reason, instead of telling the story from his own point of view, Carlson opted for collage, piecing together a narrative from newspaper accounts and orders from the commanding officers. “Among those witnessing the execution was Baptist Lassuillier, head chief of the Winnebago Indians, whose reservation was in this county,” he wrote, quoting the newspaper accounts. “He was a man of fine physical development, and dressed in citizens clothes his presence was not known except to his intimate friends and acquaintances. Always a staunch friend of the whites and loyal to authority, his sympathies were of course on the side of the law and order, and against those who had so cruelly murdered the white settlers.” Then, quoting the commanding officers: “All persons interested in Mankato and the adjoining distance for ten miles from these headquarters, are hereby notified to sell or give no intoxicating of any description, including wine and beer, to the enlisted men of the United States forces in this valley and vicinity, unless it be upon an order from or approved by the colonel commanding.”

I never found any evidence to support the apocryphal story of Carlson’s visceral reaction to the execution, whether in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society or in interviews with historians. I realized that I had become attached to the story in part because the very act of vomiting seemed to redeem his role in the execution. But I began

4

grounds, the two populations lived in relative peace, engaging in the lucrative trade of beaver hides and often intermarrying. Then, in a series of concessions, the Dakota parted with twenty-five million acres of land in return for paltry amounts of cash and food annuities and were encouraged to become farmers; by mid-century they were left with fewer than one million acres along the Minnesota River for their seven-thousand-member tribe. Corruption among the Indian agents meant that the Dakota were often cheated of their annuities; chiefs gave away more land in exchange for slightly more money, but traders’ claims increasingly limited the amount received by the tribes. Finally, in 1862, with the Dakota’s crops failing, much of the Union army fighting the Confederates, and the Civil War delaying the payment of annuities, the Dakota revolted. They were spurred by the murder of five settlers in Acton by four Dakota men on August 17. A group of Indians who had been resisting white acculturation seized this confrontation as an opportunity to wage war on the settlers, convincing Chief Little Crow to lead them into battle, despite his initial reluctance. The Dakota attacked the Redwood Agency the next morning.

Henry Sibley, who had served as the first governor of Minnesota, was commissioned by current governor Alexander Ramsey to lead an expedition against the Indians. Twelve companies, consisting of some 1,600 volunteers (“A greener set of men were never gotten together,” Sibley lamented), eventually overcame the Dakota offensive after three weeks of skirmishes that culminated in the Battle of Wood Lake. Meanwhile, many Dakota disagreed with the decision to go to war. Some fled to Canada or the West, and around two thousand gathered in a camp with the understanding that their tacit surrender meant they would be treated as prisoners of war and eventually forgiven. But contrary to what he had led the Dakota to believe,

Sibley, after declaring victory, took the entire camp into custody. Four hundred Dakota men were arrested and tried for murder—often in less than five minutes, with as many as forty cases dispatched in a single day. (Abraham Lincoln intervened on behalf of the Dakota, limiting death sentences to thirty-eight out of 303 men who had been convicted of killing settlers.) The remaining Dakota were forced to walk to Fort Snelling, which became their prison camp throughout the winter, during which more than two hundred died. When spring arrived the survivors were herded into steamboats and trains and shepherded hundreds of miles to rough, unknown territory in what is now South Dakota.

When I was a young man I often went with war parties against the Chippewas and other enemies of my nation, and the six feathers shown in the headdress of my picture in the Historical society at St. Paul stand for six Chippewa scalps that I took when on the warpath. By the terms of the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota in 1851, the Sioux sold all of their lands in Minnesota, except a strip ten miles wide on each side of the Minnesota river from near Fort Ridgely to the Big Stone lake.

The Medawakantons and Wacoutas had their reservation up to the Yellow Medicine. In 1858 the ten miles of this strip belonging to the Medawakanton and Wacouta bands, and lying north of the river were sold, mainly through the influence of Little Crow. … It caused us all to move to the south side of the river,where there was but very little game, and many of our people, under the treaty, were induced to give up the old life and go to work like white men, which was very distasteful to many.

—Big Eagle,

Through Dakota Eyes

THE MEMORY OF WAR, LIKE ALL memory, tends to be limited to those who have lived it. Rarely does

to understand his resistance to describing the execution—which was, even just forty years later, already out of sync with the history of Minnesota’s heroic pioneers and the young state’s pivotal role in the Civil War—as a similar kind of disavowal, if not exactly contrition or protest. Perhaps my uncle believed that the only way to manage his complicity, and his revulsion, was to elide his own experience and instead revisit the scrim of official records and documents that justified the hanging, while also disappearing the event into the language of vague, unimpeachable bureaucratic authority.

Like a destructive storm, the war struck suddenly and spread rapidly. Everything was confusion. It was difficult to know who was friend and who was foe. … Little Crow wanted to make peace, but the majority of the people wanted him to lead them in a war. They threatened him and called him a coward until he in anger agreed to lead them in war.

—Esther Wakeman,

Through Dakota Eyes

Thirty-five years ago Aug. 20th will be remembered by the old settlers, that are yet among the living, as the day when, late in the evening, the rumor came that the Indians were killing the white settlers and were coming down the Henderson road, fast approaching East Union; burning and killing everything in their way.

—A. J. Carlson,

East Union News, January 1, 1898

CARLSON’S RETICENCE, HIS DECISION TO describe the execution in the form of collage, and his unwillingness to fix the event to a single narrative—what he saw and experienced—makes more sense in relation to what preceded and followed the hanging. Until the 1800s, when settlers began encroaching on Dakota hunting


5


war take on larger meaning, becoming relevant for those who are separated from it by hundreds or thousands of miles, decades or centuries. Suffice to say the Dakota War is hardly one of these exceptions. While the anger and agony felt by the Dakota seems to have barely been attenuated by the passing of 150 years, for most people its memory has disappeared. The Dakota have their stories, passed on from generation to generation, and the rest of Minnesotans have the crumbling monuments to fallen settlers and moldering historical sites that are strewn about the Indian Trail, the unpaved historic byway that runs through the Minnesota River Valley, where the Dakota War was fought.

Elsewhere, these markers have been casually integrated into the landscape, with the names of streets, parks, and towns echoing the war that wrenched the modern state into being. “The Dakota conflict was the last act in a cultural transformation that divided the history of ‘modern’ Minnesota from that of the multicultural borderland that had existed for the previous two hundred years,” Mary Wingerd writes in North Country: The Making of Minnesota.

This shift was congruous with a systematic eradication of the indigenous population throughout North America, which was officially sanctioned by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 (although it likely started as early as Ponce de León’s arrival in Florida in 1513). Two Minneapolis high schools, a state park, and a park in Mankato bear the name of General Sibley. When I take the bus to the Minnesota Historical Society, an imposing new building on top of a hill, with architecture that mimics the classical pomp of the nearby state capitol, I get off at the corner of Marion and Ravoux—the latter being the name of one of two ministers who baptized the Dakota in the days leading up to the execution. (The convicted Dakota hoped they would be granted

a reprieve if they converted to Catholicism, Wingerd speculates.)

“So many Indians have lied about their saving the lives of white people that I dislike to speak of what I did. But I did save the life of George H. Spencer at the time of the massacre. … Once after that I kept a half-breed family from being murdered; these are all the people whose lives I claim to have saved. I was never present when the white people were willfully murdered. I saw all the dead bodies at the agency. Mr. Andrew Myrick, a trader, with an Indian wife, had refused some hungry Indians credit a short time before when they asked him for some provisions. He said to them: “Go and eat grass.” Now he was lying on the ground dead, with his mouth stuffed full of grass, and the Indians were saying tauntingly: “Myrick is eating grass himself.”

—Big Eagle,

Through Dakota Eyes

IN 2002, A DAKOTA ACTIVIST and academic named Waziyatawin helped organize a march to commemorate the execution. Now, every other winter, a couple of hundred people, mostly members of the Dakota tribe, march 150 miles from the Lower Sioux Reservation in the Minnesota River Valley to Fort Snelling in St. Paul, with a stop in Mankato. Every mile or so they drive into the ground stakes inscribed with the names of Dakota captives who were forced to follow that same route from in November of 1862. I meet Waziyatawin in the Grinder, a cheerful, tidy café in the tiny town of Granite Falls, about one hundred miles from the border of South Dakota. In recent years Waziyatawin has emerged as a forceful advocate for the return of land to the Dakota, and a historian at the Smithsonian had recommended I read her books and articles on the Dakota conflict.

Unlike other accounts I’ve come across, Waziyatawin’s writing thrusts the 1862 war into the present, and

insists that we recognize its enduring consequences. While delivering a speech in November 2010 to a group of students at Winona State University, Waziyatawin said the Dakota needed to reclaim their land “by any means necessary,” which earned her the attention of theFBI. In 2008 she published What Does Justice Look Like?, which argues for the return of twelve million acres of Minnesota public land to the Dakota, among other forms of reparation, such as relief from debts (and refers to white people by the Dakota word, Wasicu). Waziyatawin is careful to never claim to be a spokesperson for the Dakota, but as a result of her speaking engagements and prolific publishing, she has become a figurehead of sorts.

Waziyatawin has chestnut hair swept back into a ponytail, a girlish flop of thick bangs that highlights her brown eyes, and an easy, infectious smile. She greets me warmly, tells me to call her Waz. She seems like an unlikely candidate for the most wanted list. If anything, she comes across as maternal, and I can imagine her as the cool professor all the kids love at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where she is Indigenous Peoples Research Chair in the Indigenous Governance Program. The café is filled with tchotckes for sale, and we sit underneath wall-mounted plaques bearing treacly platitudes such as, “A mother’s love is like seeds scattered in the garden.” She tells me she was doing yardwork before she arrived, and I apologize for pulling her away from her family. We talk for a minute about chores—gardening and the like—before I get the nerve to start asking her questions. At this point I should admit that a complex and contradictory series of thoughts is powering through my brain. I’m not entirely sure that my reasons for being here—including doing this interview under the

6

guise of research—aren’t related to a feeling of personal guilt over my ancestor’s racism and complicity in the hanging, and by extension, whether I am hoping to earn something along the lines of exoneration from Waz. Intellectually I know this is an absurd desire, but it unsettles me nevertheless. Fighting off this uncomfortable knowledge, I tell her I want to talk about the execution and the personal history versus the official history. I start off, “So if you wouldn’t mind telling me when you first heard about or learned about the forced evacuation or the execution …”

I switch off the recorder and we talk about the Minnesota River Valley and how beautiful it is—perhaps the most common, and definitely the easiest, subject of conversation in the area during late summer. Out of some sense of obligation, or perhaps for masochistic reasons, I had brought my mother, who lives in Chicago, along on the trip and to the interview. She is, of course, also interested in our family’s history. During the interview, she is, for the most part, quietly helpful. She has listened intently throughout, taken pictures of Waz while she answers my questions. Now she says how difficult it is to hear about the treatment of the Dakota. Waz tells us about plans for a new power plant, Big Stone II, that was going to be built near the plantation before environmental groups successfully

stopped its construction, and how the Sioux hadn’t even bothered to protest because they felt so powerless and didn’t think they could make a difference. Waz seems almost despondent about the lack of impact the commemorative marches have had, and makes it clear that she has shifted her priorities to thinking about sustainability, with singular focus on land rather than symbolic steps toward “reconciliation.”

“So have no other descendants like us,” I tentatively ask Waz, “the troops or the white settlers who were instrumental in the removal, has anyone else reached out to talk to you or …”

“Yeah,” she says, and names a few, before adding, “but that doesn’t help us. That’s about easing white guilt and easing their conscience.”

“What sort of help would you like?”

“Land. Land, land, land,” she immediately responds.

As the conversation is winding down, and we are making motions to rise and go, my mother says, “I have a friend who grew up in New Ulm, and she had never heard of the hanging.”

Feeling relaxed, probably too relaxed, now that the interview is


Painting of a battle between Sioux Indians and settlers in

August 1862.The siege of New Ulm, Minn, by H. Aug. Schwabe, c1902. Courtesy of the Library of

Congress, LC-USZC4-2995.

technically over, I affirm my mother’s comment. “Yeah, I had never heard of it until I found out about my ancestor’s memoirs, and whenever I ask my friends about it, they’ve never heard of it either.”

Waz nods and smiles tightly, then stands up. She is no longer smiling. “I hope this was helpful,” she says simply and politely. My mother shakes Waz’s hand and says what a pleasure it was to meet her, and I do the same. Waz thanks us for the coffee and walks out of the cafe. I stare at a plaque quoting Ecclesiastes, chapter 3—“For everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” and so on—and feel like an idiot for treating the subject so lightly.

My mother and I get into the car and head back to Minneapolis by way of Mankato via the Indian Trail. We talk for a long time about the way the conversation ended, about how we seem to have offended Waz, and why. We both feel remorse for having let her down, somehow. After driving for about ten minutes we enter the Upper Sioux agency and come across a generic-looking building, which may or may not be a visitor center; the doors are locked. We retreat and continue along the byway, passing a handful of farms and an endless backdrop of ripening green cornfields. Soon all signs of people fade away, leaving a winding road lined with lush

7


late-summer foliage: cottonwood, sumac, oaks, and deciduous trees. We spot an occasional duck-hunting blind, built from sun-bleached wood, rising from the tall grass, and catch glimpses of the river, bright and sparkling in the afternoon sun. Along the way we stop at various memorials for the “heroic pioneers”: the Joseph Brown historic site, the Schwandt State monument, the Redwood Ferry historic site.

After about seventy-five miles the byway peters out and we reach New Ulm, a small town that, in the fading afternoon light, doesn’t seem to have a whole lot going for it. We’re greeted by an advertisement for the town’s Teutonic origins: a sign featuring a cloaked and bearded Goth, sword held aloft, striding toward the road. We drive a few minutes past it, far enough to see a cluster of one-story cement-block buildings, and then turn back toward the highway.

At once 40 of us were ordered out with ten days rations to make a circuit west as far as Lake Preston, 30 miles away. On the third day we came to the lake, which was one of the most beautiful little lakes I have seen, it was nearly round with a small island in the center, and the sandy shores and its clear water with fish and fowl in abundance and surrounded with a small strip of heavy white oak timber.

—A. J. Carlson,

East Union News, May 15, 1898

My grandmother, Isabel Roberts (Maza Okiye Win is her Indian name), and her family were taken as captives down to Fort Snelling. On the way most of them walked, but some of the older ones and the children rode in a cart. … When they came through New Ulm, they threw cans, potatoes, and sticks. They went on through the town anyway. The old people were in the cart. They were coming to the end of the town, and they thought they were out of trouble. Then there was a big building at the end of the street. The windows were open. Someone threw hot, scalding water on them. The children were all burned

and the old people too. As soon as they started to rub their arms the skin just peeled off. Their faces were like that, too. The children were all crying, even the old ladies started to cry, too. It was so hard it really hurt them, but they went on.

It was on this trip that my maternal grandmother’s grandmother was killed by White soldiers. My grandmother, Maza Okiye Win, was ten years old at the time and she remembers everything that happened on this journey. The killing took place when they came to a bridge that had no guard rails. The horses or stock were getting restless and were very thirsty. So, when they saw water, they wanted to get down to the water right away, and they couldn’t hold them [the horses] still. So the women and children all got out, including my grandmother, her mother, and her grandmother. … She [Maza Okiye Win’s mother] was going to put her mother in the wagon, but it was gone. They stood there not knowing what to do. She wanted to put her mother someplace where she could be warm, but before they could get away, the soldier came again and stabbed her mother with a saber. She screamed and hollered in pain, so she [her daughter] stooped down to help her. But her mother said, “Please daughter, go. Don’t mind me. Take your daughter and go before they do the same thing to you. I’m done for anyway. If they kill you, the children will have no one.” Though she was in pain and dying, she was still concerned about her daughter and little granddaughter who was standing there and witnessed all this. The daughter left her mother there at the mercy of the soldiers, as she knew she had a responsibility as a mother to take care of her small daughter.

“Up to today, we don’t even know where my grandmother’s body is. If only they had given the body back to us, we could have given her a decent funeral,” Grandma said.

—Isabel Roberts, as told to Waziyatawin

Angela Wilson, In the Footsteps of Our

Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative

Marches of the 21st Century, 2006

8

WHILE THE EXECUTION HAS LARGELY faded from the conscious history of the state for most people, it occasionally surfaces in writings that treat it with greater historical rigor and accuracy than in the past. In 1990 Carol Chomsky, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, published an article in the Stanford Law Review that analyzes the trials preceding the execution. (The article came out four years after a group called the Dakota Studies Committee issued a formal request for a reconciliation between Indians and other Minnesotans. Governor Rudy Perpich responded by proclaiming 1987 “the year of reconciliation,” in which “the Dakota people will join with others in appreciation of cultural diversity and human understanding.”) We meet in her office, a sunny room in the university’s law school. Chomsky, a legal historian, has a friendly, approachable air about her. She tells me she became interested in the topic after a colleague who taught American Indian law and was involved in planning the reconciliation events suggested she look into the trials. “We don’t usually, among white Americans, think of this kind of thing as somebody’s story,” she says. But over the course of doing her research, she came to understand that the Dakota consider it as “a narrative that is, in a sense, owned by different groups, different families.”

Claire Barliant: Could you compare the Dakota trials to those of Confederates during the Civil War, which took place at the same time?

Carol Chomsky: Abraham Lincoln declared that the Southerners were not sovereign just because they had broken away. They were citizens of the United States, and they could have been viewed as simply citizens who were engaging in treason or murder. But the Southerners were accorded the rights of a sovereign nation in terms of the military commissions. So they were tried only for whether they violated the laws of war, and

otherwise, they were simply held as POWs if they were captured. And the reason for that, in part, was because otherwise the Union army would have been treated similarly by the Southerners. And so, for practical reasons, if nothing else, they were being given the rights of a sovereign nation in terms of the treatment with respect to their activities during the war. Meanwhile the Dakota, who were a sovereign nation, were not being viewed as a sovereign nation.

CB: You write that the law is meant to do more than simply dictate and enforce rules, that it “must do more than simply define boundaries of behavior and punish those who overstep the boundaries. The law must be more than the routine exercise of power. It must ‘guide and educate’ those subject to it and validate itself ethically in the eyes of the governed as well as in the eyes of the ruling class.”

CC: We enact our laws as a reflection of our sense of right and just behavior. Rules against murder are not just there because somebody powerful said, “This is the rule that should exist.” It’s because we have a societal understanding of what boundaries there should be for us to live together appropriately, and also what is ethical and moral. Now we don’t all agree on everything, but, generally speaking, our rules reflect our principles.

The Sioux who were punished were not part of the community that created and supported those rules. It doesn’t mean they weren’t governed by them, but it wasn’t ever explained to them what was going on. In their perception, the notion of a trial—and a hanging—didn’t make sense. They knew that there had been killings, but from Dakota community perspective they had engaged in a war.

On Dec. 24th 1862 our company with A. C and K of the 6th Infantry Minnesota Volunteers, left Glencoe to assist in hanging the 38 condemned Indians at Mankato. We made about 12 miles the first day and stopped over night near some German farmers a few miles south of New Auburn, we were provided with a few “tepees” or regulation tents where 20 to 25 could easily crowd together. During the night we had a heavy rain which lasted until morning, during the latter part of the night the water ran right in the tent and under us so most of us were soaked through to the skin before we had any warning, the ground was frozen hard so the water started swiftly, about daybreak it turned bitterly cold, so our heavy clothes became stiff as a paper collar on a dude in a large city, and to pull down our large tents was a terrible job.

After having partaken of a little coffee, bacon and hardtack, we started towards St. Peter and arrived there about noon. A mile or so below town we passed the once notorious place called Traverse dis Sioux where the government had large warehouses from which the Indians had their annuity dealt out to them several times a year. This agency was established very early, and many important treaties between the Indians and the whites were made at this place. It was abandoned years ago, and only portions of decayed brick walls are left. We passed through St. Peter about noon Christmas day crossed the Minnesota River on a ferry, three miles above, and marched to the stone piles called Kasota where we found a few vacated houses, where a roasted turkey would not have tasted very bad, but none was forthcoming.

The next morning, Dec. 26th, we started for Mankato six or seven miles distant and arrived there about 9: AM.

I will now let another author speak about the tragic event more fully.

—A. J. Carlson,

East Union News, July 1, 1898

While he was in prison, awaiting execution, Hdainyanka (Rattling Runner)


9


wrote an angry letter to his father-in-law, Chief Wabasha:

Wabasha: You have deceived me. You told me that if we followed the advice of General Sibley, and gave ourselves up to the whites, all would be well; no innocent man would be injured. I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man, or any white persons. I have not participated in the plunder of their property; and yet to-day I am set apart for execution and must die in a few days while men who are guilty will remain in prison. … When my children are grown up, let them know that their father died because he followed the advice of his chief, and without having the blood of a white man to answer to the Great Spirit. My wife and children are dear to me. Let them not grieve for me. Let them remember that the brave should be prepared to meet their death; and I will do as becomes a Dakota.

—Mary Wingerd,

North Country: The Making of Minnesota,

2010

THE DAKOTA PEOPLE WERE FORMED BY Ina Maka, or Earth Mother, at the juncture of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, which they call Bdote. Since 1817 Bdote has been the site of Fort Snelling, where the 1,658 Dakotas were held in a concentration camp for six months from early November 1862 to May 5, 1863, and where more than 200 died. It “is the site of our genesis and our genocide,” one man, Jim Anderson, tells Waz in What Does Justice Look Like? There are occasional protests against the existence of the fort, which Waz argues should be torn down and reclaimed by the Dakota as farmland.

On our last day in Minneapolis, my mother and I drive to Fort Snelling, on the southwestern edge of St. Paul, a few minutes from the airport. We park on a rise overlooking the water and walk past the fort, where guides in nineteenth-century costumes flank the entrance, and walk down a hill to a grove of trees, where a small circle of stakes with Dakota names written on them have been driven into the ground. Pieces of cloth hang from the stakes and the branches of trees. There are

no plaques or markings to set the site apart from what surrounds it. It is a fragile, ephemeral memorial, a remnant of the commemorative march. It feels awkward, tentative, human, and, though the comparison is obvious, totally antithetical to the stone monuments we’d driven past earlier. The sedimented permanence of those markers seems to have enabled Americans to forget the past rather than remember it—the markers’ ostensible purpose.

The delicate Dakota memorial reinforces a paradox that is hard to accept, that real reconciliation would require a kind of collective amnesia, and possibly a form of cultural integration that many Indians resist. In other words, to forgive and forget is also to surrender. The alternative is to strive for the impossible, which is what Waz wants: the total abdication of US colonization. This leaves the Dakota—and the descendants of settlers—in a precarious position, with no foreseeable resolution. But perhaps this is for the best. Perhaps the presence of a renegade group on the margins of society acts as a balance, a reminder that those who occupy the center, and the way of life they promote, are on unstable ground.

Before we leave, we stop to look out over the point where the rivers meet. Three large birds fly out from the trees along the far bank and ascend in lazily expanding circles. The sun is so bright I have to squint to see them, and they flicker in and out of sight. They have the round heads, pointed beaks, and powerful wings of hawks. My mother is convinced they are bald eagles: “Just look at their wingspan.” I’ve never seen a bald eagle outside of the zoo, but these birds do seem appropriately majestic. I follow them as they rise, expecting they’ll eventually swoop down toward the river again. But they continue to fly in spirals into the sun, until I lose sight of them completely.

Once I had a taste of what it means to freeze to death, and do not believe that is the worst kind of a death. In a severe Minnesota winter I rode twelve miles without fur coat and with an ordinary overcoat. For a time I suffered terribly from the cold; I had neither strength nor time to run to get warm. The one mile went after the other and I thought, we’ll soon be there, and soon I did not feel the cold. But when I arrived I was so stiff, that when I tried to get out of the sleigh, I fell helpless to the ground.

Some of our people in the Union settlement were users and lovers of strong drink. For that reason I had many difficulties. Some immigrants had brought with them from Sweden a whiskey still, and soon they had the still going full blast in the woods and all winter they had a good time in their way. We warned and exhorted, but it did not help. Then we decided to pray especially David’s prayer, “Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongues.” (Gör du dum oense) Ps.55:9. Not long thereafter the owners became enemies and destroyed their equipment. I was told, that, when one of them was about to break the last vessel he cried, “Now I am doing what Carlson wants me to do.”

The same thing happened with the Baptists, who had caused us much unpleasantness. We prayed, and they were divided and moved away.

—Pastor Peter Carlson,

autobiography, late 1800s

“The Hanging at Mankato” originated as “Reading History,” a performative reading and conversation hosted by Triple Canopy at Cabinet, Brooklyn, on June 30, 2011. “The Hanging at Mankato” was commissioned by Triple Canopy through its 2010 call for proposals for the Research Work project area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York Council for the Humanities. Reprinted with permission.

10

Key IngredIents: AmerIcA by Food is a thoughtful and reflective smithsonian Institute traveling exhibit about the historical, regional, and social traditions that emerge in everyday meals and celebrations.

Underwood, ND, March 16 - April 28, 2013

entertAInIng HIstory Lecture serIes provides historically based presentations intended to appeal to a broad audience that enjoys learning about the past.

Grand Forks, ND, Myra Museum, March 17, 2013, Dr. Kenneth Dawes: Early Churches in Grand Forks; April 21, 2013, Dr. Kimberly Porter: The Red River Transportation Company

greAt decIsIons serIes is a national, grass-roots discussion program that addresses the most thought-provoking foreign policy challenges facing Americans today. the F/m communiversity will host the series for people to come together to learn and to discuss the issues. Fargo, ND, Riverview Place, March 2, 9, 16, & 23, 2013

tHe roAd to LIttLe rocK is a curriculum project developed for students in grades 4, 8, and 11 that will be available in Fargo Public schools in fall 2013. the project will also produce a documentary video focused on the untold story of Judge ronald davies. In 1957, nine African-American students were denied entry into the all-white central High school in Little rock, Arkansas. not even the people of Little rock, the Arkansas governor, or the national guard would stop this judge from his historic decisions of allowing these children the education they deserved.

Imagine what it would be like if lifelong learning were a significant activity in every city and town. Imagine the effect on children of seeing many of

the adults around them thus engaged.–Peter Kahn

tHe us-dAKotA WAr In nortH dAKotA: A sesquIcentennIAL dIscussIon is a series of four scholarly forums, convened in communities adjacent to significant sites of memory associated with the us-dakota War of 1862-64 which will engage the public in discussion of the values and implications of this conflict for our historical memory and current situation. Four forums to be scheduled at ellendale, standing rock, devils Lake, and Watford city.

tHe nortHern PLAIns etHIcs JournAL at north dakota state university will be the first peer-reviewed ethics journal in north dakota providing a dedicated platform to scholars to publish cutting-edge research. the journal will also publish high-quality work by north dakota’s students and community. the various levels of ethics discussion will create a marketplace of ideas.

neW AmerIcAn storIes is a radio documentary series that interviews new Americans living in different parts of north dakota, including ermina Jelovac, a refugee from bosnia, who exposes the almost overnight change in her neighbors during the war. now, for the past sixteen years, she’s lived in a relatively peaceful community in Fargo—and recounts the tale. the series currently runs on Prairie Public.

cIvIL WAr In dAKotA terrItory reseArcH And ImPLementAtIon focuses on the neglected native American perspective of the events surrounding the civil War in dakota territory. this research will be used as the basis for public outlets such as the commemoration of Whitestone Hill and special exhibits at the Heritage center in bismarck.

Make lifelong learning a cornerstone of your life. The NDHC makes it easy to join your neighbors and attend a free educational program in your community. Here are just a few of

the upcoming events we are sponsoring:

For more information and a complete list of programs visit ndhumanities.org


Brooklyn writer Claire Barliant’s “The Hanging in Mankato: Fragments of a Living History of the 1862 Mass Execution of Thirty-Eight Dakota Indians,” is a media-piece both geographically and politically removed from the hotbed of controversy surrounding the 150th commemoration of the United States-Dakota War of 1862. Originating as “’Reading History,’ a performative reading and conversation hosted by Triple Canopy” in a distant New York art scene, it is a rather unlikely candidate for a responsive essay from a Dakota scholar and activist deeply invested in the interpretation and legacy of this watershed episode in Minnesota and American history. Yet, Barliant’s inquiry into

her own family’s brief connection to one of the most spectacular events in world history—the largest, simultaneous mass-hanging from one gallows in world history—offers both curious insight and an honest glimpse into colonial privilege.

In many ways, Barliant’s story is a typical American story. An opening excerpt from her nineteenth-century uncle, Pastor Peter Carlson, reveals a family emigrating from Sweden in their pursuit of “God’s will,” the standard Manifest Destiny drama that, in this case, brought them to the Dakota homeland of Minnesota. In this familiar narrative, even if it is not spoken, Indigenous people are a temporary hindrance, soon to be swept away by the march of progress. Once the Indian Wars are over and the Indigenous population has been exterminated, removed, or otherwise rendered powerless, Indigenous people fade into the background, disappearing from the white collective consciousness. As long as white occupation of Indigenous homelands continues unchallenged, white Americans have little reason to devote much thought to past conflicts. Certainly Barliant and her relatives maintained the luxury of never needing to consider what crimes settlers might have perpetrated so that their family could live the American dream.

So what was it that broke their historical amnesia and drove Barliant to research the state-sponsored lynching of Dakota warriors? It seems to be curiosity about a family story recently uncovered through genealogical research. The story centers upon another uncle in the Barliant family, Anders Johan (A. J.) Carlson, who served in the Union Army during the Civil War (and presumably in the United States-Dakota War though discussion of this is conspicuously absent in her narrative). It was this military stint that landed him a role as a soldier standing guard during the mass hanging the day after Christmas in 1862. Barliant’s foray into the past was prompted by a concern over A. J.’s response to the hanging—whether he actually vomited after viewing the hanging and why he relied on impersonal sources to describe that gruesome day. Once she began venturing down that investigative path, she was both fascinated by what was for her a chapter in the distant past, and driven by a desire to acquit her ancestor of responsibility for his participation in the hanging. She was not only looking for some kind of evidence of her ancestor’s renunciation of this terrible event, however, she was also looking for her own absolution.

While questions of memory, history, and culpability routinely figure into my research, it mattered little to me whether A. J. Carlson was sickened by what he saw, or whether, as a victim of trauma he had repressed memories of the hanging and in his denial chose to recite impersonal accounts. Perhaps if his experience as a soldier keeping guard during the hanging triggered a lifetime’s actions of justice toward Dakota people, I might be interested in how he felt about the hanging. I would be interested in what aspect triggered remorse and a desire to make

DALLIANCE WITH THE GALLOWS: A COLONIZER’S

PRIVILEGEBy Waziyatawin

12


amends for wrongdoing. However, if the event did nothing to change his actions in regards to Dakota people, that is, if he did not work to stop further crimes, then his feelings are irrelevant. For example, if Carlson were disgusted, did it cause him to object when Minnesotans created a bill to forcibly remove Dakota people from our homeland? Did he oppose the unilateral abrogation of US-Dakota treaties, the payment of Dakota annuity money to white settlers, and the theft of Dakota homeland? Did he oppose the implementation of bounties on Dakota scalps? Did he take a stand against the punitive expeditions into Dakota Territory to hunt down, kill, and terrorize the fleeing Dakota? Did he protest the Minnesota Historical Society’s display of Little Crow’s remains after he was killed for the bounty? Did he offer up his family’s land as a way to make amends to Dakota people? If witnessing the hanging had no bearing on his future actions, then he was just another white settler doing what he needed to do to eliminate any threats to his right of colonial occupation. He was just another colonizer benefitting from Dakota extermination and dispossession.

The same kinds of questions might be asked of Barliant. Does her agonizing over her relative’s involvement in the hanging inspire her to work toward justice? I suspect the answer to that question is “No.”

Barliant is forthcoming, at least, about the personal nature of her journey into the past and her quest for absolution. Not only is this apparent in her musings, through which she attempts to ascribe to Carlson a degree of internal conflict he may not have felt, it is also apparent in the section on her interview with me. In her research, Barliant uncovers no evidence that Carlson felt remorse or disgust at the hanging site. In fact, when she discusses how other bystanders similarly relied on impersonal accounts of the hanging in their own writings “as if reciting from the same script,” she remarks that these witnesses

Above: Encampment of Sioux Prisoners at Fort Snelling, Benjamin F. Upton, 1863.

Left: Episcopal Bishop Whipple at Fort Snelling with Dakota Prisoners, Photo by Benjamin F. Upton, 1863.

13


convey “some feeling of triumph and personal satisfaction” about the hanging. In her wording, it is unclear whether such triumphant sentiment was also specifically expressed in Carlson’s account. This does not prevent her from wondering aloud whether his reliance on other sources to provide the account of the hanging was a reflection of memory suppression in the face of trauma, or a form of denial, or simply his shame and disgust at his own complicity that was rendering him mute. Is it possible that A. J. Carlson felt revulsion at the hanging in 1862? Certainly. Further, it is likely that more than a few white observers that day felt some measure of nausea at the site of thirty-eight Dakota men swinging from the gallows—even if they believed in the barbarity of Dakota people and the righteousness of the mass-lynching. Spectators and soldiers with such mixed feelings might have even participated in the “prolonged cheer” that erupted when the Dakota men dropped from the gallows. That Barliant’s own sense of complicity hinges on her ancestor’s reaction thus seems misplaced. Still, she is honest about her own guilty conscience.

I often receive inquiries from journalists and researchers about possible interviews, especially on the topic of the 1862 War, and I am generally willing to provide them. I know white people will likely not hear Dakota perspectives any other way. Thus, when Barliant requested an interview and was willing to make the drive out to Granite Falls, Minnesota (the town closest to Upper Sioux), I was happy to comply. It was a familiar conversation. Interviewers are frequently unprepared for the depth of feeling around these issues, especially the lingering pain and anger. Further, they are surprised that we might still want justice. This, too, is a typical reaction. We live in a context in which the occupation and colonization of Indigenous

land has become so naturalized it has been rendered invisible. For those of us who still see it, who recognize its many manifestations, anger is a mainstay. Barliant and her mother sensed this anger, but it was not an anger directed specifically at them. It was the dull, tired anger that I feel every time it is clear that a colonizer has really no idea what Indigenous people have lost so that they can live their dreams.

What seemed to be a disappointment for Barliant is that not only did she leave our interview with no exoneration from me, she glimpsed her own naïveté. Upon reflection, however, she was at least honest about our exchange and this is the work’s major strength.

The initial response of white people to these uncomfortable situations interests me far less than what people do with their newfound understandings. After all, everyone has to begin their anti-colonial education somewhere. The question for me was whether this research experience would alter Barliant’s actions—would she be compelled to work for justice for Dakota people? With this in mind, I was not disturbed by her narration of our interview. My disappointment did not come until it was clear to me that the experience had not inspired a larger commitment to justice.

Barliant concludes her piece by recounting her visit to the concentration camp site at Fort Snelling where my Dakota ancestors were imprisoned during the winter of 1862-63. She thoughtfully contrasts the ephemeral nature of our monuments to our ancestors (the prayer stakes with tobacco ties from the last Dakota Commemorative March) with the “sedimented permanence” of the stone monuments of the settlers. She then tells us “The delicate Dakota memorial reinforces a paradox that is hard to accept, that real reconciliation would require a kind of collective amnesia, and possibly a form of cultural integration that many Indians resist. In other words, to forgive and forget is also to surrender. The alternative is to strive for the impossible, which is what Waz wants: the total abdication of US colonization. This leaves the Dakota—and the descendants of settlers—in a precarious position, with no foreseeable resolution. But perhaps this is for the best.” In these comments, Barliant reveals that what she had hoped for was reconciliation between Indians and whites—but reconciliation with no serious consideration of justice. Her solution? Maintenance of the status quo—a space in which the colonizers can continue colonizing with no commitment to justice and where an ineffective “renegade” group agitates from the margins. There is no greater way to ensure ongoing conflict than this suggestion of inaction.

Fort Snelling, Minnesota Rendezvous of the Minnesota Volunteers, by W.J. Whitefield, Harper’s Weekly, Sept. 28, 1861.

14


In pitting two extremes against one another as the only two possibilities for reconciliation, collective amnesia (referring to an Indigenous amnesia since the colonizers have already forgotten what crimes they have perpetrated) versus the abdication of US colonization, Barliant is demonstrating a complete lack of will and imagination. While I do not aim for reconciliation within my own work, I have written about the goal of peaceful coexistence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples and I understand the desire to move beyond a state of conflict. I have spent considerable time contemplating how justice might be achieved in this context (my last book was titled What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland) and I have cited a whole range of possibilities that would bring us closer to peace. Because of this, I find Barliant’s closing comments stunning in their dismissal of the possibility of justice. She decides, from her privileged place as colonizer, what is possible and what is impossible. Fortunately, not all of us will abandon our struggle because Claire Barliant has decreed it futile to try.

One thing she is correct about is that settler society is on shaky ground, but I do not think she has a clue how shaky. Colonization, which relies on every new generation to continue the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples and lands, is precarious. While most Americans cannot conceive of a future without the US government, or without the US government as an imperial power, a long view of history suggests that the United States will indeed fall—it is just a matter of when. Every day that goes by, the likelihood of this occurring seems to increase exponentially. In this century, as we face the end of the fossil-fuel bonanza, the collapse of the unlimited-growth paradigm of capitalism, and the disastrous consequences of global climate change, the United States and other nation-states will find it increasingly difficult to exist at all, let alone maintain any positions of global dominance.

We are witnessing the failure of colonizing society’s capacity for longevity on all fronts. Indigenous people have long recognized the unsustainability and destructiveness of the ways of the colonizers—we have all suffered from it. But we knew it could not last. Thus, when the “impossible” happens, we will be ready. We might even provide a few nudges in that direction.

Claire Barliant is not a bad person and she has certainly helped to bring the story of the hanging to new audiences, but she has also demonstrated that her dalliance with the gallows is fleeting. Like her ancestor before her, she has encountered the unpleasantness of injustice, she has acknowledged the visceral discomfort that accompanies that unpleasantness, and she has moved on. Meanwhile, the colonized are still here, full of pain and rage, and committed to our struggle for justice and liberation.

Waziyatawin is a Dakota writer, teacher, and activist from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe (Yellow Medicine Village) in southwestern Minnesota. She earned her Ph.D. in American history from Cornell University and currently holds the Indigenous Peoples Research Chair in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria. She is the author or co/editor of six volumes and including a co-edited volume with Michael Yellow Bird entitled For Indigenous Minds Only: A Decolonization Handbook, released in Fall 2012 by SAR Press.

Sioux Trials, White Boy Identifying Indian Who Took Part in the Dakota Uprising, newspaper 1862.

15

[the civil war & world war I]

My father had gone to business school in Fargo in the 1930s, where he acquired the beautiful script that makes old ledgers and records into calligraphic art. After he finished school in 1935, he started working in the store for Eb Magoffin. But by 1939, the first dislocating quakes signaling the approach of war scattered young men to places far from home. “Johnny,” as my mother and his family called him, served in the Aleutians and then the Philippines. Jake was a radioman, flying “the Hump” in Burma. Johnny came home severely sick with malaria, acutely ill for nearly a year. But in 1946, Johnny and Jake bought Magoffin’s store and ran the business together. Two years later, in February 1948, the store burned to the ground. Two months

Until recent years, I knew nothing about Beriah or Ebenezer Magoffin except their exotic names, which would be perfectly at home in a Dickens story. And I knew the name only because, in the way of children, I occasionally overheard grownups use it. Perhaps it stuck in my memory because it was so unlike the familiar German surnames around me, or maybe because to a child it sounded like “McCoffin.” Among the second- and third-generation immigrant Germans of that time and culture, not much was explained to children. Grownups talked to each other and children overheard and interpreted as best they could. Children, it was assumed, would be told what they needed to know and no more. It must have been years before I put bits and pieces of overheard grownup conversations together to glean that my dad, John Rempfer, along with my dad’s youngest brother, Jake, had operated “McCoffin’s” store in Monango after Ebenezer Magoffin retired. They never renamed it “Rempfer’s,” that I know of. It had been Magoffin’s for nearly 60 years and so it remained.

16


THE POWER TO OUTLIVE STONE

By Karen Herzog

The

auth

or’s

dad

, Jo

hn R

emp

fer,

with

car

trid

ge

ban

do

lier,

the

Ale

utia

ns, 1

943.

Co

urte

sy o

f Mik

e R

emp

fer.

17


later, in April, Johnny’s wife, Erna, gave birth to a baby girl. Me. So I never saw Magoffin’s, except in photos, unless maybe I sensed something of it in utero.

When I was growing up on my grandparents’ homestead about six miles northwest of Monango, Magoffin’s remained just a rectangular depression along Main Street between Skinny’s Bar and an old white brick building that has been, among its various incarnations, a grocery store, a lunch counter and a post office, back when Monango still had its own 58471 ZIP code.

The sunken lot meant little to me, since on any trip to town I was mostly intent on the possibility of wheedling maybe a red popsicle or a roll of Lifesavers from Mom. I was rarely successful, since Mom saw sugar as the mortal enemy of little children’s teeth, but I always made a valiant try. Where Magoffin’s once stood, where my dad and Uncle Jake conducted store business before I was born, was just an empty spot along Main. That is, until as an adult, I became a beneficiary of the genealogical sleuthing of Jake’s son, my cousin, Mike. He has become the family’s, and in some ways, our community’s historian, patiently seeking out archives and photos and old newspaper articles, interviewing people and translating letters.

Somehow, those pieces of history began to arrange themselves into a bigger picture in my mind and it dawned on me that my ordinary little town, that little spot in the road where highway drivers barely bothered to slow to forty mph, held something quite wonderful. Here, a piece of the big, extravagant, tragic, poignant history of America (and the world) is woven into that tiny town through the people who waited the counters at Magoffin’s Store.

Dickey County, created in 1881 from pieces of LaMoure and Ransom Counties plus “Unorganized Territory,” had only been a Dakota Territory county for three years when Beriah Magoffin arrived there in the spring of 1884. Monango’s 1984 centennial history book, Banner City, honors Beriah Magoffin among the founders of that little town on Highway 281 about sixty miles south of Jamestown. Beriah, with a name and face like an Old Testament patriarch or a Kentucky colonel, surely brought with him his Kentucky accent, along with his personal scars from the Civil War.

But if we know anything about humankind that

is hopeful, it’s that stories have the power

to outlive stone.

The

auth

or’s

unc

le, J

ake

Rem

pfe

r, in

Ind

ia (1

943-

44).

Co

urte

sy o

f Mik

e R

emp

fer.

18


The flood of German-Russians who came to farm Dickey County, among others in south-central and southeastern North Dakota in the next two decades, had missed the Civil War, America’s great agony, by about three decades. Beriah Magoffin had been in the thick of it. Did the new immigrants know that? I wonder. The first-generation immigrants spoke mostly German, and whole families, from children to grandparents, were too preoccupied with fiercely excavating a foothold on the prairie for the luxury of inquiring about a man’s private past. They must have bought their necessities from his mercantile store, everything from shoes to groceries to hardware. But developing a relationship, outside of strictly business, seems unlikely.

If there was a moment when Eb Magoffin turned over the keys to his grocery story to Johnny and Jake Rempfer in 1946, it’s also unlikely that any of them stopped then to reflect that it was Abraham Lincoln who had made that moment possible.

Without the Homestead Act of 1862, which opened up the free land that must have seemed like the only hope of survival to the Germans who fled Russia, would Johnny and Jake have been born on the North Dakota prairies? Would their father have come alone, age nineteen, across Europe? Would he have stayed in Russia instead? Been dragooned into the Russian Army? Starved to death, been shot, sent to Siberia like almost all those who remained? Would his fourteen children ever have been born? When, tasting in the air some downwind scent of persecutions to come, Stalin’s executions and evictions, his starvation policies and his gulags, some animal instinct for survival drove many Germans from their comfortable villages and vineyards along the Black Sea. Where might they have gone if not to the hot, treeless, fertile, windswept, blizzard-beset sanctuary that Lincoln’s signature on the Homestead Act had opened for them?

Beriah Magoffin also arrived courtesy of Lincoln, in a way. Magoffin had fought for the Confederacy. Banner City tells Magoffin’s story, which seems worthy of a Spielberg epic, quite matter-of-factly: Beriah Magoffin was the nephew and namesake of another Beriah Magoffin, who was governor of Kentucky from 1859 to 1862. Magoffin’s uncle Beriah had personally sent a telegram to Lincoln, who had called for troops to fight the South, stating: “I will send not a man nor a dollar for the wicked purpose of subduing my sister southern states.”

Monango’s Beriah Magoffin was born in 1843 to Ebenezer and Mary Magoffin, who owned a plantation in Missouri along with a large number of slaves. Beriah’s father, in fact, raised a regiment on his farm to fight for the Confederacy. Meanwhile, in 1860, according to the Monango history book, Beriah had run away from school and headed across the plains with an ox team, “serving as assistant wagon master, freighting smelting machinery to Pikes Peak, CO. He rode at the rear of a train of 40 wagons of six ox teams each.”

When war was declared, Beriah came back and enlisted in the 10th Missouri, Parson’s Brigade. In 1862, he was shot through the leg and taken prisoner, held in Alton, Illinois. With a number of others, he tunneled his way out and within eleven days had rejoined his company. “About a year later,” according to Banner City, “… in an attack on a fort, Beriah was near where a shell struck and reported among the dead. He was only stunned, however, and, when he finally regained consciousness, his company had disappeared.” Magoffin was recaptured and returned to Alton and from there was sent to Fort Delaware.

“After several months there,” the history reads, “an order was received to exchange 700 disabled men with the South. Not being able to qualify as disabled, he took nicotine from a pipe and smeared over an eczema on his face; it created so much trouble that the doctors passed him with only a glance. He was sent to St. Louis, but never fully recovered from the effects of the nicotine.”

19


At war’s end, Magoffin returned to Missouri to farm part of his former family homestead, and in 1866, married the daughter of a former lieutenant governor of Kentucky. Three of their five children died in infancy; only two survived, a son, Ebenezer, and a daughter, Emma. History says that, after farming for ten years, he came to North Dakota and filed on a claim and ran a mail route.

In 1886, he arrived at what would become the Monango townsite ahead of the Milwaukee Railroad and “built a shack for himself with a room for his horses,” Monango’s first building. Beriah and Ebenezer hauled timbers for the railroad culverts along the line being built from Ellendale to Edgeley. President Grover Cleveland appointed him postmaster of Monango in 1886, where he served until 1888. In 1889, he and Ebenezer began the mercantile business that stood on Monango’s Main Street.

Beriah Magoffin died in 1924 and is buried in the Monango city cemetery just west of town. His son, Eb, continued to run the mercantile until he retired in 1946. He died in 1953 and is also buried in the Monango city cemetery. And so Magoffin’s section of the centennial history concludes.

And the epilogue is this: In March of 1952, Johnny Rempfer died of cancer and is buried west of Monango in St. Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery. Jake is buried there as well.

The past makes the strangest bedfellows of people. Rather, history makes of disparate men the unlikeliest of brothers. Two sons of immigrants from New Beresina on the Eurasian steppe, and father and son from Ireland via the Old Confederacy, all sweeping the same floors

and stocking the same shelves and supplying the same goods, making a life and a living, each answering to their own generation’s call to war. As Beriah had fought in Missouri for the South to be allowed to secede from the Union, Johnny and Jake Rempfer served in World War II for the Union that Lincoln preserved.

They came from places vastly apart to meet at the same little piece of the prairie along Highway 281. And now the prairie holds all of them.

The Monango city cemetery, where Beriah and Ebenezer are buried, is far from Missouri, just as St. Paul’s Lutheran cemetery, where Johnny and Jake are buried, is far from the Black Sea. Perhaps a mile divides them as the crow flies. The dirt road to the city cemetery parallels the old railroad bed for which the Magoffins first hauled the timbers. The gravel road past the church cemetery heads due west to the glacial moraine where Whitestone Hill stands. The store where their lives intersected is gone. The men themselves have gone, leaving just names carved in granite and descendants to remember them.

But if we know anything about humankind that is hopeful, it’s that stories have the power to outlive stone.

Karen Herzog is a fourth-generation North Dakotan who grew up on the family farm in Dickey County and still owns the land which her grandparents homesteaded there. She is a graduate of Jamestown College and has worked as a reporter and columnist for the Bismarck Tribune since 1994. Herzog lives in Mandan and has three grown children.

Post

card

fro

m e

arly

190

0s o

f Eb

enez

er M

ago

ffin’

s st

ore

. C

our

tesy

of K

aren

Her

zog

.

20

Founder $500 - $999Kristen & Jack ParisJune Y. Enget

AssociAte $100 - $499Steve & Barbara AndristTayo BasquiatCharles Bearstail, in honor of Raiden BearstailCarol ChristiansonKathleen B. CunninghamFrances EvansonBrenna & Tom GerhardtKara GeigerMelissa GjellstadKenneth J. GlassMargaret HaglerKate HaugenStewart W. HermanDean Hulse, in honor of John A. RichardsonJoseph JastrzembskiChar McLaughlin & Jim ConleyGeorge & Cheryl MizellM. Kay MoxnessAmy PhillipsChristopher E. RauschMarrion WalshJean Wold

contributor $25-$99Jean AndersonJeannie SteinwandCrystal VaagenPatrick & Susan EsterlyBruce HagenElaine FritzFrank BeamanRoxanne C. BoelzMargie BrekkenJames & Hariett Davis Joyce EsckilsenMary G. FrojenRuby GroveDan & Christine GubbelsJudith HammerGeorge HermanAllan & Cheryl KnutsonDarlene KnutsonHoward W. LangemoJeanette LaRockFather William ShermanEugene SmestadPhyllis SnowAndrea StombergCami DixonPatrick E. McGinnisJohn & Marla Beineke

Claudia Berg & Robert MatzJaclynn Davis WalletteMarilyn FossDavid HapipAlice KotchmanRobert W. LewisEdward & Vivian MashekMelvin & Lila PedersenJohn SakariassenGreg SandersDwight Tober

OUR IMPORTANT WORK RELIES ON YOUR

Give to the ND Humanities Council and help transform lives in your community.

RECENT DONORS

21

[the cold war]

THE COLD WAR IN THE

PEACE GARDEN STATEBy David Mills

Atoms for Peace – The Atomic Energy Commission used a bus to travel the nation, explaining to citizens that atomic energy could be harnessed and put to peaceful use. The bus traveled through North Dakota in 1958. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

22

[the cold war]

“North Dakota is presumed to have four

possible targets which the enemy may strike. They are the Air Force Bases at Minot and Grand Forks, Hector Airport

at Fargo, and the State Capitol in Bismarck,” warned the 1960 North

Dakota Civil Defense Plan entitled How You Will Survive. The small

pamphlet suggested, “In the rural parts of North Dakota, farmers

and residents of smaller communities have built root cellars to store

foodstuff and as shelter from tornadoes. Whether constructed of

concrete or sod, these root cellars are excellent protection against

heavy radioactivity.”

The circumstances that required North Dakotans to consider their root cellars as safe havens against radioactivity resulted from the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union after the Second World War, which history remembers as the Cold War. This anxiety between the two superpowers resulted from the inability of the two allies to reconcile their postwar political objectives. The Soviets installed Communist governments in the countries they occupied, as the British and Americans set up democracies in their occupied zones. The atomic bomb also amplified the distrust between the two nations. The United States held a monopoly on the atomic bomb, at least until 1949. In the interim, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin feared the United States would demand concessions from him through nuclear blackmail. Having just fought a world war that had depleted each nation’s population and treasure, the Americans and Soviets tried to fashion a postwar world that would make them safer. Security for one nation came at the cost of security for the other, creating a cycle of distrust and tension.

The Cold War at the state level was a reflection of national priorities, where the federal government developed programs and pushed them to the state level for implementation. North Dakota participated in initiatives to encourage patriotism among the populace, to fight subversion through anticommunist measures, to employ significant civil defense measures, and to provide acreage for military bases and weapons systems. Citizens in North Dakota embraced many of these initiatives and resisted communism with determination.

One of the first plans to advance patriotism among American citizens involved a train traveling through every major city in each state, transporting the nation’s most precious documents in 1947 and 1948. The “Freedom Train,” as it was called, carried the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and more than one hundred other treasured artifacts. The train left Philadelphia in September 1947, traversed the countryside, and entered North Dakota in April 1948. The train made stops in Bismarck, Minot, Jamestown, Fargo, and Grand Forks, where crowds of citizens eagerly

23

[the cold war]

waited in line for hours to view the documents. Residents in Minot broke the “West of the Mississippi” attendance record previously set in Rapid City, South Dakota. Just two days later, Fargo residents beat the Minot record by eighteen visitors. The important point is not that these North Dakota towns had more visitors than cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle; far more people turned out to see the train in those urban areas, but many could not make it through the display. North Dakotans understood that, while one citizen viewed the display inside the train, others still waited in line, so people needed to get through the exhibit quickly. The record number of people viewing exhibits inside the train was really recognition of good manners.

While the federal government developed plans to enhance patriotism, programs aimed at Communists and subversives moved to the state level for implementation. President Harry S. Truman initiated a loyalty program in 1947, in which millions of Americans eventually signed oaths attesting to their support of the America government and submitted to background investigations. Several congressional investigation committees also emerged, the most famous of which was the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC that interviewed thousands of witnesses throughout the Cold War, hoping to expose Communists in American society. Congress also passed a number of laws aimed at suppressing subversive activity, the most effective of which was the Smith Act, passed in 1940, that made it illegal to belong to any organization that advocated the overthrow of the American government and required all immigrant adults to register with the federal government. Nearly every state in the union adopted some or all of these programs and implemented them at the state and local level, as legislatures often had difficulty avoiding these ideas once proposed. The new laws were often a disaster for the civil liberties of citizens, as committees of men and women with the best of intentions often abused the legal system and ruined reputations. North Dakotans never adopted a single law aimed at exposing Communists that infringed on the rights of its own citizens. No statewide loyalty oath, investigative committees, or Communist registration laws ever emerged, much to the credit of the people who lived there. A city council person in Fargo suggested a loyalty oath for the 300 city workers there in 1955, but the rest of the council voted it down, stating that the people of Fargo were already loyal citizens.

Few North Dakotans seemed to fear a Communist insurrection within the state, but many reasons existed to fear a Soviet attack. When the Communists invaded South Korea in 1950, Americans could not help but compare this surprise attack with that of the Japanese in 1941, and reasoned that America might be next. The Soviets had at least 450 bombers and more than 3,000 troop transport aircraft stationed at new airbases in Murmansk and eastern Siberia, poised to attack the United States. American military planners estimated that the Soviets could launch an attack over the Pacific Ocean and strike the West Coast, or fly over the North Pole, striking the northern portion of the United States. These planes could drop nuclear bombs or paratroopers, depending upon their mission. The distances covered were so vast, however, that pilots were probably flying a one-way mission. They might have refueled prior to hitting their North American targets, but would not have the fuel to return home or to meet a refueling aircraft. Other theories suggested that Soviet pilots might try to fly to Mexico, spending the remainder of the war as prisoners, or they might bail out over the ocean to a waiting submarine.

Other events provided a constant reminder of American vulnerability to attack, as atomic scientists and popular culture continuously

24

[the cold war]

warned citizens of the horrors of nuclear war. The scientists felt that they alone understood the terrible potential of this new technology, and sought to educate the public and political leaders. To get their message heard, they consciously adopted a policy of horror and annihilation when discussing the bomb. Anything else, they argued, met with yawns. Thus, scientists largely manufactured the scare over nuclear weapons as a means to create opposition to their use. Movies depicting nuclear accidents or atomic war scenarios, such as On the Beach (1959), reminded citizens that they lived in a nuclear world. Citizens understood the dangers when the Soviets exploded their first nuclear bomb in 1949, a hydrogen bomb in 1953, and launched Sputnik in 1957, which ushered in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS). Even more frightening, the United States and the Soviet Union nearly exchanged nuclear missiles during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The American people were in the middle of the potential firestorm, the likely casualties of such a contest. The front lines in an atomic war were American city streets.

Civil defense planners began working shortly after World War II, formulating contingency plans to protect American citizens at home in case of attack through the newly created Federal Civil Defense

Administration (FCDA). The survival plan during the Cold War has gone by many designations such as “Run or Dig,” or more descriptively, “Run Like Hell” or “Duck and Cover.” These monikers describe the various phases national and regional planners used to ensure the survival of the American people. The “Run” appellation refers to the strategy of fleeing a city or dwelling prior to a Soviet attack where plenty of advanced warning seemed likely. The national government partially justified building the highway system through the argument that Americans needed well-constructed routes out of urban areas. “Dig” referred to the realization that citizens could never evacuate major cities fast enough to outrun a Soviet attack, especially once the missile age caught up with the Cold War in the late 1950s. The government encouraged people to find a fallout shelter within the city, or dig their own in their backyard.

Civil defense planners worked to educate the public on the terrors of nuclear war, and the fact that citizens could survive a war if they took necessary precautions. “Bert the Turtle” was a popular character in American films, instructing schoolchildren and adults ways in which they could protect themselves in event of nuclear war. The FCDA printed more than twenty million cartoon booklets with civil defense warnings, and more than fifty-five million wallet-sized cards with the same information. Newspapers and magazines carried articles showing citizens how to construct bomb shelters and stock them with the necessary provisions.

Appropriations were slow, as many officials and citizens doubted North Dakota was even a target for the Soviets. Most believed an attack would target strategic centers outside the state such as government buildings, military bases, or shipping and transportation centers. This indifference to Soviet attack plagued the state for years. The governor appointed Lieutenant Colonel Noel F. Tharalson, a soldier with more than 42 years of state and federal service as head of the state’s civil defense organization in 1955. Shortly after taking charge, Tharalson admitted that his position in the civil defense organization was the most frustrating job he had ever held. “Apathy within the state will have to be overcome before any real program can evolve,” he declared. “If you talk to North Dakotans about the possibility of bombing raids, they’ll laugh and turn their backs. They just won’t

To get their message heard, they

consciously adopted a policy of horror

and annihilation when discussing

the bomb.Fargo Freedom Train – Record-breaking crowd waits in line to board the Freedom Train in Fargo, April 1948. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

25

[the cold war]

believe that an enemy bomber would bother with the wide open spaces around the state.”

Tharalson and others concerned with nuclear war worked tirelessly to prepare North Dakota for the unthinkable. Though people may have feared nuclear war, they did little to prepare for it. Each county had an organized civil defense plan by 1960 that included basic facts about atomic explosions, likely target areas, radioactive fallout, and steps to survive such an ordeal. The counties containing larger cities even published locations of fallout shelters that were available throughout the area. The state also produced a comprehensive plan to assist residents in case of nuclear attack, published in a booklet entitled, How You Will Survive. The booklet included information on using root cellars and basements as short-term fallout shelters, and ways to decontaminate people, animals, and vehicles after an attack. The booklet also included information on evacuation procedures and encouraged residents to leave likely target areas such as Bismarck, Fargo, and the area around the air force bases.

While the federal government tried to interest people in preparing for nuclear war, the air force directed a civilian organization, known as the Ground Observer Corps (GOC), charged with watching the skies and reporting any aircraft to headquarters, called a filter center. Air Force General Ennis C. Whitehead reconstituted the GOC in February 1950, which had served a similar role in World War II. Early estimates showed the organization required 160,000 volunteers to operate the 8,000 observation sites located throughout the northern portion of America. During the existence of the GOC between 1950 and 1959, some 800,000 observers stood watch at 16,000 observation posts. The organization was so popular with citizens that by 1955, every state in the nation operated a GOC program. Observers occupied old buildings, rooftops, or observation towers and scanned the sky for low flying aircraft, twenty-four hours per day, each day of the year.

26

[the cold war]

The GOC in North Dakota was especially important, as a Soviet bomber fleet could pass through the state on its way to other targets. It was a matter of pride for many communities to build an observation post out of donated funds, labor, and materials, and then operate the observation post with volunteers. New Hradec, North Dakota, a town of thirty-five residents, accomplished the impossible by establishing an observation post that required one hundred volunteers. Residents recruited volunteers from outlying areas, and swelled the ranks of observers 125. Stanton, North Dakota, used a more creative method to meet its personnel requirements. Mrs. Rueben Sailor, head of the GOC in the town, assigned observation duties to a different volunteer family each day.

Volunteers were continuously in short supply, because observation posts and the filter centers required so many people to meet commitments. Radio broadcasts helped to recruit volunteers, as did ice cream socials held at the filter centers and observation posts. Minot had a more creative way to recruit volunteers. It staged a “bombing raid” when a local pilot dropped balloons over the city with requests for help. Each balloon carried a free ticket to see Invasion USA (1952), a popular movie viewed throughout the country that illustrated what might happen if Soviet bombers struck an American city. Nationally, newspapers and magazines also helped in the recruitment effort, but North Dakota publications brought the issue closer to home. The Golden Valley News portrayed a drawing of a Soviet soldier conducting an orchestra with musical notes floating by. The caption read, “Do the Russian leaders really want peace or to lull us into a sense of false security?” The Minot Daily News carried an advertisement that read, “WARNING: Russian War Planes in a Single Raid Could Attack All of the Most Critical U.S. Targets Leaving Millions Wounded or Dead.” Each notice also contained several paragraphs proclaiming that the Soviets possessed a considerable number of bombers and nuclear weapons that could wreak havoc upon the American population. The United States military was on alert and working hard, but the nation needed GOC volunteers.

Not everyone could serve in uniform during the Cold War, but the opportunity to serve in the GOC gave many citizens a sense of pride in serving their country. Radar improvements gradually reduced the reliance upon civilian volunteers by 1958 and eliminated the requirement for

twenty-four-hour alert. Federal authorities disbanded the GOC by early 1959, while numerous closure ceremonies throughout the state marked the end of the proud tradition of the GOC in North Dakota.

Some citizens worried about the possibility of nuclear war, but the Cold War brought tremendous economic opportunities to the state. Federal assistance had generously helped the state during the Great Depression, and some believed it could do so again. Senator Milton Young relentlessly pursued federal dollars and was quick to realize the implications the Cold War could hold for his state. The Bismarck Capital revealed in 1951 that Senator Young had orchestrated a survey of existing airport facilities, passing the information to the air force in hopes of bringing a military base to North Dakota. When air force officials responded with interest, it sparked a controversy within the state as communities maneuvered to locate a base in their vicinity. Several cities, including Bismarck, Grand Forks, Jamestown, Minot, Williston, and Wahpeton, contacted their political officials seeking information, while Fargo’s mayor traveled to Washington to discuss plans with military leaders.

Not much happened until November 1953, when the air force determined that its military requirements included an increase in the number of air force wings, requiring the construction of new air bases, the reactivation of old ones, and the expansion of existing facilities. Air force officials notified North Dakota political leaders on February 25, 1954, that they intended to establish two air force bases within the state. Initially, the military identified sites in Fargo and Bismarck as the most likely locations for the future bases because of the existing facilities there, contingent upon satisfactory agreements with the local communities.

The competition to attract military bases continued. When local officials heard that the air force was looking to locate two bases within the state, officials in Bismarck, Jamestown, Washburn, Minot, Devils Lake, Fargo, Grand Forks, and Valley City all asked their congressional representatives to help them petition the air force and secure a base near their community. Most of these cities even sent delegations to Washington to press their cases. When officials in Minot asked Senator Young for his assistance in securing an air base for their city, Young told the representatives that the air force was not considering Minot as a possible location and reiterated his stance of strict neutrality in the site selection. Rumors also persisted that the officials were looking for a site to locate the new air force academy. A number of cities, including Mandan, Minot, Grand Forks, Jamestown, and Devils Lake all sent letters to North Dakota political leaders and to the Department of the Air Force, expressing their desire to

Left: Bismarck Shelters - Officials in North Dakota began marking Fallout Shelters. Coincidently, this photo was taken October 19, 1962, three days before President Kennedy’s announcement. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

Right: Bismarck BOMARC - Air Force BOMARC missile displayed in downtown Bismarck, North Dakota, as part of the “Crazy Days” shopping Initiative in July 1962. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

27

[the cold war]

host the academy, and listed the numerous attributes their locations might have to offer. Communities continued their battle to attract air bases, even though Fargo and Bismarck appeared to have the best chance of securing the bases by expanding their existing facilities. Tension among other cities intensified when Fargo and Bismarck announced that they were having difficulty acquiring the necessary land. Other communities, specifically Grand Forks and Minot, had no such problems, and let officials know their position.

Air force officials announced on June 11, 1954, that they had an obligation to taxpayers to construct the bases at the lowest possible cost. When two or more locations existed within the area of requirement, other factors become important, such as the availability of land at little or no cost. Five days later, air force officials announced that the new bases would be located in Minot and Grand Forks, not Fargo and Bismarck as initially announced. Citizens throughout the state demanded clarification in the disappointment and confusion that followed the announcement. Officials acknowledged that they had originally considered the existing facilities at Fargo and Bismarck, but admitted these sites were only marginally acceptable, as they presented little opportunity for expansion. Additionally, military planners explained that these locations were too far south to engage enemy aircraft effectively, and needed locations farther north. Air force officials maintained that donating land had helped in selecting Minot and Grand Forks, but it was not the overriding factor.

The air force bases with their jet fighters reflected the changing technology of the era, but the missile age brought a new dimension to the Cold War. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the globe in 1957, it terrified American government and military officials. A missile that could launch a satellite into space could also carry a nuclear warhead to the United States. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s claim that the Soviet Union turned out nuclear weapons “like sausages” did little to alleviate these fears. What American planners did not know was that the Soviet Union had only six long-range nuclear missiles even as late as 1959. As Khrushchev’s son Sergei observed, “We threatened with missiles we didn’t have.” Khrushchev’s

bluster led President John F. Kennedy to rally against the “missile gap” that he believed had developed under the Eisenhower administration. Only after taking office did Kennedy learn the truth, the United States was far ahead of the Soviets in long-range missile construction.

Notwithstanding the lack of missiles on the part of the Soviets, the United States proceeded to deploy hundreds of nuclear missiles throughout the Great Plains. North Dakota, often jokingly referred to as the third most powerful nuclear state in the world, became home to 300 missile silos, as Grand Forks and Minot Air Force Bases controlled 150 silos each. The 455th Strategic Missile Wing was operational by April 1964 in Minot, and in Grand Forks, the 321st Strategic Missile Wing was operational by December 1966.

Simply acquiring land for the missile sites was a tremendous undertaking. Officials from the Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Air Force published advertisements in regional newspapers announcing their intent to buy land for the missile sites, and held public meetings to answer questions throughout the state. Once the officials had acquired all of the necessary sites, they began construction. There was no guarantee, however, that the military would build the missile silos near the bases in North Dakota. Senator Milton Young, as one might expect, played a key role in getting the missiles assigned to his state. In fact, in his adopted hometown of LaMoure, North Dakota, a Minuteman missile shell still stands, which the senator dedicated in 1972 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his Senate election.

The United States Air Force was not the only military organization keeping the skies clear of enemy bombers. The North Dakota Air National Guard (NDANG) formed in January 1947, shared this mission. Air force officials were quite skeptical about forming an air guard unit in a sparsely populated state, but the unit grew to appropriate size after officials organized the unit as the 178th Fighter Squadron, with facilities at Hector Field in Fargo. The decision to form the unit in Fargo was not without debate, however, as Grand Forks, Jamestown, Minot, Devils Lake, and Wahpeton all requested the fighter squadron. Jamestown, adamant in its desire for the fighter squadron, refused to make commitments to any other national guard unit until officials

North Dakota, often jokingly, was referred to as the third most powerful nuclear state in the world...

28

[the cold war]

decided where the flight unit would go. Air force officials settled the debate, insisting on Fargo because of the excellent facilities there.

The unit received its first “real world” mission within a few months of activation. The winter of 1948-49 was particularly hazardous, when North Dakota suffered one of the worst blizzards in history. Snow blocked the roads, isolating farms and towns, and Governor Fred Aandahl activated the NDANG to provide relief. The effort, known as Operation Haylift, primarily involved dropping hay bales to isolated livestock and providing food and supplies to stranded farms. The NDANG used C-47 transport aircraft to deliver more than 8,000 hay bales to suffering livestock over a thirty-one-day period. The situation was so desperate that the North Dakota governor asked the neighboring states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa to bring their C-47s to North Dakota and help with the effort. The Canadian Air Force even helped in the effort. An “airlift” of volunteer civilian aircraft began dropping supplies to stranded towns throughout the west and northern plains, or parachuting more delicate supplies such as units of blood plasma where needed. Twenty small airplanes outfitted with skis enabled pilots to land and evacuate ill citizens. At other times, the pilots flew reconnaissance missions, to find livestock or to drop supplies to needy ranchers. Several pilots crashed and died for a variety of reasons, generally due to poor visibility. Major Donald C. Jones, the commanding officer of the NDANG, died when his F-51 fighter crashed while seeking out those in distress.

This event played out in North Dakota at the same time the United States and other allied nations used C-47s and other aircraft to bring food and supplies into Berlin in the international crisis known as the Berlin Airlift, when Stalin closed all routes into the city. Each volunteer pilot on the northern plains could identify with the pilots providing the lifeline to the residents of Berlin, and the comparisons between the Berlin Airlift and the North Dakota Haylift were unavoidable. As in Europe, flight crews came from different countries, with different type aircraft, but with the same mission.

The NDANG received an air defense role in 1954, and turned in their F-51s because of this new mission, receiving instead T-33 jet trainers, then F-94 fighter interceptors. The NDANG was responsible for defending American skies from Duluth, Minnesota, to Great Falls, Montana, and continued to receive the latest jet aircraft throughout the Cold War. Most remember this unit by its nickname, the “Happy Hooligans.” It came about after Lieutenant

Colonel (later Brigadier General) Duane S. “Pappy” Larson took command of the 178th in the 1960s. Members of the unit joined his nickname “Pappy” with a popular comic book character “Happy Easter,” whose own band of men were called the Hooligans. The result became the “Happy Hooligans,” which denotes the unit to this day.

As technology changed the face of warfare, the missile age presented a number of problems for United States forces. While having missiles for offensive means reassured military planners, the threat of numerous incoming nuclear missiles accounted for the many sleepless nights for citizens around the country. The Soviet Union and China were closed societies, with little opportunity for American planners to ascertain the exact numbers of missiles each country held, but estimates suggested a Communist attack could devastate the United States. The answer was the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex that housed an antiballistic missile system to knock Soviet or Chinese missiles from the skies. Congress authorized the construction of such a site in northern North Dakota that used radar to detect incoming missiles. Once identified, the system launched its own nuclear missiles against the inbound ones.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, a period of relaxation of Cold War hostility took hold in both the United States and the Soviet Union, until the Cold War ended with the restructuring of the Soviet Union in 1989. Looking back, the Cold War had two major implications for North Dakota; it provided a strategic location for a number of military facilities and demonstrated the resolve of citizens to protect their state and nation in their own way. Citizens there embraced the programs that fostered patriotic feelings, but avoided ones that promoted trouble. Military bases provided an economic stimulus for the state, allowing citizens to abandon their dependency on eastern interests and guard their own interests. Though the Cold War demanded great sacrifice, North Dakotans benefitted from the experience.

Dave Mills grew up in Maryland, received his bachelor’s degree from Frostburg State University, then served in the U.S. Army for fourteen years. He settled down in Minnesota, received his Ph.D. from North Dakota State University, and currently teaches at Minnesota West Community College. He is working with a publisher to bring out his book, Cold War in a Cold Land: Fighting Communism on the Northern Great Plains, which explores the Cold War in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana.

29

[the cold war]

Above: The Missile Site Radar, Nekoma, ND. © Maxime BrouilletRight: The exhaust stacks for the underground power plant. © Maxime Brouillet

30

[the cold war]

AFTER SAFEGUARDBy Marcel LaFlamme

I was seven years old when the Berlin Wall came down. I can still remember my father in his armchair, glued to the television screen. Restless, a little bored, I started up the stairs to my room, and he called me back: “No, you should see this. I know you don’t understand what you’re seeing right now, but someday you will, and you’ll be glad you saw it with your own eyes.”

What does it mean to watch the world change, to look on as a geopolitical order that has held sway for almost half a century begins to come unraveled? What does it mean to experience it through the hazy filter of childhood, as I did, or in history books, as do high school students today who have never lived in a world in which there was a Soviet Union? I still have a map tacked up on the wall at my parents’ house, the orange expanse of the USSR stretching from the Baltic Sea to the eastern edge of Siberia. But these days, more than twenty years after the Cold War ended and that map became obsolete, I am trying to locate myself within this history, to understand the claims that it makes on me and on the world that I have inherited.

My dissertation research on unmanned aviation brought me to North Dakota, a state that largely saw the Cold War, in historian David Mills’s argument, as an opportunity rather than a threat. While other parts of the United States balked at the arrival of military bases and missile fields, Mills’s forthcoming book shows that civic leaders in Fargo, Grand Forks, Bismarck, and Minot all vied for the federal dollars that would accompany these facilities—even though their arrival meant putting North Dakota in the crosshairs of a nuclear attack.

To defend against such an attack, Congress authorized the construction of the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, an antiballistic missile installation built in the rural northeast corner of the state. Originally one of twelve sites to be built across the country, the Safeguard Complex in North Dakota was the only one to be completed after treaties signed in the early 1970s limited the proliferation of missile defense technology. The Missile Site Radar in Nekoma, with its signature concrete pyramid and its arsenal of Sprint and Spartan missiles, achieved full operational status on September 28, 1975. Four days later, in response to concerns about the system’s effectiveness and cost, the House of Representatives voted to deactivate it.

The photographs and interviews excerpted in this article are part of an ethnographic exhibition, staged in Cavalier County in November and December 2012, that documented the missile years and their aftermath in the small towns adjoining the Safeguard Complex. The construction of the site brought federal infrastructure investment and hundreds of new jobs to farming communities like Langdon, Nekoma, and Osnabrock, in a development boom that many current residents liken to the Oil Patch. Yet the site’s abrupt closure points to the ambivalent promise of development and the disruption it can leave in its wake. School enrollments plunged and businesses closed after the site went dark, and Cavalier County lost almost 40 percent of its population over the next two decades. “We were going to be different,” the former postmaster told me, “We were going to be a larger city.” This gap between what could have been and what is defines, at least in part, what it means to live even now in Safeguard’s shadow.

31

[the cold war]

Contradictions abound. In interviews some say that the site personnel were welcomed into the community with open arms, while others confess that no one ever quite forgot who the missile people were. For Joan, the closing of the site was a relief, signaling a return to normalcy. For Nancy: “It was a sad time, after they said they were pulling the plug. It just tears you up. Because you feel like you own the darn thing sitting up there, like it’s yours.” Other incongruities are striking only to the outsider. In the middle of Langdon’s City Park, a leftover Spartan missile thrusts its way toward the sky. The kids at the nearby day care center like to hide between its tail fins.

Construction at Nekoma began in 1970, and the first wave of workers to arrive found housing wherever they could: in rented rooms, or in the new trailer park west of town. The manager of the rural electric cooperative remembers running wire out to old farmsteads that had been disconnected for years. Local farmers housed workers and enlisted them to help out with the farmwork, but they also hired on at the site to supplement their own incomes. “They were good jobs,” Carl recalls. “In ’70 or ’71, I don’t know what your minimum wage was, it was probably $1.30 or something. I know when I started working out there, it was $4.40 an hour and $1 an hour sub. Big money.” Some of that money got sent home to families or socked away as seed capital, but plenty of it also changed hands on rowdy weekend nights in downtown Langdon: ironworkers were known to gamble with the check number on their paystubs, and crowds of men would wander in and out of bars like the notorious Snake Pit.

The tone shifts, in a way that’s unmistakably tied to class, when conversation turns to the second wave of new arrivals: army officers and defense contractors from firms like Raytheon and Martin Marietta, many with their families in tow. These career professionals lived in base housing

...you feel like you own the darn thing sitting up there, like it’s yours.

Left: The exhaust stacks for the underground power plant. © Maxime BrouilletRight: What’s green and what’s bare. © Maxime Brouillet

32

[the cold war]

out at the Safeguard site, where amenities from a beauty salon to a bowling alley had been added to meet their daily needs. An invitation to an event at the officers’ club became a mark of social distinction for civilians in town, who would often chuckle about the strange notions held by their new neighbors. Ruth remembers a Christmas party at which she realized that all of the missile wives were wearing long johns under their evening gowns. The North Dakota winters called for other adjustments, too: underground sensors along the patrol road would get triggered by the weight of the snow, and the military police would have to hurry out to make sure that there was no intruder. Despite these misunderstandings, friendships were formed and relationships kindled between local residents and the more recent arrivals. As Diane put it: “The missiles brought me here, but it was love that kept me here.”

Living in post-9/11 America means knowing a thing or two about how fear can leach into everyday life: the color-coded threat levels rising and falling, the impassive gaze of the TSA agent, the heightened scrutiny on anyone brown or, God forbid, Muslim. Yet what might be hardest for me to understand about life in Cavalier County during the missile years is the specter of nuclear war, made imminent in the built environment. How could you spot the pyramid on the horizon or drive by the remote Sprint site off Highway 5 and not think about the warheads glowing in their silos, ready to be launched on fifteen minutes’ notice? “Well, that was Dad’s job,” Nancy explained, “and so you didn’t worry about it. You just had faith that the defenses were going to work. If anything happened, it was going to be way outside, out there in the atmosphere. You just, you can’t worry about things like that.” There were some, of course, who did worry, including the student protesters that descended on Nekoma as construction was beginning in May 1970. Yet locals shied away from involvement with the protest, despite (or perhaps because of) their direct experience of the arms race.

Some say that it came as a shock; others insist that they saw it coming. Regardless, the closure of the Safeguard Complex marked the end of an era in Cavalier County. “Things went on,” Carl told me, haltingly. “But it was a lot less people around here then.” The contractors moved on to their next assignments, the trailer courts were dismantled, and salvage crews showed up at the site to strip out what they could. Then, for fifteen years, the Safeguard Complex sat empty. The current caretaker remembers how eerie it was to walk through the abandoned buildings for the first time in 1991: “It was just like somebody hollered ‘run.’” The buildings, today, are in reasonably good repair, and this past December the site was sold for $530,000 to an unknown bidder. Part of me, naturally, wants to see someone breathe new life into the place, to create some jobs that would retain the area’s young people and diversify the local economy. But another part of me is fascinated by the Safeguard Complex as a ruin, as a materialization of the death drive that brought our civilization to the brink of destroying itself. The peeling wallpaper, the overgrown creek, the wind whistling in my ears out on the missile field: all of these have made the Cold War more real to me than those flickering images of the Berlin Wall ever could.

For Cavalier County, the takeaway may be different. Anthropologist Catherine Lutz has called into question the assumption that military

installations are an economic boon for their host communities, while her colleague David Vine has pointed to the destabilizing effects of the more than 1,000 bases that the United States presently maintains overseas. Indeed, here in North Dakota, it wasn’t just hippies who opposed the construction of the Safeguard Complex: Governor William Guy and Senator Quentin Burdick were on record as opposing it, too. None of this is meant to detract from the patriotism and ingenuity of those who built the Safeguard site, or of those who serve in uniform today. But it is to put pressure on the uneasy relationship between global militarism and local prosperity, and to ask how sustainable development can be when the key decisions are being made half a continent away. As Cavalier County wrestles with the legacy of the Cold War, as its residents debate what comes after Safeguard, these are questions that will be impossible to avoid.

*Following anthropological convention, interviewees in

this article are identified with pseudonyms.

Marcel LaFlamme is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Before embarking on his doctoral studies, he served as the library director for a rural community college in southeast Kansas. He will be moving to Grand Forks in May to begin his dissertation research on unmanned aircraft testing and training.

Neil (“Buzzy”) Holmen, longtime caretaker of the Nekoma site. © Maxime Brouillet

33

[plain thinking]

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?There is a growing clamor around the country to induce students to study “STEM” subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Along with that clamor usually goes a devaluation of humanities subjects such as English literature, history and philosophy. “Why study those? They don’t enable graduates to find well paying jobs.” The arts get similarly short shrift. At the same time we hear a clamor for people capable of “critical thinking” and for people who can communicate well, both orally and in writing.

There is an inherent contradiction in wanting the country to create people competent in science and math and demanding that students be equipped with critical thinking skills on the one hand and devaluing the humanities on the other. In this essay we explore some of the ramifications of this contradiction.

The great majority of the 200 people enrolled in my general biochemistry course cannot write a coherent paragraph, and a significant fraction cannot write consistently grammatical sentences. What appears over and over in essay answers is a stringing together of words whose meanings are in the general area of the question but which make no sense in the question’s context. It’s as if the student had no idea of how to frame a direct response to the question and so dredged up from memory any words or phrases which might conceivably earn a few points. We also encounter run-on sentences, lack of or incorrect punctuation, random capitalization or none, incorrect word usage, a list which could go on. Colleagues who teach related courses at my own university and across the country report the same problems.

All the students in general biochemistry have passed two years of chemistry, the second of which, Organic Chemistry, they must pass with grades of C or better. What is more, by the time they take the course, nearly all have passed a year of calculus, a year of biology, a year of physics and a semester of genetics. They will also have taken two semesters of English composition (!), so although the class is large, it is a selected group consisting of third- and fourth-year undergraduates and a scattering of graduate students. In spite of all this background, the average level of written work is atrocious.

The best students, a small and unchanging percentage of the total, are as good as the best students anywhere and as good as the best have ever been. They handle writing well, and they include a fair number for whom English is a second or third language. I think they succeed in spite of the educational system, not because of it. However, it is the great majority with whom we are concerned here.

By and large, the students are not lazy, although there are

always some of those around. The majority work hard. A great many of them, though, don’t know how to study. They cram for a few days before an exam. They cobble lab reports and papers together close to the due date. Their academic work is a series of looming deadlines, and they rush from one to the next. There is an expectation that problems on exams will follow templates which have already been encountered and that what needs to be done is to use different numbers or give back learned material. Should a computational problem or an essay question require pulling disparate material together in a way they have not seen, they are lost.

Most biochemistry students have the intellectual horsepower to handle the subject. They are accustomed to getting good grades in their lower level courses by dint of memorization, so they learn to do that. Literally dozens of students come to my office during the year because they are concerned about their grades, having done well in earlier courses but coming up with 30 percent to 50 percent on general biochemistry exams. Some are stunned. Although I spend a lot of time with individual students coaching them on how to study productively over a long period of time without having to cram, that is not the main source of the problem. Neither is the fact that they are overburdened with too many academic requirements or that they may be working many hours a week to cover their college expenses.

When students tell me they are having trouble because they are not good at math or at chemistry, they are describing symptoms, not causes. A large part of the problem is that they see science and mathematics as combinations of facts to be absorbed, procedures to be mastered and the like. These are presented in a linear fashion, one item following another, all having been worked out in advance and presented in a 1,000-page textbook.

When I tell them that the course is the lectures and the text is an adjunct to the lectures, the majority don’t absorb that statement. In most of their prior courses, if they master the text—organic chemistry reactions, calculus and physics formulas, biology classifications, etc.—they earn grades of A. No one can do that in biochemistry. There is too much, and the attempt to master all of it means the main ideas will be lost in a sea of apparently unrelated details, which will themselves soon be forgotten, as the student will have no mental framework on which to hang them. What is more, the linear presentation in textbooks is deceptive. Everything in biochemistry is related to everything else in a complex, multilayered web; that’s the way living cells are made and the way they operate. That complexity may be why so many students seem baffled when they encounter the subject.

34

[plain thinking]

The critical thinking skills that would enable them to sort out what is important from what is less so are absent. I advise the class repeatedly to write short essays detailing what they think they understand and to give those essays to a classmate. If the classmate understands what you are trying to say, then you understand it, and if not, then you don’t; it is an acid test. Some people do this and report that it helps, but it takes considerable effort, and many find it daunting.

All these problems are burdensome and contribute to the difficulty in focusing intensely on the work at hand. They are the background to what I see as the core problem. The inability to write clearly usually reflects an inability to think clearly, and one who cannot think clearly about essay questions on biochemistry exams in spite of having the appropriate formal background is unlikely to think clearly about much else, and that applies to every subject, not just biochemistry.

HOW MIGHT IT BE SOLVED?The linear nature of the text is deceptive as is the fact that there is too much to master in a single year. A large part of the problem is that the

ideas and facts are all parts of an interlocking, complex web; every part is related in some way to every other. That’s the way living cells are. We study how enzymes work. They are “nature’s robots,” which is the title of Charles Tanford’s and Jaqueline Reynolds’s history of protein chemistry (Oxford University Press, 2003). These biochemical robots are specialized machines that make cellular components, including other enzymes, DNA, and everything else. The code in the DNA specifies the detailed nature of the enzymes which make the DNA and the detailed nature of the other materials—certain proteins and RNAs—that control which part of the DNA is active at any given time. Complexity is the soul of the subject.

Doesn’t this sound like a description of a history text or a history survey course? The material is presented in a linear fashion. But history is not a linear sequence of events. The essence is the interplay among broad historical forces, the character of individual people, technological and institutional developments, economics and a dose of pure happenstance, which is often called contingency. All these play back onto one another; historical circumstance contributes to the formation of individual character, and the actions and characters of individual people form historical circumstances. Complexity is the soul of the subject.

The arc of a novel is often linear, and we read from page one to the end.

ON WRITING AND THINKING IN

SCIENCEBy Peter Kahn

Cellulase Chomper by Arwa Abbas. This drawing deliberately conveys scientifically important ideas. Beautiful art is useful for instruction as well as of value in and of itself, and the analogies deepen understanding.

35

[plain thinking]

The interplay among characters, the development and change in character brought about by the plot is, in the best of novels, highly complex, and re-reading often enriches us, as we see aspects we had not seen before. Here, too, complexity is the soul of the subject.

We who do science are storytellers of a kind. We put together stories derived from the facts of experimental or theoretical work. Our ability to persuade some and to fascinate others, including the general public, depends on our ability to tell the stories. If we cannot tell the story, we cannot convince. Literature is as important to that skill as the laboratory.

It is not for nothing that what we call science was once called natural philosophy. In fact, science is a humanity. Research has at least as much in common with poetry as with engineering, and engineering itself has poetry in it, as anyone who has looked carefully at a suspension bridge will realize. From a humanities point of view the laws of thermodynamics, the structures of enzymes and DNA, and the interconnected web of metabolic pathways and their controls have the same beauty as a Rembrandt painting, a point which most people in the humanities don’t get, as their knowledge of science is so thin. There is work to be done there.

Why are so many students not just in my courses but throughout the country in this situation? Learning to write clearly trains the mind to think clearly. It is a learnable skill like learning to ride a bicycle. Most people of average intelligence can learn it with enough of the right kind of effort and, especially, guidance. A vocabulary of good size is required. The words are the bricks of which the edifice of writing is built. It is not enough, though, to learn words as one does in order to do well on the SAT test, for that preparation gives but one or a few of the meanings of many words. One needs to grasp the

many often subtly different meanings, and that requires extensive reading to understand context and lots of writing which is examined by a trained instructor who directs the student in rewriting over and over again. It almost doesn’t matter what the student reads or writes about. The skills are immediately transferable. What is more, the skill of writing and therefore of thinking clearly carries the additional benefit of enabling one to speak coherently to others one-on-one or to groups about what one understands.

How does one learn to tell stories that can convey complexity without getting lost? The only way I know is to have read a lot of “stories,” both fictional and not, to have discussed them in depth with other people, and to have written about them, receiving criticism and suggestions to improve the analysis and the writing. The study of the humanities is where this is done. I recognize that giving large numbers of students the necessary feedback so they can resubmit improved work is expensive. Trained people would have to read and analyze their material and be available for discussion. There is no other way for students to learn the habits of mind we call critical thinking or to learn what openness to new ideas and to the unexpected actually mean. It becomes a question of how do we as a nation want to spend our money?

Parts of academia are beginning to address the problems. There are mathematics and physics departments I know of which require essays. Imagine that: essays explaining a proof in mathematics or why a particular problem has a given solution in physics! This is certainly a step in the right direction. In fact, mathematical equations are actually statements which relate one or several quantities to one another and behind which are often assumptions. It is a useful exercise for a student to write out in words what an equation actually says, including any assumptions. A short mathematical relationship may well take several

paragraphs or a page or two. The same is true of the biochemical pathways which describe the replication of DNA or a metabolic pathway and its controls.

The more of this the better. It is a step in the right direction, but it is only a step; there is no silver bullet. By the time an eighteen-year-old enters college it has become hard, though not impossible, to change the habit of not reading and the feeling that reading is always a chore rather than a potential source of pleasure. I would wager that few people become competent writers who do not read for pleasure. It does not matter whether they read actual books or read the same material on an electronic reader. Pleasure must come from the encounter with well-written prose or poetry. Everything learned in these ways is immediately transferable to the practice of science and to science education and, for that matter, to anything else.

I am not an expert in teaching the humanities. I’m aware that considerable work has been done on teaching young people to enjoy reading. Coupling that to extensive writing will complete the loop.

WHAT WILL BE THE CONSEqUENCES OF NOT SOLVING IT?The quotations below come from a paper by Michael S. Roth which appeared on the op-ed page of the online edition of the New York Times on September 5, 2012, and in the print edition on the following day.

We face “critics who see higher education as outmoded. Conservative scholars … ask why people destined for low-paying jobs should bother to pursue their education beyond high school, much less study philosophy, literature and history….”

“This critique may be new, but the call for a more narrowly tailored education—especially for Americans with limited economic prospects—is not. A century ago, organizations as varied as chambers

36

[plain thinking]

of commerce and labor federations backed plans for a dual system of teaching, wherein some students would be trained for specific occupations, while others would get a broad education allowing them to continue their studies in college.”

“… John Dewey, America’s most influential thinker on education, opposed this effort. Though he was open to integrating manual training in school curriculums, Dewey opposed the dual-track system because he recognized that it would reinforce the inequalities of his time. Wouldn’t such a system have the same result today?”

“… Dewey had a different vision. Given the pace of change, it is impossible (he noted in 1897) to know what the world will be like in a couple of decades, so schools first and foremost should teach us habits of learning.”

This sounds like some current critiques which are the opposite of the narrowing vision of the conservative one.

[We dare not] “neglect Dewey’s insight that learning in the process of living is the deepest form of freedom. In a nation that aspires to democracy, that’s what education is primarily for: the cultivation of freedom within society. We should not think of schools as garrisons protecting us from enemies, nor as industries generating human capital. Rather, higher education’s highest purpose is to give all citizens the opportunity to find ‘large and human significance’ in their lives and work.”

Here is the crux of the matter. Dewey’s arguments—and Roth’s—apply not only to higher education but to all levels from primary school up. The conservative argument is a convenient justification for cutting school budgets. Much of the public discussion of school reform takes a utilitarian approach: teach people enough reading and math so they can get jobs. We certainly do need ways to evaluate teachers and

to remove those who are ineffective, but the actual policies of demonizing teachers while reducing resources have the effect of weakening what teaching is done. It also makes the teaching profession unattractive to smart people who might otherwise want to enter it.

Teaching, beginning in elementary schools, should be a high-status profession. Teachers should have the time and resources, including limited class size, to encourage student discussion and to assign and correct significant writing. To make better scientists, we need teachers who can write well and can cultivate good writing and who have and can cultivate an appreciation of complexity.

At best, however, current approaches produce people trained for limited lives. We can train a robot or a monkey, but we cannot educate one. Our polity and our economy need educated people, not robots or monkeys who will easily become out of date. People whose educations have not equipped them for clear thinking become fearful. Fear of the unexpected and a lack of openness to new ideas take hold. They become susceptible to the blandishments of those who would use the fear for their own ends. The “cultivation of freedom within society” is the antithesis of this.

The ultimate consequence of separating science and the humanities will be grim indeed if we teach science as memorization and neglect to cultivate the appreciation of complexity that studying the humanities can foster: elementary technical competence without thoughtfulness on one side and scientific ignorance on the other. That ignorance leads many business and political people to have a purely utilitarian view of science. What will it do for the bottom line within the next year or two? Hence the push for translational research to commercialize findings at the expense of the basic research which is the goose that lays the golden eggs.

AND IF WE DO?Not everyone, obviously, will become a writer or a storyteller. Once writing has served to teach clear thinking it will have served its purpose for most people. Not only will many take pleasure in reading, but they will also be able to read between the lines and know when someone is trying to put one over on them. They will also know a good deal more about the world. It will then become harder for those who would take advantage of them for personal or political ends to deceive them. It would become easier for people to find the common ground needed to meet human needs. Imagine what it would be like if huge numbers of people insisted that our crumbling infrastructure were to be rebuilt, if our parks were to be refurbished and expanded, if crumbling schools were to be rebuilt. Imagine what it would be like if lifelong learning and adaptation were a significant activity in every city and town. Imagine the effect on children of seeing many of the adults around them thus engaged.

Despair is easy, and the litany of complaints of our leaders that we are broke and helpless feeds that despair, so people find it hard to have a different vision. But a different vision is possible, and we are not broke. The steps to be taken, some of which are outlined above can be started now with resources that can be mustered now. No leader will do this for us. We will have to do it for ourselves from the ground up, and we can.

Peter Kahn is professor of biochemistry at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he teaches biochemistry courses and does research in protein biochemistry and biophysics. He is also working with a group to develop agricultural research stations all around the world devoted to developing perennial plants as food for humans and livestock and to reclaim damaged land. He and his wife have two married daughters and four grandchildren, and he is a part-time woodworker.

37

[plain thinking]

LAKOTA LANGUAGE NEST, AN IMMERSION SCHOOLREVIVING A LANGUAGE ON THE EDGE OF ExTINCTIONBy Dakota Goodhouse

It is the heart of winter on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. Gleaming white snow

blankets the landscape, the Missouri River has turned to

ice, and the crisp cold air somehow makes every sound

sharper—the peal of a bell seems to carry an impossible

distance from town—but the sounds of children playing,

laughing and singing warms everything. The children are in preschool, ages three to four. Their high-pitched play echoes down the hall when their door opens. The pitch of little voices sounds like what one would hear in any other early child care service across the state, but listen closer and it becomes obvious that this isn’t like any other day care service. The children speak a mix of English and Lakota among themselves, but the teachers strictly speak only Lakota in the classroom. This preschool is called Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi, the Lakota Language Nest. It is an immersion school still in its first year of practice and based on the language nest model designed by the Maori people in New Zealand. The language nest was established to raise language loss awareness on the reservation and to raise up a new generation of first-language Lakota speakers. The language nest is one part of the Lakota Language Education Action Program (LLEAP) designed for students to go to college and pursue language studies. Students who are in the program are given financial aid to learn Lakota and gain proficiency in the language with the caveat that LLEAP participants must teach the language. Many of the nest’s learners have parents participating in LLEAP at Sitting Bull College.

Tipiziwin Young, a second-language teacher in the Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi program, estimates that there are about 200 fluent Lakota speakers left on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. “A few years back, I was facetious with Jan Ullrich about who I am and where I’m from when he said to me, ‘Your language will die.’ He didn’t say it to be mean. He said it to be real. I was moved to silence. I was provoked. The loss of my language motivated me to learn it.” Young is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, born and raised on the reservation, and a mother to three children. “I teach here, then go home and stay in Lakota for my children to learn.” A little boy with a mop of brown hair approaches me. In a quiet unassuming voice he introduces himself to me. Thinking to obey the rule of the classroom, I go down on one knee and respond, “Hau. Dakota émaĥčiyapi lo.” I gesture to him, an open palm when I greet him, then gesture to my heart. I place my right fist above my left fist over my heart, then gesture with my right hand–index finger—to my mouth when I say my name. I’ve seen few others use the Plains Indian sign and gesture language and the signs I made were for “my” or “mine” and for “name.” I don’t know that this little one has seen the old sign and gesture but he nods his head and smiles. Sacheen Whitetail-Cross, Project Director of LLEAP and the Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi at Sitting Bull College, is preparing an activity with rice for the children. For Whitetail-Cross the greatest challenge with the language nest has been to “stay” in Lakota. “I spent a week in Washington DC, speaking nothing but English. When I came back to the classroom, during an activity, I asked a couple of the children, ‘What are you doing?’ in English. They were as shocked as I was.”

38

[plain thinking]

39

[plain thinking]

One observation that Whitetail-Cross shared about the children of the language nest is that they are showing ownership of Lakota. At a recent program, they heard a Lakota speaker, and many of them told Whitetail-Cross, “That’s my language.” Tom Red Bird, the first-language teacher on staff at the Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi, approaches a group of little boys near the window. One mischievous boy stands on a heater behind the short bookcase which was put next to the window. “Héčé šni! [Don’t do that!]” Red Bird says and gestures to the boy to get down. The boy casually climbs down as though he were going to get down anyway and rejoins the other boys. Perhaps an indication of how comfortable the children are in use of Lakota is in their own little conversations. Two of the children, a boy and a girl, are playing with Legos. They began to argue over a few choice bricks in their construction. The boy wants a brick that the girl is already using. As he reaches for it he says in English, “That’s mine!” She retorts in Lakota, “Šni! Šni! Héčé šni! No, don’t do that!” and keeps her brick. A father steps into the classroom. Chase Iron Eyes is his name. His daughter Azilya (4) is among the nest participants. “I heard of this program through community members,” says Iron Eyes, “My wife and I were immediately drawn to it. We wanted her to have this opportunity.” Iron Eyes commutes each week day from Bismarck, ND. “She’s not a morning baby. She fights every morning.” He believes the effort is worth the struggle. Iron Eyes relates to me that Azilya experienced culture shock for the first two weeks then she started to like it and began to speak Lakota at home. Azilya’s older siblings have begun asking their sister and father how to say things in Lakota, and she corrects her father’s Lakota grammar. Iron Eyes doesn’t believe that language revitalization today equals a renaissance. “It’s something that’s been building up now since the 1960s and ‘70s,” he points out. “Native activists were and are proponents of language practice. It’s not a renaissance because you live it.” Iron Eyes is active with the community and engaged as a parent in the Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi program. The children in the Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi are getting to be good speakers. “Their American accent is going away,” says Red Bird. They hold hands and pray before lunch. Little hands clasped in little hands. When the prayer of thanksgiving, the Wota Wačéki, is finished the children say together in unison, “Mitakuyé Oyasiŋ,” the traditional way the Lakota conclude prayers meaning “All My Relatives.” During lunch one of the little boys stops eating and spontaneously breaks into song, singing in the Lakota language. After the parents have picked up their children, Red Bird

deeply breathes what sounds like a sigh of satisfaction. The only relief he shares is that the language is spoken again daily. “I like it,” Red Bird says in English. “I get to speak my language all day. It feels good.” Red Bird is originally from the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation, and had taught Lakota at United Tribes Technical College for several years. “Our Lakota people get lonesome to be home or go home, and language is part of that. That’s where our heart is. I go home to get reenergized.” Red Bird has hopes for the children, the tȟakóža, as he refers to them. “If this keeps going, maybe in ten years we’ll have a new group of Lakota speakers who speak the language correctly.” Red Bird is a great-grandfather and he speaks only Lakota to his great-grandson. His optimism for what can only be called a language revival pours out of him, “We have a culture and tradition, our spirituality, a land base, and our relationship with all of those is best expressed with words found only in our language. It is a sacred language.” Whitetail-Cross’s hopes for language revival echoes Red Bird’s, but her optimism is laced with concerns for the program: “Funding is an issue.” The Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi program received funding from an Administration of Native Americans grant for three years. The first year of programming consisted of developing preschool curriculum, training for language educators, and classroom startup. The Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi is in its second year of funding, its first year of operation. The North Dakota Humanities Council recently awarded a $10,000 grant to the Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi program to assist the program with publication of language materials, but it’s not enough. Both Whitetail-Cross and Red Bird have expressed the dire need for age-appropriate language materials. There isn’t much published. Once a week, Red Bird will take a children’s book, translate the text, and then read the story to the children. Having extra copies of Red Bird’s translations for parents to take home and read with their children would help to reinforce that day’s language lesson. “We desperately need more language materials,” Red Bird said. Jan Ullrich, linguistic director of the Lakota Language Consortium, shares Red Bird’s concern for speaking the Lakota language correctly. Ullrich has had a hand in the development

Azilya’s older siblings have begun asking their sister and father how to

say things in Lakota, and she corrects her father’s

Lakota grammar.

40

of a standard Lakota orthography for the New Lakota Dictionary. We converse on Skype getting to know a little of one another before business. Ullrich is from the Czech Republic. As a little boy he admired the survival story of the American Indian. In 1992, he traveled to the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation and made friends with the Fire Thunder and Looking Horse families and came to learn Lakota. Ullrich sends me the letters t, o, k and a. He then asks me to pronounce what he’s spelled. I reply TOH-kah which can mean “enemy,” then follow up with toh-KAH which can mean “first.” Ullrich then sends me the texts Tĥoka and Tĥoká. The accent marks take a moment to get used to, but the new standard orthography he employs has me pronouncing Lakota correctly when I read it. Ullrich’s standard orthography isn’t embraced by all Lakota speakers, nor is it the first effort at standard orthgraphy, he admits. Sometime back, a Lakota man named Curly from the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation, developed a thirty-six character alphabet. The main drawback with this alphabet for modern Lakota speakers is that it involves learning and remembering entirely new symbols. The new standard orthography makes use of the modern keyboard and letters with sounds Lakota students learned with English; the only additions are marks for accent, aspirants, glottal sounds, and glottal stops. “Missionaries did a good job of starting the process ofrecording the language,” explains Ullrich, “But they ‘invented’ new words in the interest of literal word for word translation, rather than translation of concept for concept.” Thousands of entries in the Buechel and Riggs dictionaries should be carefully and critically examined, according to Ullrich. These dictionaries should also be praised for bringing the Lakota and Dakota languages to the general public’s attention. Ullrich recently joined the Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi via Skype to encourage the young learners and to offer courage to the language teachers. Like Red Bird, Ullrich believes that the key to language revitalization is learning consistently and accurately.

Young gathers the children together in a circle on a soft blue carpet. A couple of the children take their time in getting to the circle. Young raises her voice a little, “Inaĥni!” she says. “Hurry!” I know the word well from my own childhood and it becomes obvious that these young ones do too. “Iyotake, iyotake,” Young commands with the strong confidence that mothers everywhere instinctively possess. “Sit down, sit down,” and they do so without argument. She takes out a pen and paper and quickly draws a series of faces with a variety of expressions. The children respond somewhat in unison, “Iyokipiya!” “Wačiŋko!” Happy! Sad! The children tell her in Lakota what faces to draw next and she obliges. When they finish this exercise, they even take time to sing happy birthday to two of the boys, “Aŋpétu tuŋpi,” Young begins, and the tȟakóža sing following her cues. It is to the popular tune “Good morning to all” which was popularly appropriated to the Happy Birthday song, and it’s a close translation in Lakota, The day you were born. Little voices singing in Lakota continue to echo in my mind when I leave the Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi, the Lakota Language Nest. It was spoken every day in the days of warriors and legend. It was spoken every day when the reservations were established. Somehow along the way between then and now, the language began to die. Some speakers were scarred from their experiences in learning English during the boarding school days. Some left the reservation and never returned; their children and grandchildren grew up speaking only English. Schools on the reservation teach only in English. Lakota became a language for church or special occasion. These tȟakóža speak the language in fun, in play, in prayer, and even in arguments. They can express themselves and articulate their feelings accurately through the knowledge of two languages. Perhaps English has too many words. There is a word for everything, a noun. It’s a language of things. Lakota is a language of description and relation, and that’s just what we need these days.

41

We have ways of making you think.Board of DirectorsCHAIRTayo “Jay” Basquiat, Mandan

VICE CHAIRKate Haugen, Fargo

Najla Amundson, FargoBarbara Andrist, CrosbyAaron Barth, FargoVirginia Dambach, FargoTim Flakoll, FargoKara Geiger, MandanMelissa Gjellstad, Grand ForksKristin Hedger, KilldeerJanelle Masters, MandanChristopher Rausch, BismarckJaclynn Davis Wallette, West FargoSusan Wefald, Bismarck

STAFFBrenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Executive DirectorKenneth Glass, Associate DirectorDakota Goodhouse, Program OfficerAngela Hruby, Administrative Assistant

The North Dakota Humanities Council is a partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The humanities inspire our vision of a thoughtful, respectful, actively engaged society that will be able to meet the challenge of sustaining our democracy across the many divisions of modern society and deal responsibly with the shared challenges we currently face as members of an interdependent world.

North Dakota Humanities Council418 E. Broadway, Suite 8Bismarck, ND 58501

[email protected]

ndhumanities.org

“History is a relentless matter. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.”— John F. Kennedy

42

Documents

Yesterday's War Today