Beside a snowy, ribbon-like highway in Western Minnesota, a small pack of horseback riders moves together through the biting cold of late December, bracing against a blast of arctic air.
They are headed to Mankato, a small city in Southeastern Minnesota, where the largest mass execution in U.S. history occurred in 1862. That year, President Abraham Lincoln signed off on the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men in the aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Two more Dakota chiefs were kidnapped and tried in 1864, and hanged the following year.
Every year since 2008, descendants of the forty executed Dakota men have made the trek on horseback from South Dakota, where their surviving ancestors were exiled by the U.S. government. Many of their ancestors died in Minnesota, at a concentration camp at Fort Snelling, before they could be forced to march, in the middle of winter, to a reservation in South Dakota.
Minneapolis-based photographer Ben Hovland and Minnesota Public Radio reporter Hannah Yang accompanied the group on its latest 330-mile journey across the frozen fields of South Dakota and Minnesota, capturing the spirit of survival and healing that seems as present as the snow and ice.
Hovland’s pictures are striking, painting the colorful riders against a bright blue December sky and capturing pre-ride scenes of a community joining together.
In one photo, the low winter sun hangs just above the curve of the neck of a horse in mid-gallop. In another, members of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe join in a circle around a large drum to send the riders on their journey with a ceremony that includes an offering of tobacco.
The future of this memorial ride is uncertain, Yang notes, as the elders who have been leading it have indicated that 2022 was their last year at the helm, although many expressed hope that younger people would keep it going.
For those who have participated, the experience has been transformative. Yang interviewed LeAnne RedOwl, forty-one, whose ancestor was among those hanged in Mankato. “We’re here to show them that we’re still here,” she told Yang. “We’re still making noise. We’re not going anywhere, and we’re proud of who we are.”
It would be wrong to extrapolate too much here, although it is tempting to apply RedOwl’s words of determination and perseverance to other—or perhaps all—Native people living in the Midwest. The rates of suicide, addiction, and homelessness continue to disproportionately affect Native communities in Minnesota, South Dakota, and beyond.
Yet, as RedOwl stated, Native people are still here. And more stories that highlight this are rising to the surface, offering examples of the various ways Native communities in the Midwest are surviving and often thriving, adapting, and leading the way.
It’s something we should pay attention to, and the examples are plentiful.
In Morris, a town of about 5,000 residents in Western Minnesota, a University of Minnesota campus offers free tuition to all Native students. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the campus is built on the site of a former boarding school for Native children.
When the federal government turned the boarding school over to the state in the early 1900s, it stipulated that Native students must be allowed to attend the school for free. In 2021, a group of Native students at the University of Minnesota Morris launched a petition insisting that university officials authorize a search of campus grounds for the remains of children who had died at the boarding school.
To date, nearly 35,000 people have signed the petition, which also asked that the search be conducted by an Indigenous expert, in collaboration with “tribal nations and our Indigenous campus community,” rather than the federal government.
Two defining factors influenced this request, according to the Sahan Journal: the appointment of the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, by the Biden Administration in 2021, and the discovery that same year of the remains of 215 children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
Officials at the University of Minnesota-Morris have indicated a willingness to move forward with the search for the remains of children who died at the boarding school, although it is a complicated and expensive process.
Tamara St. John, a citizen of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota and the tribal archivist, described to the Sahan Journal the cost incurred by her community when they undertook their own recent excavation of the Tekakwitha boarding school in South Dakota. The cost ran upward of $80,000, an amount that St. John said is difficult to absorb. Still, she added that tribal-led searches of boarding school sites allow Native people “to take control of telling our stories and not let other people speak for us.”
This spirit of resistance and self-determination is taking root in a rural area near Morris, with a reparative justice project known in Dakota as Makoce Ikikcupi (Land Recovery).
Launched in 2009 and led by Dakota, Ojibwe, and Lakota people from across the Midwest, the Makoce Ikikcupi project centers on buying land to provide a place to “re-establish our spiritual and physical relationship with our homeland, and ensure the ongoing existence of our people.”
Makoce Ikikcupi is about reparative justice. So far, the group has used donations from the broader community—which it describes as “settler donations”—to purchase twenty-one acres of land in the Minnesota River Valley. There, earth lodges are being built to house any Native person who would like to be part of a community focused on healing, language restoration, and traditional practices such as foraging and harvesting wild rice.
The path toward healing, reparative justice, and increased empowerment for Native communities is being forged by leaders like Nancy Beaulieu, a member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and an activist with the environmental group MN350.
Native voters have the power to show up no matter who is in office and remind them that “treaties do matter.”
She has also been at the forefront of recent voter registration and information drives in Northern Minnesota—in part because she saw the toll the 2016 election took on relations between Native and non-Native communities. In a 2020 article in Red Lake Nation News, which operates from the Red Lake Reservation in Far North-Central Minnesota, Beaulieu described seeing racism on public display in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory.
In one particularly potent example, Trump hosted a rally in the Northern Minnesota town of Bemidji in September 2020. Beaulieu recalled how the nearly all-white audience of thousands cheered when Trump praised them as “hardworking American patriots” with “good genes.”
Trump’s rally came just months after Beltrami County, which includes Bemidji, became one of the first in the country to ban refugees from settling there, following an Executive Order in late 2019 by the Trump Administration giving local officials a say in the federal refugee resettlement program. In response to these aggressive actions, Beaulieu realized that members of her community needed to become more engaged in politics.
So she helped to lead the way, hiring Native canvassers, rather than ineffective non-Native ones, and educating people about why voting matters.
The efforts of Beaulieu and others led to a dramatic increase in Native voter turnout in Minnesota, including an increase in vote totals in four precincts around the Red Lake Reservation in Beltrami County, from 22 percent in 2016 to 45 percent in 2020, according to Red Lake Nation News, citing the Star Tribune. Across the state, vote totals increased by about 11 percent. This was no easy victory, Beaulieu conceded in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio’s Melissa Townsend.
“Many of our people don’t understand how important local elections are,” Beaulieu said, adding that many have felt let down by both Republicans and Democrats. Yet Native voters do have the power to show up no matter who is in office and remind them that, among other things, “treaties do matter, and treaties are here to protect all of us.”
Beginning in the 1770s, treaties have been made and broken across Minnesota, South Dakota, and the rest of the United States, pushing Native people out of their homelands through genocidal actions that included the use of boarding schools and forced assimilation.
The future is here, too. In the 2022 midterm elections, Alicia Kozlowski won their bid for a seat in the Minnesota House, becoming the first nonbinary legislator in Minnesota’s history. Kozlowski is a Democrat with Mexican and Ojibwe roots, and has deep ties to the Native community in their hometown of Duluth.
In an interview with the Sahan Journal, Kozlowski describes growing up in Duluth, where they witnessed many Native people experiencing “economic and emotional suffering.” Their Ojibwe grandmother, Clara Kozlowski, took care of Alicia Kozlowski and provided them with another perspective that was rooted in Native-led strength and resilience.
Now, Kozlowski is part of the most diverse group of legislators ever elected to the Minnesota House, and they say they are prepared to push for progressive policies including basic income initiatives, clean air and water, and improved access to high-quality health care.
Their input will likely be very useful in 2023, as Minnesota’s legislature wrestles over how to spend the state’s unprecedented budget surplus that is now up to nearly $18 billion. Perhaps this will help propel the progress being carved out by leaders such as Kozlowski, Beaulieu, and RedOwl.
Through their activism and acknowledgement of both the pain and promise Native people have experienced, they remind us that Native people are still here, still making noise, and still telling their own stories—of recovery, resistance, and resilience.