Penguin Random House
I held the beat on my tiny hand drum, singing a tyke-sized honor song for my world of a father. “Way-haa!” I sang. Thwack-thwack-thwack! “Way- haaaa!” Thwack. Thwack-thwack!
I was two years old. I had on blue-and-white-striped OshKosh B’gosh overall shorts. My wispy shoulder-length hair was held back by a blue headband. And I was stealing the show.
Joe David, mustachioed, sunglassed, and handsome—as those coastal carvers often are—eyed me with a hint of annoyance. He was the one rendering the song to awaken Dad’s piece. I was nowhere near the rhythm or melody of the ancestral tune from his esteemed Tla-o-qui-aht forefathers. But what was he or anyone else going to do? Pry that drum out of my itty-bitty hands?
“Way- haaa!” I continued. Thwack-thwack! Thwack. “Ya-wayyyy!”
The red blanket spread over Dad’s shoulders displayed his self-designed-and-assigned crest: a wolf of the sea. To the untrained eye, it could have been a coyote of the plateau. Hands on hips, Dad danced like a hereditary chief at a coastal potlatch, making a slow, stately circle around his artwork, a monumental copper and bronze mask overlooking Minnehaha Falls. The piece was wrapped in a shiny brown blanket, waiting to be unveiled and awakened. The year was 1995. Dad’s piece was called Through the Eyes of Little Crow. It was a portrait mask of Ta Oyate Duta, the Dakota chief known to most as Little Crow.
Little Crow was one of the leaders of the Dakota Uprising of 1862, a conflict that began, as so many Indian wars did, because treaty rights were being ignored. Payments promised under the 1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux were late. The Dakota were plagued by corrupt American traders and agents who siphoned off money, charged exorbitant prices for food and other goods, and put the Dakota into debt. Settlers encroached on Dakota lands in the Minnesota River valley. Game grew scarce. When crops failed in 1861, the Dakota starved. Tribal members begged to buy food on credit. But Indian trader Andrew Myrick refused. “So far as I am concerned,” he said, “if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.”
When a hunting party of four young Dakota men killed five settlers, a war council was convened at Little Crow’s house in the middle of the night. The hosting chief was a traditionalist and accomplished warrior. A military campaign could not be waged without his support. At first, Little Crow lobbied for peace. But after he was called a coward by one of the young men, the chief had a change of heart. His response was committed to memory by his fifteen-year-old son, Wowinape, who stood behind his father as he spoke: “Ta Oyate Duta is not a coward, and he is not a fool! When did he run away from his enemies? When did he leave his braves behind him on the warpath and turn back to his tipis? When he ran away from your enemies, he walked behind on your trail with his face to the Ojibwes and covered your backs as a she-bear covers her cubs! Is Ta Oyate Duta without scalps? Look at his war feathers! Behold the scalp locks of your enemies hanging there on his lodgepoles! Do they call him a coward? Ta Oyate Duta is not a coward, and he is not a fool.
“Braves, you are like little children; you know not what you are doing. You are full of the white man’s devil water. You are like dogs in the Hot Moon when they run mad and snap at their own shadows. We are only little herds of buffaloes left scattered. The great herds that once covered the prairies are no more. See! The white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one— two—ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one—two— ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.
“Yes; they fight among themselves—away off. Do you hear the thunder of their big guns? No; it would take you two moons to run down to where they are fighting, and all the way your path would be among white soldiers as thick as tamaracks in the swamps of the Ojibwes. Yes; they fight among themselves, but if you strike at them they will all turn on you and devour you and your women and little children just as the locusts in their time fall on the trees and devour all leaves in one day. You are fools. You cannot see the face of your chief; your eyes are full of smoke. You cannot hear his voice; your ears are full of roaring waters. Braves, you are little children—you are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them down in the Hard Moon. Ta Oyate Duta is not a coward; he will die with you.”
Sometimes I wonder why Indian men like Little Crow and my dad are quick to fight. Why they are so readily called to the justice of the fist. Why, even when they are intimately familiar with the potentially crushing consequences of violence, they go at it anyway. Maybe it’s because they’re fighting for a people, place, and way of life that will disappear if we don’t fight. Maybe they’re romantics at heart, fighting for what’s right even when what’s right can’t win. Or maybe they think we will love them more than we did while they were here among the living, when they are remembered as martyrs. I’m not sure. All I know is that we—their families, their kids—we’ve lived in the aftermath of their righteous tragedies all our lives.
The Dakota Uprising unfolded much as Little Crow predicted. With the Civil War raging in the East, the Dakota initially drove settlers from their little houses on the prairie. But the Union army and the militia retaliated with a vengeance. The Dakota soon surrendered. Dakota civilians were marched 150 miles to an internment camp at Fort Snelling. Little Crow and some of his followers fled north to Dakota Territory and Canada. Colonel Henry Sibley formed a military commission to try 392 captured Dakota combatants. Sibley’s commission heard as many as forty-two cases per day with some hearings lasting less than five minutes. In a little over a month, they sentenced 303 prisoners of war to death.
When President [Abraham] Lincoln caught wind of this kangaroo court on the Minnesota prairie, he ordered two White House lawyers to review transcripts of the trials and commuted 265 sentences. The remaining thirty-eight Dakota were hung in Mankato, Minnesota, just six days before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The “Dakota Thirty-Eight,” as they are known, represent the largest mass execution in United States history. This country has yet to come to terms with the fact that its Great Emancipator freed the slaves and hung the Indians in the same week.
The hanged Dakota were buried in a sandbar along the Minnesota River. That same night, their graves were reopened and their cadavers distributed to local doctors for medical training and research. William Worrall Mayo received the body of Maȟpiya Akan Nažiŋ (Stands on Clouds). Mayo’s private practice grew to become the Mayo Clinic.
The following summer, Little Crow and his son Wowinape were picking raspberries near Hutchinson, Minnesota, when they were spotted by a farmer, Nathan Lamson, and his son Chauncey, who were out hunting deer. A firefight ensued. Little Crow shot the elder Lamson in the shoulder. But the chief was mortally wounded. He died in his ancestral homelands looking up at the heavens. Wowinape wrapped his father in a blanket and put new moccasins on his feet for his journey to the spirit world. Then he fled northwest, hoping to meet his mother at Devils Lake in Dakota Territory.
The next day, the Lamsons returned with a search party. When the searchers found Little Crow, they grabbed him by the hair and scalped him. Then they paraded his body through the streets of Hutchinson, where children stuffed firecrackers in the chief’s nose and ears before townspeople tossed his corpse into a slaughterhouse offal pit. There, someone decapitated the chief with a saber.
The Minnesota legislature awarded Nathan Lamson $500 for “rendering great service to the State.” Chauncey received $75 for Little Crow’s scalp, which the Minnesota Historical Society collected along with the chief’s skull and bones. These macabre war trophies were on public display from 1879 to 1915 and were not returned to Wowinape’s son for reburial until 1971.
“Ed, what I think you’ve done here today is a remarkable thing,” Ernie Whiteman, the co-founder of Native Arts Circle, said to my father in his opening remarks. “It makes me proud, brother.”
“Way- haaa!” I kept singing. Thwack- thwack- thwack.
“And that one artist’s vision can touch a lot of people,” Whiteman continued, unperturbed.
Dad approached the mask holding an eagle feather. Three ZZ Top look-alikes from the foundry that cast the piece stood beside him, wearing shirts with that Wolves of the Sea design. “Team NoiseCat,” they called themselves. Joe David lit sage and smudged the bronze mask, my dad, and himself. Then the ZZ Tops untied the blanket, revealing a larger-than-life matte brown face with strong cheeks, pursed lips, and long hair framing hollow eyes that invite the viewer to gaze out upon the land and up at the heavens through the eyes of Little Crow. Dad’s intention was for the viewer to look through the chief’s eyes and see the world before all this mess—before broken treaties, starving reservations, Indian wars, and mass executions. Little Crow, I imagine, would have looked out at this world through those same eyes with sorrow and regret—sorrow for what is lost, and regret for the terrible price his people paid for the war he chose to wage. But there must have been a reason for this chief to sacrifice everything. So, at the falls tucked between oak and elm, cascading fifty-three feet down a limestone overhang above the Mississippi River, I look through the eyes of Little Crow and try to see the things the chief believed were worth fighting—and dying— for. This land belonged to Ta Oyate Duta, Wowinape, and the Dakota. Maybe that’s why he had to die for it. Because when you die for something, even after it’s taken, no one can dispute that it’s yours.
“Julian,” said Mom.
“Huh?” I replied in my kid voice.
“Sing a song!” said Dad.
“Come on, babe,” seconded Mom.
In its coverage of the awakening, the Star Tribune ran a half-page picture of me “drumming up support for dad.” With that miniature drumstick in my hand and that blue bandanna tied around my noggin, I looked like a cycle broken. Like my innocence and the parental love it evidenced could escape the fates hunting down Indian dads, Indian sons, and Indian people. Like through the eyes of Little Crow, the red man was rising.
Excerpted from the book We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat. From Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission.