Dakota Sioux Research Articles

The Pole and The Tree: Zitkála-šá's "Consciousness" and the New Thought

Abstract: This article traces a strand of determined positive thinking in the work of Zitkála-Šá, a Yankton Sioux author, to late-nineteenth century metaphysical religious currents called the New Thought. I show how Zitkála-Šá's theories of "consciousness" resemble the work of contemporaneous pragmatic philosophy, but speak specifically to the concerns of Native peoples, exhibiting what Gerald Vizenor called "survivance." Furthermore, I connect this vision of Native life to her environmental imagery by showing how Zitkála-Šá's sylvan symbols (the tree and the pole) allow her to illustrate how Natives might concurrently embrace "consciousness" and traditional ways.

Middle Passages: Lessons in Racial Subjection at the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Abstract: This essay argues that the historically Black Hampton Institute (1868) and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879) are crucial sites to investigate how US political, territorial, and economic conquest were sutured to the project of emancipation after the Civil War. Rather than focusing on these schools’ manual education, I turn to their newspapers, the Southern Workman and Indian Helper , to demonstrate how they developed techniques of discursive representation, rooted in Black fungibility, that made racial subjection appear as racial emancipation in the postbellum period. These newspapers were framed as both tool and evidence of students’ subjective transformation. Instead of providing authentic evidence of Black and Native transformation, however, they provide a glimpse into how Hampton’s and Carlisle’s representations of racial emancipation drew on discursive techniques created in the material and symbolic violence of transatlantic slavery’s Middle Passage. The essay concludes by demonstrating how a trio of boarding school stories (1900) by the Yankton Sioux author Zitkala-Ša provides a nascent critique of the ways in which Indian boarding schools produced Native fungibility as a technique of white domination in the context of postbellum US imperialism.

Firms are planning clean ammonia

Yara Clean Ammonia has signed a letter of intent to develop a clean ammonia project in Texas with the energy firm Enbridge. The plant, which would be at Enbridge’s site near Corpus Christi, would have between 1.2 million and 1.4 million metric tons (t) of ammonia capacity per year and use carbon capture and storage to sequester 95% of its CO 2 output. The partners expect the complex to cost between $2.6 billion and $2.9 billion and start up by 2028. Separately, Adams Fork Energy and the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe are planning a clean ammonia facility for Mingo County, West Virginia. The plant, to be on a reclaimed coal mining site, would have 2.2 million t of ammonia output per year and would also use carbon capture and storage.

Dismantling racist ideologies in nursing academia to enhance the success of students identifying as Black, Indigenous and students of colour.

Dismantling racist ideologies in nursing academia to enhance the success of students identifying as Black, Indigenous and students of colour.

Developing Culturally Tailored Mobile Web App Education to Promote Breast Cancer Screening: Knowledge, Barriers, and Needs Among American Indian Women

American Indian (AI) women face disproportionate rates of breast cancer mortality and cancer disparities. This study conducted qualitative research to assess perspectives of AI women towards breast cancer screening, knowledge, barriers, and needs about mobile web app–based education to promote breast cancer screening. This study, in collaboration with the Yankton Sioux Tribe (YST), followed a community-based participatory research approach and conducted two focus groups with a total of 22 YST women aged 40–70 years living on reservation in rural South Dakota. Each group consisted of 11 local professionals working in healthcare and social services and community members. A grounded theory was used for the qualitative analysis. A large portion of participants reported having prior knowledge about breast cancer and screening methods, yet lacked awareness of the detailed procedure and recommended guidelines. Competing priorities and cost of mammograms were noted as major barriers to screening. Participants wanted to learn—in a convenient and easy-to-understand manner—more about breast cancer and prevention from a credible source. Both groups were favorable toward novel educational tools, such as the mobile web app education, and cited potential health benefits, particularly for women aged 40s to 60s. Our findings highlighted the importance of creating effective, culturally tailored educational interventions built into programs specific to AIs to increase understanding about breast cancer screening and promote screening behaviors among AI women. Particular attention to how AIs’ culture, beliefs, and barriers are implicated in screening behaviors could help with developing culturally tailored health education tools for this population.

Border History is Indigenous History

Border History is Indigenous History Ryan Hall (bio) Benjamin Hoy, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Notes and index. xv + 322pp. $35.00. In the desperate final months of 1862, some two thousand Dakota Sioux people trekked north through the cold Minnesota winter in search of safety. To these survivors, British lands north of the 49th parallel represented their last possible refuge, their last hope. Over the previous summer, the Dakota had launched a doomed resistance campaign against American settlers and government authorities, citing broken treaty promises that had left them on the brink of starvation. In the war's aftermath, soldiers quickly rounded up and arrested Dakota survivors. Those who remained unfettered were forced to flee, and danger stalked their every step. Some went west to the lands of their Lakota kin, but punitive U.S. Army expeditions followed them to the plains to hunt them down. Those who instead went north had to avoid packs of vigilantes who roamed the border hoping to capture stragglers for rewards. Even after they crossed, the Dakota refugees still had to evade illegal kidnapping parties; keep peace with Indigenous nations like the Crees and Métis, who resented their presence on fast-shrinking hunting grounds; mollify British officials who saw them as dangerous nuisances; and find ways to subsist and survive in the harsh northern prairies. Despite all this, they persevered. By the 1870s, the Dakota refugees secured a handful of small reserves in what is now central Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where descendants remain today. The border saved them. The Dakota were the first of many Indigenous peoples to cross the U.S.-Canadian border to escape violent death during the era of continental expansion. In January 1870, many Blackfoot people in Montana fled north after escalating violence with settlers culminated in the U.S. Army massacring nearly two hundred peaceful Blackfoot people encamped along the Marias River. Many of the Blackfoot survivors never returned to the southern portions of their homelands that lay in the United States. In 1877, the renowned Lakota chief Sitting Bull led three thousand of his people north into Saskatchewan to avoid certain retribution following victory over U.S. troops in the Battle of Little Big [End Page 160] Horn. Later that year, Nez Percé people in Idaho lashed out against an invasion of their homelands, then led the U.S. Cavalry on an epic, thousand-mile chase that ended with a frantic final dash towards the Canadian border. The Nez Percé leader Chief Joseph and most of his followers were ambushed and forced to surrender within sight of their destination, but several hundred still managed to slip away and join Lakota refugees in Canada. The border worked in both directions, and Indigenous people in Canada sometimes fled to the United States for the same reasons as their American counterparts. Following an 1870 resistance campaign against the Canadian government in Manitoba, the spiritual and political leader of the Métis people, Louis Riel, absconded to Montana to avoid prosecution. After he returned to Canada to wage another failed campaign in 1885, Riel was executed, but many of his fellow Métis resistors fled across the American border, as did several bands of Cree allies who had risen up alongside them. To Indigenous people in the North American West, the international border in the late nineteenth century meant something very different than it means today. To them, the border meant safety; it meant refuge; for many, it represented the only possible option for avoiding the marauding violence of what Americans called the "Indian wars" era. The experience of Indigenous people during the bloody decades of the late nineteenth century has inspired generations of public interest and often predictable strains of historical writing. Writers have used the Indian wars to tell moralistic stories of American avarice and doomed Indian heroism, the perils of industrialization, and the clash of irreconcilable worldviews. In Canada, a parallel tradition has belatedly unfolded around their (more limited) conflicts with Métis and Cree people. Like America's Indian wars, Canada's prairie conflicts have turned an uncomfortable mirror onto...

Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement

Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement

Brest Cancer Screening and Mobile Web App Intervention: Perceptions, Knowledge, and Needs among Native Women

American Indian (AI) women have the highest breast cancer mortality and lowest breast cancer screening rates in the U.S. The present study, in collaboration with the Yankton Sioux Tribe (YST) in South Dakota, sought to (1) identify the general public/professionals’ knowledge, attitudes, and needs for a mobile web app for breast cancer screening (wMammogram) intervention, and (2) inform development of the wMammogram intervention to improve Breast Cancer screening among YST women. Following a community-based participatory research approach, two focus groups were conducted in October 2020 with a total of 22 YST women aged 40-70 years, including 17 elderly women. Each group consisted of 11 community leaders, members, healthcare professionals. Qualitative analysis was conducted using grounded theory. Participants in both groups were generally favorable toward the wMammogram intervention, and noted a potential health benefit, particularly for women in their 50s to 60s. Key areas identified by participants for intervention include: (1) needs for better knowledge of breast cancer, screening, and prevention/early detection, (2) culturally tailored educational materials rooted in AI cultural values and beliefs (e.g., holistic wellness approach, Native lifestyles), (3) barriers (e.g., fear), (4) motivators (e.g., reminders), and (5) suggestions for acceptability (e.g., content and structure of messages). These results suggest that the wMammogram intervention, which is culturally tailored and addresses the community’s concerns, can be a feasible, acceptable, and effective tool to promote breast cancer screening among YST women. The results informed the development of an innovative health intervention to help reduce health disparities experienced in Indian Country.

Conational Networks: Reconstituting Indigenous Solidarity through the Works of Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin

The early twentieth-century writings and community organizing of Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin (Yankton Sioux) reveal how their cocommitment to Dakota nationhood and to all Indigenous nations informs current discussions and practices of Indigenous intellectualism, modernism, nationalism, and global relations. The still-unanalyzed 1926 constitution and bylaws of the National Council of American Indians is brought into conversation with the Bonnins' personally annotated copy of the 1932 constitution of the Yankton Sioux Tribe to analyze their efforts to organize a conational network of Indigenous solidarity. Building upon the conceptual frameworks of Indigenous trans/nationalism, intertribalism, and trans-Indigeneity, conationalism offers a conceptual framework that acknowledges the long-standing reality and ongoing necessity of fostering networks of Indigenous solidarity that remain rooted in the self-determination of individual Indigenous nations. Often sidelined from discussions of early twentieth-century Indigenous nationalism, the Bonnins' constitutional writings evidence an expansive understanding of Indigenous nationhood and nation building. Their writing and activism connected urban and reservation-based community members, facilitated collaborative relations between Indigenous nations, resisted federal impositions, and promoted collectivism over individualism in an ongoing effort to preserve, protect, and prosper Indigenous lands, waters, and peoples.

The Red Road and Other Narratives of the Dakota Sioux

The Red Road presents the oral histories of Sam Buffalo, also known as Samuel Mniyo, and Robert Goodvoice, with editorial comments and annotations from Daniel M. Beveridge. Additionally, the book includes the artistic renderings of someone whom the editor believes to be Jim Sapa, also known as James Black. Beveridge explains, “This book is like a rope made up of four strands, representing four voices” (6). Together, the contributors narrate Dakota history and culture, tradition and ceremony, speaking with the knowledge gleaned from seven generations of the Dakota people. While the authors clearly state that they “do not claim this to be the one and only story of the Dakota people,” The Red Road is far-reaching and quite personal, making it an important addition to the existing Dakota scholarship (7).In many ways The Red Road is hard to categorize. It has the organizational style of a reference book and, at times, the structure of a historical monograph. Yet the reader can clearly hear the voices of Sam Buffalo and Robert Goodvoice in each story as they share the wisdom of their elders with the Dakota people and the public. Buffalo and Goodvoice address many topics, but much of their commentary focuses on two of the Dakota’s essential traditions, the Red Road (a spiritual journey) and the Holy Dance. The decision to print information about these two traditions is not without controversy, however. Specifically, the editor notes that discussing the Wakán Waċípi (Holy Dance) ceremony may be considered taboo by some members of the Dakota nation. On the other hand, the Wakán Waċípi was last held in 1934, and the songs and ceremonial meaning of the dance are in danger of being lost as those who experienced the dance, or remember hearing about it, have become part of a dying generation. For these reasons, Sam Buffalo and Robert Goodvoice recorded their stories with Daniel Beveridge, hoping that “this book will be for the younger generation of Dakota to look at, to learn about who they are and where they came from” (53). It includes history lessons about the Dakota’s first contact with Europeans and about the War of 1812 as well as reflections about the loss of religious practices, matters of faith, and the struggles of contemporary life, making The Red Road appealing to a vast audience.At times, The Red Road has the feel of a modern-day Black Elk Speaks as Sam Buffalo and Robert Goodvoice narrate stories of the Dakota people’s history and traditions. However, unlike the earlier problematic, albeit classic, memoir, Beveridge remained “committed to recording Sam’s [and Robert’s] material as faithfully as possible” (8). When necessary, in-text annotations from the editor clarify or explain the nuances of Dakota life, but beyond these editorial additions, the stories alone compose much of the narrative. For those unfamiliar with Dakota history and tradition, The Red Road can be difficult to follow. The oral histories of Buffalo and Goodvoice are rich with detail on numerous aspects of Dakota life, from the genesis of the Dakota people to the taste of sun-dried buffalo meat. Despite Beveridge’s inclusion of time lines and a brief historical overview, the book lacks the familiar structure of a traditional historical narrative—which is exactly the point. Written for the Dakota people, the book purposefully does not conform to the expected standards of a historical monograph. Instead, The Red Road is a reference, a memoir, a history lesson, and a spiritual journey written for the next generation of the Dakota nation and published for all who are interested to enjoy.

The Future of Land-Grab Universities

The Future of Land-Grab Universities Meredith McCoy (bio), Roopika Risam (bio), and Jennifer Guiliano (bio) the land-grab universities (lgu) project compellingly conveys how nearly eleven million acres of land were stolen from almost 250 tribes, bands, and communities to establish land-grant universities.1 In their work identifying nearly all tracts covered under the Morrill Land Grant Acts, the LGU team connected Indigenous nations with their tracts and calculated the financial benefits land-grant institutions reaped from sales of these lands. Placing the Morrill Act into the context of widespread fraudulent and coercive land-seizure practices in the mid- to late 1800s, LGU successfully illustrates how the existence of contemporary land-grant universities is predicated on extractive legal practices backed by threats of government violence. Students, faculty, and staff at land-grants occupy the shadows of these violent, genocidal processes that forcibly expropriated lands from Indigenous peoples and communities. A critical piece of investigative journalism, LGU raises awareness of how land-grant universities not only exist upon Indigenous lands but also have been built with Indigenous lands.2 Through interactive visualizations that allow users to search by state, institution, and tribal community, readers learn how the Morrill Act provided a financial foundation for contemporary land-grant universities. Supported by an extensive bibliography and links to media coverage of the project, the visualizations provide information on endowments, enrollment (including Indigenous student enrollment), and profits generated from the Morrill Acts. LGU depicts tracts expropriated, grantees, and the total financial gains generated through those lands. Users learn, for example, about the impact of the 1851 Dakota cession, which reassigned nearly 830,000 acres to endow thirty-five different universities, linking one out of every 13 acres redistributed under Morrill to the United States' dispossession of Dakota people across Mní Sota Makoče. The striking numbers revealed in LGU's financial analysis make this project a critical intervention into conversations about land dispossession and higher education. Future projects could extend this work even further: U.S. Department of Commerce economist William Larson estimated in 2015 that the 1.89 billion acres of land that make up the United States of America were worth $23 trillion. Splitting the United States into census [End Page 169] tracts, parcels, and counties, Larson identified "land" price and value estimates that included "ecosystems (e.g. root systems such as alfalfa), basic siting improvements (e.g. fencing, irrigation, and land clearing), and stocks of natural resources that convey with the land (e.g. timber, water, hunting, and fishing rights)."3 LGU accounts for land price for all institutions, while some valuations included mineral rights and surface rights.4 Yet land valuation is more complex, as institutions' longitudinal financial benefits from land accrue over time. For example, institutions cleared their lands, selling off timber or using the resources to build. The estimated value of those resources along with others like hunting rights, mineral rights, and access to water increases calculations of institutions' financial gains, as would calculations of tax benefits and other financial incentives. This more complex understanding of land valuation further illuminates the ways settler colonialism is extractive—not simply predicated on landownership and the sale of land but on its utility for continually generating profit over time. We might push those wishing to build on LGU's argument to take a more expansive view of the value of land, one that would consider relations between humans and more-than-human relatives to understand land's importance. LGU's reliance on private property values alone, without drawing attention to the importance of Indigenous relationships with land, risks confirming settler logics of capitalist valuation that undergird the imagined right of colonization on terra nullius. Depicting value and land impact only in terms of capital reinforces settler notions of land as an extractable commodity. Instead, an approach that engages nonquantitative analyses of the impact of Morrill Act transfers could help users revise their understanding of land as a capitalist deliverable. What if, for example, LGU offered users a chance to think through a different relationship to land that engages with Indigenous ways of knowing that rely on active maintenance of relationship to the land through responsible stewardship? This would raise...

They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story by Gretchen Cassel Eick

Reviewed by: They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story by Gretchen Cassel Eick Janet Dean They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story. By Gretchen Cassel Eick. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2020. xiii + 353 pp. $45.00 cloth. When Charles Ohiyesa Eastman and Elaine Goodale married in 1891, they formed a power couple in the fight for Indigenous people in the United States. He was a Santee Dakota (Sioux) doctor, serving his community as government physician at the Pine Ridge Agency. She was a white teacher and writer from Massachusetts whose work with Indigenous students at Hampton Institute led to a government position as supervisor of education in the Dakotas. Despite [End Page 177] their Indian Bureau appointments, both had reputations as critics of federal Indian policy and advocates for western tribes. Joining forces in life and work, the Eastmans would go on to dedicate their lives to the advancement of Indigenous rights. But the inauspicious timing of their engagement, days before the massacre at Wounded Knee, suggests the magnitude of what they, and their marriage, were up against: no less than a national campaign to eliminate Native American peoples and cultures. Less discernibly, the couple faced tensions within the movement they helped lead, as well as changes in their individual views about what was in the best interests of Indigenous people. Gretchen Cassel Eick’s They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story uses the record of this fascinating shared life as a framework for exploring the conflicts and contradictions of the Progressive Era. Interweaving descriptions of the Eastmans’ nearly thirty-year partnership with overviews of major historical events, shifts in government policy, and developments in reform movements, Eick offers not so much an intimate portrait of a marriage as a case study in the convergence of the personal and the political. Eick draws on scholarly biographies and the Eastmans’ memoirs, but rather than just presenting side-by-side life stories, she illuminates the major events that positioned her subjects between white and Indigenous worlds. The opening chapters focus on the Dakota War of 1862, which made Charles Eastman a refugee when he was four years old. Charles was raised by his grandmother in a traditional Dakota community in Canada; at fifteen, he was reunited with his father and brothers, who had been imprisoned by the United States and had emerged Christianized and assimilated. Charles learned English, converted to Christianity, and earned degrees from Dartmouth College and Boston University School of Medicine, but as Eick notes, he retained a belief that practicing traditional culture was an important form of resistance. Eick devotes less attention to Elaine’s early years but outlines a childhood in a New England family dedicated to social reform and an early writing career (as a teenager, she published a book of poetry with her sister). By the time of her marriage, Elaine was writing articles criticizing the commissioner of Indian Affairs and exposing the corruption of land speculators, railroad companies, and political appointees who exploited tribes. She learned Dakota and spent a year traveling to reservations to document conditions. In the years that followed their marriage, Charles held a variety of positions as Elaine supported his career and raised their six children, writing when she could. Eick details Charles’s work as a representative for the YMCA (he started forty-three chapters of the organization on reservations around the country), a lobbyist, an educator, a Bureau of Indian Affairs official, and a founder and president of the Society of American Indians. She chronicles Charles’s growing [End Page 178] celebrity as an author and speaker and the couples’ creation of a summer camp devoted to teaching Indigenous practices. Alternating with these descriptions are analyses of historical events, from the Battle of Little Big Horn to World War I, and introductions to a cast of prominent figures, including Chief Red Cloud, Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin/Zitkala-Ŝa, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. While most of these figures did not directly interact with the Eastmans, their stories offer rich context for understanding the transformations in politics, society, and culture that the couple was experiencing at...

The Dakota Sioux Experience at Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools by Cynthia Leanne Landrum

Reviewed by: The Dakota Sioux Experience at Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools by Cynthia Leanne Landrum John R. Legg Cynthia Leanne Landrum, The Dakota Sioux Experience at Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 243 pp. $55.00 (cloth). In the wake of the U.S.–Dakota War, Dakota peoples dispersed in different directions around their homeland, Mni Sota Makoce—the Land where the Waters Reflect the Skies. Once forced onto reservations, they found their children being coerced into boarding schools that subjected students to ongoing efforts to assimilate away from Indigenous culture and toward values of American economics, civilization, and Christianity. Historical studies of these schools focus on them as oppressive, violent, and destructive institutions that mistreated Indigenous children for the sake of allegedly bettering their lives. Cynthia Leanne Landrum's book challenges this emphasis, examining how the Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools served as beacons of Indigenous culture even though the broader Dakota diaspora extended far beyond its communities of origin. Landrum's book is organized into two sections—"History" and "Student Reflections"—which are part chronological and part thematic. Chapter subheadings help readers to understand the Dakota culture and to follow the formation of and interactions between the Flandreau and Pipestone schools. "History" focuses on Dakota and other Indigenous histories before, during, and after European contact. Landrum aims to show how Dakota peoples navigated educational systems, as compared to Algonquian peoples in previous centuries. One significant example from this section tells the story of Dakotas' connection to land, especially the Red Pipestone Quarry [End Page 84] in western Minnesota. Many Dakota leaders felt uneasy about preserving the sacred quarrying site, but, through its proximity to the two schools, the quarry provided a place for students to both reflect upon and protect their culture. "Student Reflections" addresses the process through which Dakota students embraced the education provided at the Flandreau and Pipestone schools. Even though children from other Indigenous communities, such as Ojibwe ones, attended schools like Pipestone, Landrum's book focuses on Dakota experiences above all others. Oral history interviews emphasize Dakota students' individual experiences, adding a distinctive voice and perspective to readers' understanding of life at both institutions. For the Flandreau school, Landrum's book recounts various themes in Dakota students' lives, such as communication, orphans and runaway children, and the differences between exceptional and undesirable students. Regarding Pipestone, however, Landrum addresses its importance to the Dakota beyond educational opportunities; the school possessed a strong connection to the land—the Red Pipestone Quarry. Unlike the students at Flandreau, those at Pipestone—both Dakota and Ojibwe—experienced the quarry with "reverence, humility, and as a united front, rather than as a divided, scattered, and powerless people" (236). Pipestone students' proximity to this sacred space allowed them to hold their culture close to themselves. This contrasted with the experience of their counterparts at the Flandreau school, which lay further away from the quarry; they faced the constant threat of erasure and assimilation. One of Landrum's interesting approaches involves looking past the idea and anthropologic term of settler colonialism by focusing on Dakota persistence over time. In highlighting that persistence, the book concentrates on how Dakota peoples "observe, test, and finally adapt to those transformative elements . . . of what denoted the long-term success of the [Dakota] culture" (xii). It is true that when scholars focus solely on settler colonialism, many fall into the trap of only emphasizing the term rather than the people affected by that process and deepening structure. However, readers of Landrum's book would have benefited from more clarity on this particular topic. A discussion of the violence and marginalization that Dakota peoples faced before the rise of both schools would have provided context to readers, enabling them to better understand settler colonialism and Indigenous responses to it. That said, Landrum's approach to using personal narratives illustrates persistence through a unique Indigenous perspective. [End Page 85] Landrum has produced an excellent monograph on the history of the Flandreau and Pipestone schools. The book demonstrates how Dakota peoples embraced the educational process at these institutions as a means to confront banishment, displacement, and attempted erasure by the U.S. government during...

The Future of <em>Land-Grab Universities</em>

The Future of Land-Grab Universities Meredith McCoy (bio), Roopika Risam (bio), and Jennifer Guiliano (bio) the land-grab universities (lgu) project compellingly conveys how nearly eleven million acres of land were stolen from almost 250 tribes, bands, and communities to establish land-grant universities.1 In their work identifying nearly all tracts covered under the Morrill Land Grant Acts, the LGU team connected Indigenous nations with their tracts and calculated the financial benefits land-grant institutions reaped from sales of these lands. Placing the Morrill Act into the context of widespread fraudulent and coercive land-seizure practices in the mid- to late 1800s, LGU successfully illustrates how the existence of contemporary land-grant universities is predicated on extractive legal practices backed by threats of government violence. Students, faculty, and staff at land-grants occupy the shadows of these violent, genocidal processes that forcibly expropriated lands from Indigenous peoples and communities. A critical piece of investigative journalism, LGU raises awareness of how land-grant universities not only exist upon Indigenous lands but also have been built with Indigenous lands.2 Through interactive visualizations that allow users to search by state, institution, and tribal community, readers learn how the Morrill Act provided a financial foundation for contemporary land-grant universities. Supported by an extensive bibliography and links to media coverage of the project, the visualizations provide information on endowments, enrollment (including Indigenous student enrollment), and profits generated from the Morrill Acts. LGU depicts tracts expropriated, grantees, and the total financial gains generated through those lands. Users learn, for example, about the impact of the 1851 Dakota cession, which reassigned nearly 830,000 acres to endow thirty-five different universities, linking one out of every 13 acres redistributed under Morrill to the United States' dispossession of Dakota people across Mní Sota Makoče. The striking numbers revealed in LGU's financial analysis make this project a critical intervention into conversations about land dispossession and higher education. Future projects could extend this work even further: U.S. Department of Commerce economist William Larson estimated in 2015 that the 1.89 billion acres of land that make up the United States of America were worth $23 trillion. Splitting the United States into census [End Page 169] tracts, parcels, and counties, Larson identified "land" price and value estimates that included "ecosystems (e.g. root systems such as alfalfa), basic siting improvements (e.g. fencing, irrigation, and land clearing), and stocks of natural resources that convey with the land (e.g. timber, water, hunting, and fishing rights)."3 LGU accounts for land price for all institutions, while some valuations included mineral rights and surface rights.4 Yet land valuation is more complex, as institutions' longitudinal financial benefits from land accrue over time. For example, institutions cleared their lands, selling off timber or using the resources to build. The estimated value of those resources along with others like hunting rights, mineral rights, and access to water increases calculations of institutions' financial gains, as would calculations of tax benefits and other financial incentives. This more complex understanding of land valuation further illuminates the ways settler colonialism is extractive—not simply predicated on landownership and the sale of land but on its utility for continually generating profit over time. We might push those wishing to build on LGU's argument to take a more expansive view of the value of land, one that would consider relations between humans and more-than-human relatives to understand land's importance. LGU's reliance on private property values alone, without drawing attention to the importance of Indigenous relationships with land, risks confirming settler logics of capitalist valuation that undergird the imagined right of colonization on terra nullius. Depicting value and land impact only in terms of capital reinforces settler notions of land as an extractable commodity. Instead, an approach that engages nonquantitative analyses of the impact of Morrill Act transfers could help users revise their understanding of land as a capitalist deliverable. What if, for example, LGU offered users a chance to think through a different relationship to land that engages with Indigenous ways of knowing that rely on active maintenance of relationship to the land through responsible stewardship? This would raise...

State-Directed Intervention in the Santee Dakota Sioux Nation: A Comparative Case?

Historically, education policy has frequently framed American Indians, a contested term long-used to describe peoples indigenous to the United States, through a deficit-lens as “other.” While CER p...

The Dakota Sioux Experience at Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools

The Dakota Sioux Experience at Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools

Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion ed. by Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks

Reviewed by: Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion ed. by Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks English Brooks Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, eds., Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2018. 323 pp. Paper, $24.95; e-book, $20. Both for readers who locate themselves inside as well as those outside the Mormon tradition, this edited collection of critical and personal essays is a welcome step toward bringing Mormon studies into more serious conversation with postcolonial/decolonial, Indigenous, regional, and globalization studies. Many of these discussions have been taking place for well over a decade, formally in Mormon studies journals, conferences, and symposia; less formally in online blogs, forums, and podcasts; and for generations in peoples’ homes, across kitchen tables and living rooms. Decolonizing Mormonism, however, is the first book-length intervention in this direction, and it signals an open, eclectic, and vigorous approach from a variety of disciplines. Contributors’ backgrounds range across anthropology, art history, education, [End Page 99] filmmaking, psychology, western regional history, as well as cultural, critical race, ethnic, gender, literary, Asian, and Chicano studies, to name a few. As varied as the collection’s thirteen essays are, each responds in particular ways to a set of problems coeditors Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks (no relation) outline in their introduction: “Mormonism reproduces American colonial dynamics, [which] fall unevenly on communities of color and non–North American communities.” Recognizing and addressing these dynamics, they state, “is an essential step in the cultivation of a more responsible practice of Mormonism and more responsible work in the field of Mormon Studies” (1). This project has significant implications for western literary and cultural studies. The Mormon presence in western American history could hardly be overstated, a presence whose distinctive forms of communitarianism, patriarchy, land use and politics, race-based exclusion and marginalization, settler colonialism, Indigenous relations, and missiology have shaped the cultural, literary, and physical landscape of the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau. Indeed several essays in this volume deal specifically with such patterns in the region. For example, Angelo Baca’s “Porter Rockwell and Samuel the Lamanite Fistfight in Heaven” discusses his personal negotiation of Navajo, Hopi, and Mormon identity. Growing up in the contact zone of the reservation and Mormon country, he recalls how although his family was Mormon, they “were also traditional Navajos [. . . who] went to church because that’s where people went, it was where the opportunities were, and where the educational, business, and social worlds intersected. . . . Mormon influence,” Baca continues, “is so strong that I felt it to my very core ever since I was a young boy. . . . At the same time,” he explains, “my grandparents told me the harsh truth about Mormon settlers who took land, water, animals, and language away” (67–68). Similar tensions between individual, family, and community identities characterize essays by Elise Boxer, Alicia Harris, Ignacio Garcia, and Mica McGriggs. For example, in considering erasures of “Indigenous peoples and communities . . . from the historical and contemporary narrative of Mormon settlement in Utah,” Boxer [End Page 100] “employ[s] the term settler rather than ‘pioneer’ to disrupt the narrative and to name settler colonialism as a process that seeks to replace Indigenous people” (78, 96). And Harris claims ancestry from various European as well as Assiniboine and Dakota people who, as she puts it, “saw the face of God in the prairie that stretched out unendingly and knew the way that the earth moved in relationship to the stars, a macrocosm of their own bodies” (119). Seeking greater personal and collective reconciliation between these spiritual traditions, she asks, “Why do we, as a culture, persist in denying Native and Indigenous ways of knowing and seeing the world?” (122). The collection’s scope, however, reaches beyond the Mormon culture region of the American West, especially considering the ways in which Mormonism has become a significant avenue by which US American cultural and economic hegemony has inserted itself across Latin America and the Pacific since the late nineteenth century. The essays by Colvin (“A Maori Mormon Testimony”) and Brooks (“Mormonism as Colonialism, Mormonism as Anti-Colonialism, Mormonism as Minor Transnationalism”) go into excellent depth, personally and historically, in describing...

Changing Scholarly Interpretations of Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša)

The Yankton Sioux writer and activist Gertrude Bonnin (1876-1938), better known by her Lakota name, Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird), was perhaps the most prominent Native American woman of the early twentieth century. In her writings, she consistently overturned conventions of language and meaning to subvert and criticize the American discourse of civilization. Bonnin’s use of English as a tool of resistance has invited misrepresentations and misunderstandings. Criticism can be distilled into three interpretive frameworks: liminal, assimilationist and bicultural. Liminal scholarship focuses on Bonnin’s 1900 semi-autobiography for the Atlantic Monthly , which laments the author’s separation from her birth culture. Assimilationist criticism springs from extra-literary sources, concentrating on her anti-peyote and pro-US citizenship campaigns. Finally, bicultural criticism argues that Bonnin’s knowledge of both the white and the Sioux world allowed her to form a compelling critique of Euro-American society from differing cultural and linguistic discourses. Recently, however, more forceful interpretations on Bonnin have begun to emerge. They identify her as either a promoter of Gerald Vizenor’s concept of “survivance” or as a forerunner of the Red Power movement. This article traces and dissects the evolution of Bonnin scholarship, pointing to emerging perspectives from which to interrogate her work and the direction future research and analysis could take. Keywords: Gertrude Bonnin; Zitkala-Sa; liminal; assimilationist; bicultural; interpretation

Ways of Seeing and Responding to a School in Santee Sioux Country

Ways of Seeing and Responding to a School in Santee Sioux Country

“Everything Originates from the Oral Traditions”: A Close Reading of Cook-Lynn’s Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy

Over the past forty years, Dakota writer and scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has published numerous books and articles that are foundational to Native American studies. Although much of Cook-Lynn’s scholarship focuses upon Native politics, law, and history, this article examines her often underappreciated, undervalued contributions to Native literature. In this article, I provide a close reading of Cook-Lynn’s 1999 book Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy, a collection of three novellas that quickly fell out-of-print after early literary critics dismissed it as too political and unrealistic. Indeed, Cook-Lynn’s trilogy is unapologetically political as she exposes the devastating effects of settler colonialism. However, I argue that early literary critics, who bristled at these accusations, also seemed to misinterpret this trilogy because they failed to acknowledge that it is firmly grounded in the Dakota literary tradition. Aurelia is a contemporary retelling of two traditional Dakota oral stories (o-hun-ka-ka tales) about the Corn Wife and the sacred river that remind contemporary Dakota people about their connection and responsibility to the land and each other. In this close reading, I explicate the content, style, and structure of these three novellas to show how Cook-Lynn re-imagines the Dakota oral tradition in a more modern form as print literature.