Dakota Women's Work: Creativity, Culture, and Exile

Dakota Women’s Work

Dakota Women’s Work

Creativity, Culture, and Exile

Colette A. Hyman

The publication of this book was supported in part by the Ken and Nina Rothchild Fund for Business and Women’s History.

©2012 by the Minnesota Historical Society. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to the Minnesota Historical Society Press, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 55102-1906.

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International Standard Book Number

ISBN: 978-0-87351-850-5 (paper)

ISBN: 978-0-87351-858-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hyman, Colette A. (1958–)

Dakota Women’s Work : Creativity, Culture, and Exile / Colette A. Hyman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87351-850-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-87351-858-1 (e-book)

1. Dakota women—History. 2. Dakota women—Social conditions.

3. Dakota women—Economic conditions. 4. Dakota Indians—Industries.

5. Dakota beadwork. 6. Indian leatherwork. 7. Quillwork. I. Title.

E99.D1 H96 2012

978.004/975243

2011047752

For

WILLIAM BEANE,

the late EDITH BICKERSTAFF,

and their families

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Women, Work, and Survival

CHAPTER 1

Work, Art, and Dakota Subsistence

CHAPTER 2

The Fur Trade and the Treaty of 1837

CHAPTER 3

Gender and Resistance

CHAPTER 4

Separate Survival

CHAPTER 5

Dakota Tradition at Santee and Flandreau

CHAPTER 6

Work, Gender, and the Dakota Church

EPILOGUE

Indian Renaissance and Dakota Women’s Art

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Dakota Women’s Work

INTRODUCTION

Women, Work, and Survival

WHEN LILLIAN BEANE WAS BORN IN 1911, her great-aunt Mary Eastman Faribault made her a pair of deerskin moccasins beaded with a floral design characteristic of their people, the Eastern Dakota. These carefully protected moccasins have remained in the family for more than a century. They honor the memory of the woman who made them and the generations that they represent, connecting Lillian’s grandmothers to her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren.

Beaded deerskin moccasins made in 1911 by Mary Eastman Faribault for her newborn great-niece, Lillian Moore.

Mary Faribault, whose Dakota name was Tipiwakanwin, Sacred Lodge Woman, would have learned to work with hides and decorate the moccasins from her mother, Wakantankawin, Great Spirit Woman, Nancy Eastman, her grandmother Wakaninajinwin, Stands Sacred Woman, and her great-grandmother, Canpadutawin, Red Cherry Woman, who married Mahpiya Wicasta, Cloud Man, in 1810. In making these moccasins, Mary honored the new baby. She also honored the baby’s mother, Grace Eastman Moore, and the baby’s grandmother, Mary Jane Faribault Eastman, wife of Mary’s brother John.¹

When Mary created these moccasins, she fulfilled the historical role of Dakota women: making footwear, garments, equipment, and shelter for their families as well as bearing and caring for young children. Dakota women also taught older girls the skills they would need as adults in their communities and the obligations they would have within their families. Among those obligations were honoring relatives and celebrating life cycle events and accomplishments with gifts of functional items—clothing or pouches, for instance—that were delicately ornamented with the woman’s best efforts and sincerest prayers. For in proffering these gifts, women honored not only their relatives but the spirits of ancestors and all creation around them. When Mary Faribault made these moccasins, she was following in the footsteps of her grandmothers, doing much as they had in their Minnesota homelands.

The moccasins made for Lillian by a woman who had lived through devastating changes inflicted on Dakota people during the nineteenth century bear witness to the endurance and survival of Dakota traditions in exile. They also testify vividly about the role of women in that survival. This book addresses many different strands of Dakota history that are woven into each delicate stitch. Through the story of the family who created them, we can begin to understand the lives of Dakota women in the times surrounding the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, the most devastating moment in the history of the Eastern Dakota.

Mary’s ancestors had come from different parts of the Minnesota homelands. Her mother, Wakantankawin, was the daughter of Seth Eastman, an officer in the U.S. Army posted at Fort Snelling; her mother’s mother, Wakaninajinwin, had grown up among the Mdewakantunwan Dakota, the Spirit Lake Dwellers, who lived along the lower Minnesota River and the Mississippi. Wankantankawin married a skilled hunter named Tawakanhdiota, Many Lightnings, who had ancestors among the Mdewakantunwan but also among the Wahpetunwan, the Dwellers among the Leaves. The latter, along with the Sisitunwan, the Dwellers of the Fish Ground, lived upstream along the Minnesota River and on the shores of Lake Traverse and Big Stone Lake, which divide Minnesota from South Dakota.

Between the Mdewakantunwan in the East and the Sisitunwan and Wahpetunwan in the West lived the Wahpekute, the Leaf Shooters, along the upper Cannon River and west along the Blue Earth and Des Moines rivers. These Dakota peoples constituted four of the Oceti Sakowin of the Dakota Oyate, the Seven Council Fires of the Dakota Nation. The other three groups were the Ihanktunwan, Dwellers at the End, and the Inhanktunwanna, Little Dwellers at the End, who lived between the Minnesota and Missouri rivers, and the Titunwan, Dwellers of the Prairies, who lived west of the Missouri. The Titunwan, the largest of the seven groups then and now, were themselves divided into another seven council fires.²

One of the primary distinctions between the Dakota in Minnesota and other Dakota peoples was language. The peoples of the Oceti Sakowin spoke three mutually intelligible dialects of one language: the D dialect spoken among the four eastern bands, or Dakota; the N dialect spoken by the Ihantunwan and Ihanktunwanna, or Nakota; and the L dialect spoken by the Titunwan, or Lakota. In addition, different Titunwan groups speak slightly different dialects of Lakota, but the four Council Fires of Minnesota Dakota spoke, and continue to speak, different dialects. These groups have also developed some different practices and traditions, but, overall, they share structures of social organization and views of the relationship between the spirit and material worlds.³

The bands’ geographical locations meant they had different experiences with westward-encroaching European Americans. The aftermath of the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 created distinct trajectories among Dakota families. Fewer than a thousand warriors, out of a population of more than seven thousand, fought in the war, but President Abraham Lincoln would sign an order nullifying all treaties with the Dakota in Minnesota and removing them from the state. A few hundred Dakota remained there overtly, under the protection of powerful white men, or clandestinely, in communities protected by geography or as individuals trying to blend in with their European American neighbors. Many Dakota, perhaps half the population in Minnesota, fled westward or northward, where they eventually settled in Canada and North Dakota. Approximately two thousand men, women, and children, whether they were involved or not, were imprisoned and forcibly removed from the state. Consequently, by the early twentieth century, the Eastern Dakota lived on reservations at Santee, Nebraska; Flandreau and Lake Traverse, South Dakota; Spirit Lake, North Dakota; Fort Peck, Montana; and several reserves in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, as well as in the Lower Sioux, Upper Sioux, Prior Lake, and Shakopee communities in Minnesota.⁴

The Dakota in Minnesota before 1862.

The Dakota in Exile. Sioux Valley is the largest Dakota reserve in Canada. A full listing of Dakota reserves and communities in Canada is available at www.aboriginalcanada.gc.ca/

This book focuses on the Dakota, mostly Mdewakantunwan and Wahpekute, who were imprisoned following the war and then taken far from their Minnesota homelands. After the war, the federal government removed them, first to prison camps and then to new lands in Santee, Nebraska. A few years later some, including Mary Faribault’s family, established a community in Flandreau, South Dakota, that embraced Christianity, and the majority of people still in Santee converted as well. No longer able to live from hunting, harvesting wild plants, and cultivating small crops, they turned to farming and other occupations. A significant number of men from these two communities began working for the church, including Mary Faribault’s husband, David Faribault, Jr., and her brother, John Eastman, a grandfather of the baby Mary honored with the moccasins she made.

The lives and experiences of Dakota peoples on other reservations bear some resemblance to those of the Dakota peoples at Santee and Flandreau, but each community followed its own historical path, shaped by internal dynamics as well as by geography and federal policy. Their distinct stories intersect with those of the Dakota at Santee and Flandreau through enduring bonds of kinship and culture. Indeed, Mary Faribault, whose father Tawakanhdiota, Jacob Eastman, helped found the community at Flandreau, lived most of her long life at the Lake Traverse reservation among Sisitunwan and Wahpetunwan Dakota.

Mary’s mother, Wakaninajinwin, died in 1858. Although she did not experience the devastation of war and exile in her brief twenty-seven years, she lived through profound changes: with the decline of the fur trade, Dakota women experienced transformations in their work, including the new practice of making beautiful moccasins and other goods specifically for sale to the increasing numbers of white people living around them. They also witnessed the arrival of Protestant missionaries dedicated to erasing Dakota ways, making Dakota men into farmers and converting Dakota women and men to Christianity.

For the Dakota peoples of Minnesota and all Indigenous peoples, objects carry spiritual meaning and embody family and community relationships. This is especially true for objects created for an individual, for a special accomplishment, or for a life cycle event. Richard W. Hill, Sr., a Tuscarora museum curator, maintains that for many Native peoples, it is impossible to separate spirituality from aesthetic principles, or from community ethics. As Dakota women’s lives were cataclysmically transformed over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nature of their work changed as well, but, in many ways, the meanings embodied in the beaded, quilled, and other ornamented items they created remained much the same as before the dislocation of their nation. They demonstrate cultural continuity, even in the face of war, exile, conversion to Christianity, and the many other dimensions of colonization.⁵

The history of Dakota women in this period broadly parallels the history of Native peoples across the continent. Other Indigenous women exercised similar complex and essential roles in their communities that entailed both material and spiritual obligations and that were defined with more or less flexibility by a clear gender division of labor. The functional art that women created was central to the physical subsistence and spiritual well-being of their people. Like Dakota women, Native women in the northern tier of the United States participated in the fur trade alongside the men in their communities and lived in communities that missionaries and the U.S. government sought to eradicate and reconstitute in their own image. Finally, Indigenous women faced war, violence, and loss of their homelands as the U.S. Army and European American settlers took over Native lands and destroyed Native peoples’ ability to support themselves as their ancestors had for innumerable generations.

For the Dakota, the path to war and its brutal aftermath began in the late eighteenth century with their first contact with European Americans, who began competing with their British and French predecessors in the lucrative fur trade. Contact with the white men—whether French, British, or American—brought changes to the lives of the Dakota, including new materials with which women made their art. Yet, for many decades, stability in the trade allowed the Dakota to sustain relatively intact their subsistence patterns and the culture that grew out of them.

When the United States acquired territories that included the Eastern Dakota’s homelands and increasing numbers of white American farmers moved in, changes came rapidly. Missionaries and civil authorities sought to sever the Dakota from their subsistence economy based on seasonal migrations and to turn them into sedentary farmers. In 1862, the growing presence of white settlers, the increasing strength of the U.S. military in the region, and ongoing efforts by missionaries to Christianize the Dakota erupted into war and genocide. The Dakota who survived were forced to leave their homelands and rebuild communities, having lost nearly one half of their population as well as all of the lands that had sustained their people since their origins at Bdote (Mendota), where the Minnesota River runs into the Mississippi. These events necessarily altered the work of Dakota women: bearing and caring for the next generation; feeding, clothing, and sheltering the older generations; and working not only for physical survival but for cultural and spiritual survival as well.

Women’s work intertwined these realms of existence. Women honored the spirits of ancestors by passing on their traditions to younger generations and as they cared for their children, called wakanyeza, sacred beings. Women brought together these traditions most immediately in special gifts such as moccasins made for children but also in functional art created for ceremonial and everyday use. The Dakota language has no word that translates into art, but the task of making aesthetically rich utilitarian objects expressed the relationships between different realms of experience. According to Mi’kmaq artist and art curator Viviane Gray, Native art is a way of life—a holistic experience that incorporated not only their cultural experiences (Indian and non-Indian) but also their personal and tribal beliefs, historical events, stories, dreams, and personal visions. When Dakota women made moccasins and leggings, for instance, they incorporated all these elements of their lives. In the process of creation, they embellished and adorned them with quills, feathers, bones, and dyes, and, later, with materials acquired from traders, including ribbons, artificial dyes, metal, and beads. Women composed patterns and combined colors and textures in designs that they shared with one another. The objects they created, in their production as well as their use, were central to the identity of the Dakota and other Native peoples.⁶

Only in the last two decades have the creations of Native women—and the craftwork of other women—been recognized as art. Reflecting the influence of feminist and Native artists and art critics, scholars have begun acknowledging that quillworkers, potters, weavers, beadworkers, and others produce artwork of the same technical and aesthetic sophistication as the paintings and sculptures by European and European American men traditionally recognized as art. In response, some museums are attempting to identify the Native creators of objects, not just their tribal origin. Even the phrase unknown artist on a museum label reminds viewers that an individual created the object.⁷

This reevaluation of Native material culture has, in turn, necessitated a reassessment of what is known as tourist art, items made by Indigenous peoples explicitly for sale. While long belittled as inauthentic or too commercial, this genre of creative production has become central to discussions regarding Indigenous people’s strategies for coping with their changing lives. Production of items for sale is now recognized as both a strategy for material survival and a way of resisting an economy that would otherwise force people into low-wage work outside of their own communities. At the same time, production of moccasins, dolls, and other objects explicitly for sale is an essential part of the history of collecting Native America.⁸

Europeans and European Americans began gathering mementos of exotic cultures at the time of first contact. By the nineteenth century, this habit had emerged into a full-blown obsession. Collectors of Native American artifacts scoured the continent for physical vestiges of cultures they believed were on the path to extinction. As colonization of Native lands and genocidal attacks on peoples and cultures advanced, the perpetrators stepped up their efforts to collect evidence of the soon-to-be-gone nations. The powerful myth of the vanishing Indian led to the ransacking of Native communities in order to build collections that eventually stocked natural history museums in cities across North America and Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁹

The arrival of collectors, however, opened new ways for Native women to make economic contributions to their families. Women became increasingly attuned to the tastes of white consumers and began catering to them, even as women continued to produce items for use within their own community. Far from abandoning their own values and traditions, these women created new opportunities for themselves, expanding their creative repertoire as well as their incomes.

The production of this art took place against the backdrop of colonization and genocide. The market for Indian artifacts emerged just as their subsistence economy collapsed under the assaults of land cessions and white settlement. Women responded by accelerating their production for sale. Among the Dakota, this work was arrested by the 1862 war and subsequent incarceration, but it resumed when they were removed to new lands. The story of Dakota women’s art is therefore intertwined with their efforts at survival, and it highlights the relationship between art and survival. Women’s art opens the door to understanding the experiences of women facing multiple layers of assaults on their persons and way of life.

Dakota Women’s Work seeks to sort out interrelated strands in the history of Dakota women and Native women more generally. Chapter I establishes the relationship between Dakota women’s art and Dakota society in the early nineteenth century, when Dakota peoples still controlled their homelands. This ethnographic discussion centers on gender roles and subsistence and defines the cultural context of women’s artistic production. Chapter 2 examines the impact of the declining fur trade and increasing white population on subsistence patterns, focusing on women’s changing relationship to the fur trade and the emergence of artistic production for sale. As the fur trade declined and white farmers arrived in Minnesota, the Dakota faced an onslaught of people dedicated to saving them through a new religion. Missionary efforts and resistance to those efforts, culminating in the 1862 war, constitute the focus of Chapter 3. The full force of genocide is explored in Chapter 4, which details the incarceration and internment of the Dakota in the three and one-half years following the war. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the ways in which the Dakota rebuilt their families, communities, and culture within the new realities of reservation life. Several generations of Mary Faribault’s family experienced these traumas and transformations, and they continued to create beautiful tools for everyday life and for special celebrations. Their stories lie at the heart of this book.

Historians trying to reconstruct the lives of Native peoples face special challenges that multiply when focusing on the lives of women. As a consequence, Dakota Women’s Work draws on a wide range of resources and methodologies. It begins with the voices and actions of Dakota women as they exist in the stories they tell and have told and in the objects they have created; oral tradition, oral history, and material culture together can shape a historical narrative that starts with Dakota women. Yet this narrative must also draw on more conventional historical sources, including official documents, traders’ records, and missionaries’ correspondence and organizational papers. Using problematic sources is always a matter of reading critically, write Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy regarding the use of European and European American men’s documents to study the history of Native women. Such texts must be read with care to sift out the useful evidence from the values and judgments about the lives of the Indigenous people they discuss.¹⁰

In the end, however, the historical record remains thin in many places. Sometimes this makes drawing solid conclusions impossible. In these cases, it is reasonable to speculate carefully, weave together the evidence that does exist, and hypothesize about what additional sources might reveal. This account of the lives of Dakota women at times ventures into this uncertain terrain, but it always makes clear where the gaps in evidence appear.

One certainty that emerges from this study is the common goal of subsistence and survival that united Dakota women and men. Their culture assigned them different roles and tasks, but, in the end, they shared the goal of ensuring the material and spiritual well-being of their family, their village, and their nation. As a result, while Dakota Women’s Work begins with the experiences of women, it necessarily encompasses the lives and experiences of the