We Are Meant to Rise by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCO002000 LITERARY COLLECTIONS / American / General, SOC008000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / General, SOC053000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Regional Studies
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2021-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Healers Are Protectors / Protectors Are Healers

Marcie Rendon

I am an Anishinabe woman. I joke and say, “This is not our first pandemic, and it certainly isn’t our first war.” From smallpox to the Spanish flu to tuberculous and government medical experiments, the sterilization of Native women, and now the Covid-19 pandemic—Native people have survived it all. European folks arrived on the eastern shores with weapons we had never seen, and from day one we were target practice.

United States school curricula teach about the Cherokee’s Longest Walk, but no mention is made of the other long walks Native people have been forced on—the Sandy Lake Tragedy in Minnesota or the Navajo’s longest walk. After warfare broke out between white settlers and the Dakota in southern Minnesota, the Dakota were rounded up by U.S. military and interned at Fort Snelling on the banks of the Mississippi. They were living a bleak existence there when just a three short months after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota in Mankato. During that same time Acts of Congress revoked treaties that had been made between the United States and the Santee Sioux. As a result, the Dakota people who had been interned at Fort Snelling were exiled, by state law, from Minnesota. Forced to leave, they were taunted and spit on by white settlers who had been granted free occupation of Dakota lands.

In May 1863, thirteen hundred Dakota were put on steamboats and sent to the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota. In the first six months, more than two hundred tribal members died. This occurred a mere 158 years ago. No, certainly not our first pandemic nor our first war. The most recent time the U.S. government deployed arms against Native people was in 2016 at Standing Rock on the lands of the Lakota Nation in what is known as North Dakota.

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