The Dakota Prisoner Of War Letters
A Review Of A Powerful Narrative
By Dakota Wind
A Review Of A Powerful Narrative
By Dakota Wind
BISMARCK, N.D. - I received
my copy of Dr. Clifford Canku’s The
Dakota Prisoner Of War Letters: Dakota Kaškapi Okicize Wowapi through the
mail and I carefully removed it from the box it came in. I was excited to read it, but not joyous to do so. Its about a real life tragedy, the consequences of which the Dakota and Lakota are still living with today.
My initial perception
of the book, my judgment of the book based on its cover, was that I was getting
a book in the vein of Albert White Hat’s Life’s
Journey. In the case of White Hat’s book, the transcriber, Mr. John
Cunningham, and White Hat took great pains to keep the oration of the book even
as a translation into English as how a traditional Lakota would speak English.
White Hat’s work retains the “flavor” of the language.
Canku’s
book goes a step further. Not only did White Hat and his associates invest
several years translating beautifully hand-written letters in Dakota to English,
Canku keeps the original Dakota, but he adds a word for word translation, then a
free translation into English which contains Dakota connotations.
Dr. Canku carefully reads a letter of a Dakota prisoner.
There are
two things which reached out to me about this book. The first being that its
about the Dakota who became prisoners of war following the Minnesota Dakota
Conflict of 1862. The book contains letters, first-person accounts of innocent
men and women who were wrongly accused and imprisoned. They weren’t US
Citizens, so due process didn’t apply to them, so they were guilty and
imprisoned until they were determined to be innocent or no longer a threat.
Part of the
story of the letters involves a missionary to the Dakota people, Rev. Stephen
Riggs.
Riggs, a
missionary among the Dakota in the 1850s, was present when cases involving the
Dakota were judged, as fast as the service at a fast food restaurant. In one
day, Riggs saw forty Dakota cases judged and sentenced to death in about seven
hours. Some of the cases took mere minutes.
The missionary Stephen Riggs.
Missionaries,
including Riggs, visited the Dakota prisoners, and converted a captive audience,
while writing their letters of appeal for them, letters to loved ones at
different agencies and letters to military commanders pledging to never more
resist the American expansion westward.
The second
thing which reached out to me was that the book is bi-lingual. There aren’t
many resources published in both Dakota and English. As a person whose first
language is English, and being a Dakota-Lakota person, having the original
Dakota language present for me to read and learn is wonderful.
The most
intriguing part of this book is the scholar himself. Dr. Clifford Canku. He is
an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate and a retired Presbyterian
minister. Canku is a common man and his stirring introduction includes early
efforts from the previous teams he worked with at Flandreau ,
SD , the Sisseton
Wahpeton College ,
and then North Dakota
State University .
Even though his name is on the cover alongside Michael Simon, Canku is quick to
acknowledge the efforts of others.
Taoyate Duta, His Red Nation, more commonly known as "Little Crow."
Before
being brought on to earliest efforts of this translation project, Canku was visited
by the spirit of Taoyate Duta (His Red Nation; aka Little Crow). Throughout the
translation process, a spiritual presence was always present. When the project
wrapped, Canku received another visitor through a dream. He was at a sundance
in this dream and a old man was brought into the east gate where his name was
announced four times. The grandfather’s name: Wakaŋboide (Sacred Blazing Fire). The grandfather came to Canku and
said, “Hau, wičohaŋ ečanupi kiŋ de wašhté
do.” (Yes, the work you are doing is good, it is so.)
Canku is
deliberate in that the reader, casual or otherwise, clearly understands that
the book is about the Dakota prisoners of war. There are plenty of books out
there, and more so with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and
the Dakota War, but Canku’s and Simon’s book is the only published primary
resource from the perspective of the people who fought, the people who
defended, and the people who were entirely innocent of the 1862 Minnesota
Dakota Conflict.
Camp Kearny, where the Dakota prisoners of war were taken.
An excerpt
of one of the letters places the reader in the first person. Wiŋyaŋ, or Woman, writes to her relative
Pa Yuĥa, Curly Head, about starving and the heartbreak in the
prison camp at Davenport , Iowa :
…my heart is so very broken, it is
so. Last summer, we all know one terrible event has occurred, and always we are
very heartbroken, because now again, my heart if broken very much, because this
winter we are without, we are all suffering. I hate to live, it is so. And now
where will they take us?...now we don’t know where they will take us, and
therefore I thought maybe we will never see all of you, and therefore my heart
is very sad.
Another
letter by Stands On Earth Woman tells her relative His Country that she is
recently widowed and with a new baby, at the prison camp. She asks for her
relative’s assistance because she literally has nothing and she’s starving.
Get this
book if you are interested in the “other” side, the forgotten side of the
story. Get this book to support a native elder and scholar, but get this book
so that we never forget what happened as a result of this terrible conflict.
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