Following the surrender of the Dakota in September 1862, thousands of Dakota people were forcibly removed from their homelands in Minnesota as part of a two-front war to preserve and maintain U.S. empire. Loyal Americans fought to end the Rebellion in the south and to exterminate its Native neighbors in the west. Many found themselves in concentration camps, like Fort Snelling, designed to separate Dakota from white society.[1] “It was a gloomy, inhospitable site,” one Dakota described Fort Snelling, “on bottomland that turned to mud and offered no protection from the icy winter winds.”[2] For Dakota confined in Fort Snelling, the goal of U.S. policy was clear: theft of Dakota land and the extermination of its people.
The forced removal of Dakota to Fort Snelling indicates two issues. First, it was designed to separate Dakota from white society following the U.S.-Dakota War. Second, the land in which Dakota people lived would now be transformed into a white agricultural landscape. White American empire transformed Minnesota into an agricultural and extraction-based economy that uprooted Dakota from their traditional homelands.
Simone Weil provides an important theoretical framework for this analysis in The Need For Roots. For Weil, uprootedness grows from two primary factors: military conquest and economic domination, both consistently intertwined under capitalism.[3] “But when the conqueror remains a stranger in the land of which he has taken possession,” says Weil, “uprootedness becomes an almost mortal disease among the subdued population.”[4] We see this clearly through the practice of American empire, especially in the context of the Dakota/white settler experience in Minnesota. The very presence of white settlers on Minnesota land initiated Dakota uprootedness through their exclusionary use of waterways and their appropriation of much-needed food supplies. White consumption threatened each of these essential resources upon which the Dakota relied. The primary goal for this expansion into Minnesota was to create open space for what I term the “built rural environment.” White settlers came to this place to seize new opportunities for themselves: lands for farming, trees for timbering, and iron for mining.
The Minnesota landscape would be transformed from the Dakota Oyate (homeland) to this built environment designed around the extraction of resources.[5] The goal was to “make white men” of Dakota people, transforming them, according to Commissioner of Indian Affairs William P. Dole, into a civilized group with “industry, thrift, [and] economy.”[6] Those who rejected assimilation stood in the way of white empire and blocked a “whole system of Northwestern Development,” as James Wickes Taylor blustered in The Sioux War (1863).[7] During the process of removing Dakota people, the government hoped to transform the Minnesotan landscape into a capitalistic enterprise.