Ghost Trails and Places

 en denkjmol

 Today (26 Dec, 2012), marks the 150^th Anniversary of the hanging of 38 of 303 Sioux men who took part in the 1862 Sioux Uprising in southern Minnesota.  The anniversary of this, the largest mass execution in U.S. history, is especially poignant in that it occurred the day after Christmas in stark contrast to the cultural message of the holidays, and that the cultural aspects of both the uprising and its repression have yet to be openly dealt with by the dominant culture – although marking the 150-year anniversary has generally re-opened discussion in a positive direction, though it remains a discussion engaged in mostly by Native American culturalists and Minnesota historians rather than a generalized public conversation. 

    The following is an account of my 23 Sept historical tour of Ramsay County relating to the Uprising and Native American culture in Ramsay County, Minnesota:

   

    Sunday (23 Sept, 2012), I was fortunate to take part in a Ramsey County Public Library outing in honor of the sesquetennial (150^th Anniversary) of the Minnesota (USA) – Sioux War of 1862.

    “1862 – that was before the Mennonites came to American in 1874… what does this have to do with Mennonite culture and history?” one might reasonably ask.  “Quite a lot, in fact,” I would just as reasonably reply.

    The Indian Wars of the American West play an important role in the history and ethic of the Mennonite immigration of the 1870s to North America – especially in the United States.  In particular, the Minnesota – Sioux (or Dakota) War of 1862 specifically opened up much of the area in Southwest Minnesota for later settlement and agricultural development – just in time for speculators to get the townsites and farms of Mountain Lake, Bingham Lake, Windom, Butterfield and others set up and ready to market to the newly arrived immigrant refugees from Alexander II’s increasingly repressive Russia.  

    To be fair, groups such as the Aron Wall congregation, did not arrive in Mountain Lake until 1878 and were in no way directly related to or directly culpable for these events.  In fact, much of the farmland purchased by those early Brüderthaler were tracts being abandoned by previous settlers fleeing the infamous grasshopper hordes of the previous decade.

    On the other hand, these lands had only recently been opened up and made secure by American aggression in the Dakota wars and the newly arrived Mennonites would have been only too aware of this fact in as much as numerous family narratives record intense propaganda on the part of the Tsar’s agents extolling the dangers and terrors the Native America tribes and such uprisings posed to those who chose to leave the safety and security of the Ukrainian veldts and southern Russia for the wild frontier prairies of Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota Territory and Minnesota.

    Not only were lands being opened up and secured by the activities of the United States army and cavalry units, but news of the necessity of such actions in order to encourage and guarantee settlement of those lands was an important consideration for Mennonites pondering a move to the New World in a weigh-off between religious freedom and unknown dangers.

    Finally, this war marked the beginning of a massive ethnic relocation that would greatly influence the Mennonites of the Great Plains culturally by bringing the Dakota peoples to new homes near future Mennonite settlements near Brandon, Manitoba, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Wolf Point and Fort Peck, Montana and many other, smaller reserves.  

    In fact, the establishment of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Reservation in Montana would eventually lead to President Wilson’s decision to open up those lands to settlement between 1911 and 1915 – an invitation many Mennonites would enthusiastically accept as they founded farms, businesses, schools and churches in present-day Lustre, Volt, Grand Prairie, Larslan, Oswego, Frazer and Wolf Point.  Similarly, other Mennonites would settle on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.

    Ghost Trails and Places provided the urban inhabitants of developed landscape the same opportunities afforded those of us who grew up on those rural reservations.  It was easy for us to imagine the Indian villages, hunting camps and horse pastures of the First Nations as we toiled under their shadows summerfallowing or swathing hay.  Remnants of this history are still readily and easily apparent to even the most casual hiker.  

    The cities of St Paul, Roseville, White Bear Lake, Little Canada and Centerville have largely expanded over the earlier native landscape of Ramsey County, mostly erasing such physical reminders of their own extensive period of Dakota habitation – but not completely.  

    Not-so-amateur historian David Riehle has developed a remarkable annual tour of the accessible former village sites and farm grounds of the Dakota or Kaposia culture in and around St Paul.  In fact, the original village center of St Paul was a Dakota settlement Imnizaskadan, meaning “White Cliffs,” along the banks of the Mississippi adjacent to the current municipal airport.  While all traces of the village have long disappeared, the site itself remains visible to visitors from a well maintained vantage point in front of the terminal – a vastly under-visited yet highly-recommended, tourist destination.  

    According to Reihle, Imnizaskadan was abandoned in the 1837 Treaty and the Dakota or Kaposia moved downriver near South St Paul and finally to the reserves along the Minnesota River where the 1862 war began.

    Reihle’s tour is filled with narrative and facts – both I and my travel companion, who grew up in Roseville, learned a lot.  The greatest strength of this tour lies not in the narrative but in the actuality of being almost physically transported back to the geography of the Dakota and seeing the remnants of this geography underneath the modern urban construction.

    Our other major destination for the day would be Lac au Sauvages or Savage Lake and Gervais (Jarvis) Lake.  

    Savage Lake, located in Little Canada, was known to the Dakota as Day Camp because it was a day’s journey from Imnizaskadan – a day’s journey with all the implements and supplies necessary to move from the farms and winter camp along the river, up the bluff (via Swede Hollow) to the summer grounds and autumn ricing lakes around Savage Lake and points west and north.  

    To illustrate this point, we investigated several former trails now located under railroads and highways such as the Trout Brook Ravine (I 35-E), the Goose Lake Trail (present-day Centerville Road), Rice Lake Road Trail, Shakopee Trail and the trail from the Kaposia villages.

    One finds it difficult to adequately describe the usefulness of this tour.  While one could easily trace the route of Trout Creek on a map, the reality of the former world and our changes or impact on this landscape and cultural geography become apparent only by physically following the remains of these trails, in seeing the rise and fall of the ridges that had to be traversed (involving a 300-foot climb from the riverbottom), and the physical sense of security that one would feel in inhabiting Savage Lake.

    Only from there and from seeing the eccentric bends and junctions in these old trail routes, can one realize Riehle’s hypothesis that Savage Lake may have been a major junction of trade, hunting, agricultural, commercial and migration routes not far from the boundary between the Dakota and Ojibwe nations (near present-day White Bear Lake) – a busy intersection along the essential highway system of a former culture.

    While Reihle encourages us to consider the disjoint between this populous and wealthy urban center (St Paul), and the present reality of the Dakota descendants on Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota (the statistically poorest county in the United States), descendants of the Mennonite refugee settlers can take away the historical, geographic and moral lessons of our own immigration narrative and its impact on the geography, culture and ethnicity of the Great Plains.

    Clearly, I do not find any ethical questions in the Mennonite settlement of these areas – the early settlers had little knowledge of cultural and geographic realities prior to their arrival, or of the minds and politics of the governments, railroads and speculators from which they purchased their farms and communities.  But one would find it compelling to better understand the role the Mennonites more-or-less naively played in the resettlement and relocation of the First Nations tribes of the greater Agassiz and Assiniboia regions and to perhaps become more understanding of and sympathetic towards Native American claims for restorative justice – to the point of establish a spirit of supportive cooperation rather than fear or competition over lost opportunities, scarce resources and limited futures.

    In fact, Russländer Mennonite descendants are somewhat uniquely positioned to understand and empathize with the impact of that stage in history on the Dakota culture in its similarity to the forced migrations, loss of lands and villages, homelessness, often near starvation, deprivation and generally negative refugee status experienced by the Russian Mennonites who remained behind to experience the Russian Revolution, Collectivization, two world wars, forced removal, expulsion and the near-tragic ending of our own historical Great Trek as the lands in Chortitza, Borosenko, Molotschna, Samara and the Kaban were forcibly sold-off and culturally abandoned to new inhabitants and politicos who felt little or no sympathy with the previous inhabitants of that historic geography.

    Ghost Trails and Places would be a great tour to take as a means of initiating more competent and beneficial dialogue regarding this past in North America and possibly how the Mennonites of Latin America, especially those engaged in the current Chaco dialogues, might more successfully and ethically help resolve past injustices and feelings of injustice.  As they always say, it doesn’t hurt to “walk a mile in another’s shoes” when attempting to better understand their perspectives and motivations – even if walking really means taking a comfortable drive in a restored 1957-era city bus.

‘tag.

For further reading:

Beckstrom, Maja - Dakota War: 150th anniversary of mass execution leaves unhealed wounds

En lostijch Weinachte!

Holiday Traditions from the Prairies of the Assiniboia  

(Central Canada, North-central USA)

(c) Lauren Grace O'Malley, courtesy www.vintagewings.ca

The Shepherd, a CBC-1 Christmas Radio Tradition:

Allan Maitland reads the CBC-1 Christmas Classic, The Shepherd

CBC-1's As it Happens reveals the story behind "The Shepherd"

The Man and the Birds, a Paul Harvey classic from the Great Plains:

Paul Harvey tells the Classic tale The Man and the Birds 

The Man and the Birds by Paul Harvey transcribed by Keiki Hendrix 17 Dec 2010

The man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge, he was a kind decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas Time. It just didn’t make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man.

“I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a hypocrite. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound…Then another, and then another. Sort of a thump or a thud…At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

(c) wallpapersus.com/snow-birds-blue-jay

Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it.

Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them…He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms…Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.

And then, he realized that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me…That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him.

“If only I could be a bird,” he thought to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to safe, warm…to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand.”

Courtesy http://www.free-hdwallpapers.com

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells – Adeste Fidelis – listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas.

And he sank to his knees in the snow.

Peace.

Bruderthaler

A Mennonite Tomte

Courtesy http://jeffsprayerconnection.blogspot.com

Ne Too’frädenheit

    According to various Mennonite historians, theologians and sociologists, Anabaptists have historically been quite ambivalent towards the concept of Christmas.  Such was not my experience growing up.  In fact, I can recall at least two sermons from childhood on keeping the “Christ” in ‘X-mas’. 

    Sociologically speaking, and coming from five generations of public school teachers, Christmas traditions and celebrations, as we know them today, probably entered into our North American lives and folkways via the public schools which were mandatory, non-Mennonite and well-meaningly assimilationist.  Further inroads were probably made by participation in and adherence to post-World War English-language, non-Anabaptist Sunday school curriculums, conference fellowships and ecumenical holiday drives (including the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC)’s school packets and children’s gift box campaigns).

    At the same time, many Mennonite folk holiday traditions seem so innate to our culture and world-view that one can hardly consider a time when they would not have been followed – including the baking, the hymn sings, the family and church fellowships, the church Christmas programs and a general feeling of shared peace and fellowship for at least that one night with all of creation – especially, for us former farmers, with our non-human companions – both domesticated and wild.

Burning Passions in Southern Africa

May we be willing reapers of the Word, not Sowers only!

(c) Matthew Wettlaufer, The Murder of Matthew Shepherd*

    Sometimes readers’ responses can take you a little bit by surprise.  In that potential readers have been fairly warned that these essays are exercises in free-style thinking rather than stated opinions, I find it pretty easy to not take things too personally, but once in a while a negative reaction forces you to delve a bit deeper in to a topic.  Such is the case with a short paragraph written on Ludovic-Mohamed Zaheb’s intention to found a gay and feminist-friendly mosque in Paris, France ( see:  French Mosques for Women and Gays? ).

    The phrase, or I will admit, paragraph in question is as follows:

Not that we can be too hard on them.  News coverage also indicates numerous Anglo-American Fundamentalist leaders stumbling over the question of whether or not practicing gays should face the Biblical death penalty – a situation American-backed “Christian” conservatives in Uganda seem too close to implanting.  (Try placing that one in the Minnesota constitution!)

    'Them' referring to violent anti-gay Islamic Fundamentalists in Europe and North Africa.  

    The point of contention being whether or not anti-gay, often border-line hate legislation in some of Africa’s more volatile nations is being generated and funded by Fundamentalist anti-gay Christian groups out of the United States.  In this case, the clear answer is yes – in fact, many of the more extreme anti-gay Evangelical groups in the United States openly brag about their activities in Africa on their websites.

Mennonites of Congo, Burkino Faso

Notes from 20 Sept 2012 AIMM Centennial Roundtable at Goda Cafe, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Pastor Benjamin Mubenga, Evangelical Mennonite Church of Congo

“It is not good to cut the roots of this tree which has now grown so grand.”  [The tense in this is off – it seemed convey more a sense of we are preserving what is and celebrate it … not that it was actually threatened].

How can we bring the Good News to the rest of Africa?

a.      Spiritual priorities

b.      Community development

Question:  Many American Evangelicals feel that the missionary focus should be on Evangelism and that the church should not be distracted by social or economic development issues.  Would you agree or how would you address such criticism?