Whitestone Hill: Making it Right

By Winona LaDuke

winona@winonaladuke.com

There’s not really a word for reconciliation, it's said in our language. There’s a word for making it right. To talk about reconciliation in terms of the relationship between Indigenous people and North Dakota, South Dakota or Minnesota, would assume that there was a good relationship to begin with. That’s a stretch.

There is a word for making it right: gwayakochigemin. That’s what we must try and do. Gwayakizhichigemin: making it right.

It’s a long ride to Whitestone Hill from Crow Creek, but the memory and story needs to be told and retold. Each morning, we awake to prayer and drum, the elders tell the stories, and singers share their songs with the spirits and the riders. The ride is full of young people (twenty or more who are teenagers), a few middle aged folks and some elders.

Jimmy Hallum from Santee is one of the leaders and he tells us the story of Whitestone Hill each day. Myron Johnson and Volney Fasthorse join him. He thanks us for riding for the spirits. Last year, the state of North Dakota changed the name of the Whitestone Hill memorial from a battlefield to a massacre site, a step Jimmy Hallum, and the other Dakota appreciate, but it really is not enough.

Gwayakichichigemin. That’s the question of how you make it right.

Riding on horseback 200 or so miles through Dakota Territory, a.k.a. eastern South Dakota and across the border to Forbes, North Dakota one can see a lot: fields of GMO corn for ethanol plants, plans for a carbon sequestration pipeline and shrinking towns. People come to greet us and bring jam, fresh bread and prayers. This is the fifth year of the ride and we are remembered.

And we see the landscape. Is it so much better, after all that “progress,” than the 50 million buffalo and 250 species of prairie grass that were once here? Was it worth it?

That’s the kind of question one asks on the ride.

Some 40 or so Dakota, Anishinaabe, Lakota and allies annually ride the Whitestone Hill Memorial ride. We remember and try to heal from one of the worst massacres to occur on the northern plains. It’s a massacre that is never spoken of or acknowledged in North Dakota history, but it is a story well remembered by Lakota and Dakota whose ancestors perished, and then scattered to the reservations to mourn, console grief and try and piece together a life again.

Whitestone Hill is a hard place to find. The Dakota knew this place like the back of their hands, as many times before the massacre they had gathered there for hunting and harvesting. It’s said that this is a place where the White Buffalo Calf Woman came to give instructions, and the terrain, a hill, a lake ravine and more made it a perfect hunting camp. That was then.

Now, with North Dakota’s oversight, the 12 inch by 12 inch sign says Whitestone Hill. (Basically, you must know where you are going.) The “monument” is a soldier with a bugle atop the hill, surrounded by 22 soldiers who died there. In a word, it’s shameful.

It has been called a battlefield by those who write history. Heavily armed battalions from Iowa and Nebraska shot into pieces hundreds of Dakotas and Lakotas who were camped with the last remaining buffalo herds, harvesting, praying, mourning their losses from the 1862 hanging of 38 Dakota in Mankato. Having chased the Dakota across the vast expanse of prairie in brutal wars, on September 3, 1863, General Alfred Sully's troops attacked a hunting camp of 600 lodges. They shot their babies, their horses, dogs, burned their tipis and food.

General Sully was in charge, with one company of the Seventh Iowa Cavalry, two of the Sixth Iowa Cavalry, under the commanding officer Major House, and the Second Nebraska Cavalry under Colonel Robert Furnas. As George Belden reports in his eyewitness account, the order from General Sully was to hold the Indians in check until they could finish his council with Chiefs Two Bears and Little Soldiers, both neutral towards the US. While Sully negotiated, the Iowa Captain Bayne “stepped out in front of the men and said, ‘“Boys we have come a long way to fight Indians and now that we have found them, I am in favor of whaling them, and shall we advance?”

According to Belden, the men made a call to move forward and Captain Bayne said, “...Each man pick his Indian…there was no word of fire but every soldier leveled his carbine. The Indians were seen raising their hands like they wanted to shake hands. They were bringing a flag… (that) flag was about him as he fell….”

That’s how it started. It seems the Dakota sought peace. They had enough of war.

Once the shooting started, the Cavalry went after those who were fleeing. “Sully ordered Colonel Furnas, commanding the Second Nebraska Cavalry, forward at full speed to cut off the Indians' retreat,” reports an account published by The State Historical Society of North Dakota. Sully sent Colonel David S. Wilson, with part of the Sixth Iowa, to the north side of the village. Major House and the artillery battery charged toward the center of the village.

“Although the Indians scattered in as many directions as possible, most tried to escape down the ravine,” the State Historical Society of North Dakota continues. “As the Indians came to a saucer-like broadening of the ravine about one-half mile from the village, they began to gather in a large throng. There they were surrounded by Colonel Furna's cavalry, Major House's battalion, and Colonel Wilson's Sixth Iowa troops […] Furnas ordered his men to dismount and advance toward the ravine on foot. When his men were within a few hundred yards, he ordered them to begin firing. The other troops followed his lead, dismounted, and closed in on the Indians.’”

“…The light of the following day revealed a field of carnage,” according to The State Historical Society of North Dakota account. “Dead and wounded men, women, and children lay in the campsite and in the ravine. Tipis stood vacant or drooped in various stages of destruction […]personal items, tools, utensils, weapons, toys, and injured or dying horses and dogs littered the ground. Injured women protected babies and the little children. As the soldiers looked after the wounded and gathered the dead, Sully moved his camp to the battlefield. While some squads of soldiers patrolled the region searching for escapees, other men were put to work digging graves and destroying the village and Indian possessions.” 

“[…] For two days, military patrols guarded while troops destroyed Indian property,” the report continues. “Tipis, buffalo hides, wagons, travois, blankets, and perhaps as much as half a million pounds of buffalo meat were stacked and burned… Troops threw pots, kettles, weapons, and other things that would sink into the lake...” Seven hundred horses were killed or captured.

How do you heal from that?

Pray and ride.

As we ride into Whitestone, I think of the joy of those going in. They were looking forward to the gathering, songs and the buffalo hunt which would feed their families. There must have been laughter and gratitude. I felt their presence, and as we rode with young people, dogs and forty or so horses, we reaffirm that memory.

As we get closer, it is more somber. We ride for all those who cannot, and the horses and dogs they killed. We ride up the hill, fast, and we bring our dogs too. It is how we remember.

“Ride for the ones who died here, the babies, children, young mothers, grammas and grampas, for the young girls violated and the men who used their bodies as shields so that others could flee,” instructs Jimmy Hallum. “Ride for them. Show no fear. You riders are warriors.”

And then, forty or fifty riders ride at full speed up the hill. The youth are in the lead, the grammas and grandpas come behind. This is a way of healing; we do our part to begin.

North Dakota should come clean on history and begin to make it right. This March, Minnesota returned 1280 acres —about two square miles of land —to the Dakota, including what’s known as the Upper Sioux Agency.

That’s where annuities were withheld by Andrew Myrick, who said,” Let them eat grass.”

That act resulted in the starvation and death among Dakota people leading to the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, the mass execution in Mankato the same year, the internment of Dakota families at Fort Snelling that winter and Dakota exile from the state. Then came Whitestone Hill, a year later.

“Everyone in this room knows, the Yellow Medicine people know, our Dakota and Ojibwe brothers and sisters know, when there’s an official treaty signing or official documents, that almost always ended in sorrow and tears for your community,” Governor Walz said at the March ceremony commemorating the transfer of the land. “Today is not that day…what we're here to do: to return this land to the original caretakers.”

“We are honored to be part of doing the right thing for the Dakota people, but also doing the right thing for the state of Minnesota,” said Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Commissioner Sarah Strommen.

“It’s a simple truth, what we’re talking about here,” Upper Sioux Tribal Chairman Kevin Jensvold told MPR News. “None of us were here back then to participate in the wrongs that happened, but we’re here today helping to make it right,”

I think those 22 soldiers should go home, the Whitestone Hill monument should be scrapped, and the Iowa and Nebraska officers should be tried for War Crimes. And we will pray and ride for those who cannot.

Someone needs to make it right. Gwayakochiigedaa. Let’s make it right.