This is Dakota Land - Expanded Moments, Oct. 1 & 13, 2016

A bright red maple leaf drifts haltingly down from high above, like a marionette being slowly lowered on her strings.
    ~ Gibbs Farm Museum, Oct. 1, 2016

Like squirrels hoarding acorns for the winter, maples and birches seem to seize sunlight in their golden leaves, holding it for the dark winter nights.
    ~ Interstate 94 between Alexandria and St. Paul, Oct. 13, 2016

These two Moments in the Park draw on time spent with family and connections to our history. On October 1, the Gibbs Farm Museum held their annual apple fest. Maintained by the Ramsey County Historical society, Gibbs Farm is a portion of the land purchased by Jane and Heman Gibbs in 1849, shortly after Minnesota opened as a territory. The site includes the family home and barn, a recreation of the original 10-foot by 12-foot sod home, as well as typical Dakota homes and structures, reflecting Jane’s lifelong relationship with the Dakota.     (To continue the story, click "Read More," below)

The farm museum is just down the street from my own childhood home, and I remember visiting as a child, especially the scrumptious caramel apples from the apple festival. I enjoyed the chance to visit again with my mom and my own children. We learned about pioneer and Dakota food; touched soft rabbit and coarse bear fur; sat in the desks of the one-room schoolhouse, where my mom recalled the not-so-different schools her older siblings attended; told stories in the tipi; and, of course, sampled the caramel apples.

More poignantly, we gathered with aunts, uncles, and cousins on a sparkling sunny day on October 13, to remember and celebrate the life of my grandfather. He had passed away on the tenth, ten days after his ninety-eighth birthday. During the months near the end of his life he was often heard to say, “Life’s pretty good up until 95. After that, it goes downhill.”

A cabinet-maker and mechanic by trade, he was a meticulous craftsman. Born in 1918, he came of age during the Great Depression, experience that persisted in lifelong frugality. Capable of fixing almost anything, he usually did, many times over. But he had a sense of adventure as well. He loved to travel, embarking on several journeys to Sweden to visit with cousins there, and his favorite mode of transport was his motorcycle. My father and his siblings finally made him give up riding his own bike around his ninetieth birthday. After that, he had to settle for riding in a sidecar in parades with a motorcycle club that adopted him as an honorary member. I suspect it is not often that the funeral of a 98 year-old features an honor guard of Harley-Davidsons.

Driving down the highway on the way home, I was struck by how the trees seemed to gather the sunlight in their golden leaves, savoring it as my grandfather savored a glass of beer at his last birthday party, enjoying the simple pleasures right up until the end.

Revisiting these moments in 2022, having served on the Land Acknowledgement Task Force at St. Paul’s UCC, made me want to know more about the story of Jane Gibbs and my own family’s history in Minnesota. The task force has been intentional about honoring the history of the Dakota and their integral connection to the land we now occupy and working toward healing in our relationship with them. We have engaged with others in the congregation to educate ourselves about the many ways colonialism has and continues to harm Native Americans, and particularly the role of the Christian Church in perpetuating such pain. We have worked to bring Native voices into the conversation and to understand the complexities of how they were forced from the land to the point of banishment from Minnesota. In light of this work, it seemed important to acknowledge and to know more about how my own neighborhood and family were entangled in this history.

Jane Gibbs' relationship with the Dakota
It turns out that Jane Gibbs’ story is truly unique. Jane’s life is also relatively well chronicled, thanks to a biography written by her daughter and a number of other detailed secondary sources. In 1834, when she was five years old and living in Batavia, New York, Jane’s mother was severely injured in a fall. Her father sent Jane and her siblings to stay with relatives and friends while he stayed with their mother at the hospital. The friends Jane stayed with were also hosting missionary J.D. Stevens and his family at the time. The Stevens family had recently suffered the death of a young daughter, and, according to Jane’s daughter’s account, J.D. Stevens’ wife became quite attached to Jane. The Stevens family was on their way to Minnesota, on an assignment to “serve” (i.e. convert) the Mdewakanton tribe of the Dakota. Apparently believing that Jane’s mother was unlikely to recover, and that they could give Jane a “better life,” the Stevenses “adopted” Jane and took her with them to Minnesota.

The Stevenses’ actions strike me as more akin to kidnapping than adoption. They did not inform her parents of their intentions, and Jane told her descendents of  leaving one stop on their journey suddenly in the middle of the night when J.D. Stevens overheard word of a party (Jane’s father and two uncles) searching for a young girl. The belief that they could provide a better life than her own father, with or without her mother, seems to speak to the inherent arrogance of the zealous missionary conviction that they know what is best for everyone. It is the same tendency toward domination that later gave rise to the “kill the Indian to save the man” philosophy behind Indian boarding schools.

Nevertheless, Jane spent four years of her childhood living with Cloud Man’s village on the shore of Bde Maka Ska, and another two years with Wabasha’s band south of the Twin Cities. Cloud Man and his village were conducting an experiment in adaptation, encouraged by Indian Agent Lawrence Taliaferro. While still traveling seasonally to hunt and gather wild rice, they were also attempting a more settled form of agriculture, growing crops at their summer village site. Jane and her “adoptive” brothers found friends and playmates among the children of Cloud Man’s village and learned much of the Dakota language. According to Jane’s children, her Dakota playmates were fascinated by Jane’s stories of how she came to live in Minnesota, and gave her a Dakota name meaning “Little Bird that was Caught.” Though the Stevenses and Jane left Minnesota when Jane was twelve, Jane’s childhood among the Dakota established lifelong friendships.

Jane married Heman Gibbs in November of 1848. The following spring, Jane persuaded him to move to the newly “opened” Minnesota territory, where they purchased a homestead just outside Minneapolis and St. Paul. The homestead happened to be located on a trail frequently used by the Dakota during seasonal trips north to ricing lakes. We don’t know whether that feature of the location was a factor in the Gibbs’ selection, but it seems plausible that it was. Over the next thirteen years, Dakota, including Jane’s childhood friends, regularly stopped to visit the Gibbses on their seasonal trips. Jane’s daughter recalled that they were welcomed to stay in the house for their weeks’ long visits. Jane’s family frequently traded with the Dakota, dealing fairly in their exchanges in a relationship based on friendship and, most likely, Jane’s understanding of Dakota principles of reciprocity.

Jane saw the increasing struggles of her Dakota friends, as they were subjected to eminently unfair exchanges with traders and Indian agents and repeatedly cheated out of even the meager treaty payments they had been promised in exchange for giving up their rights on the land. Jane’s daughter recalled seeing how sad her mother looked during their last visit, writing, “She could see how they had been wronged.” Jane fed her friends as best she could, probably wishing she could do more to help.

The Dakota last visited Jane early in the summer of 1862. That August, after years of witnessing their families struggle and facing starvation while government representatives refused access to treaty-promised resources, tensions finally snapped, and a group of Dakota warriors attacked a settler family. The attack led to a war lasting several weeks and inevitably ending in defeat for the Dakota. In retribution, the U.S. government banished all Dakota from the state of Minnesota. Elders, women, and children were captured and held at a concentration camp at Fort Snelling for the winter before being forcibly removed to Crow Creek reservation, in South Dakota. The federal government also formally revoked all treaties with the Dakota and executed 38 men in a mass hanging the day after Christmas.

My ancestors in Minnesota
My own ancestors were somewhat distanced from this acute conflict in both time and place. Thanks to extensive genealogical research conducted by my dad’s eldest brother, I know that all of his great-grandparents were still in Scandinavia in 1862. Seven of the eight emigrated to Minnesota between 1866 and 1883, while the eighth was born in Minnesota in 1870, to parents who had emigrated in 1865 and 1866. All of my dad’s great-grandparents settled in Belle River township, in and around Alexandria.

This area has a complicated history of Native American settlement and treaties. Originally part of Dakota homelands, Anishinaabe occupied the region in the late 1600s, at the end of their western migration. An 1825 treaty demarcating territories among the Native nations in what would become Minnesota drew the line dividing Dakota and Anishinaabe territory just south of Alexandria’s location. Then, in 1847, another treaty took the land from the Anishinaabe as a place to settle Ho-Chunk people forcibly moved from their ancestral lands in Wisconsin and southeastern Minnesota.

Encounters with Native Americans do not feature prominently in the stories related in my uncle’s accounts of family history, perhaps because most had already been forced out of the area by the time my ancestors arrived. Though one of my great-great-grandmothers noted in her writings that, “The Indians lived in the thick woods [around our homestead]; we saw them often. But they were peaceable. Sometimes they would come up to our place, wanting to trade deer meat for bread.” Two sets of my great-great-grandparents had homestead farms on Anishinaabe treaty land. The other two made their livelihoods as carpenters and builders. Of course, their customers would have been primarily homestead farmers.

Reckoning with history
Both Jean Gibbs and my ancestors benefitted from land the U.S. government appropriated from the Indigenous people of Minnesota, though none of them got rich off of it in the way that some traders and Indian agents did. Each of these farming and building families was trying to scrape together a livelihood within the system in which they were embedded. It also seems that they tried as best they could to live respectfully and with friendly relationships with their Indigenous neighbors.

Looking back, it seems easy to criticize homesteaders and other European immigrants for taking advantage of land made available as a result of unjust treaties. Such criticisms are justifiable, and can serve as an important part of reckoning with our own generational privilege. Four generations later, I certainly have more advantages than the great-great-grandchildren of the Dakota who were exiled from their homeland. But we would also do well to recognize the parallels between our ancestors’ circumstances and actions and our own. In doing so, we can work for a just response now, rather than wishing for one from the past.

In our time, the benefits we gain from using fossil fuels are much the same, if not far more fraught, as those our ancestors gained from stolen land. As has been exposed by pipeline protests across North America, fossil fuel extraction disproportionately harms Indigenous peoples. And the effects of climate chaos wrought by fossil fuel combustion are disproportionately felt by Indigenous and other vulnerable peoples around the planet. Yet even with this knowledge made absolutely clear (an advantage our ancestors probably didn’t have), how many of us are able to fully disentangle ourselves from the fossil fuel-driven economy as we work to provide for our own families?

Moving toward healing
So what is to be done? That is a big, complicated question that I wrestle with every day. As a complex question, its answer comes in many parts. One part of the answer may be found by imagining what our living in this land might have looked like if there were more people like Jane Gibbs, who had deep and respectful relationships with the Dakota and other Indigenous peoples. What if our ancestors had had the humility to learn from Indigenous peoples, rather than forcing European livelihoods and values on them or trying to eradicate them? What if we try now to salvage some humility and work toward healing?

Among the many things we could learn from our Indigenous neighbors is a way of living in deep relationship and connection with the land and all the many beings with whom we share it. That relationship begins with awareness and understanding. The practices that underlie Moments in the Park can serve as a good starting point for building those relationships. Paying attention to the many varieties of trees, plants, birds, bugs, and other beings around us. Observing their unique colors, textures, shapes, and behaviors to begin to know and recognize them as distinct beings, rather than blending into a background “environment.” Watching daily and seasonal cycles and finding ways to live within their rhythms. Being open to the beauty and wonder inherent in each being, each place, each moment, and honoring that worth with gratitude. Learning ways to co-create with our neighbors, human and otherwise, and enhance the harmony of the places we call home. Living deeply into our home place so that we become a part of it, it becomes a part of us, and we gain a sense of belonging to the land, rather than it belonging to us.

Of course, we should not stop at appreciating the grace and intricacy of our ecosystems. Ideally, that appreciation will impel us to action, working toward healing, regeneration, and justice. For Indigenous peoples, one vital aspect of justice is to return what was taken from them. Since so much was taken, there is much to return, from facilitating efforts to strengthen Indigenous languages, to rematriating seeds of ancestral plant varieties to their peoples, to supporting Indigenous arts and culture.

At its core, though, justice must reunite the land with her people. To many descendants of settlers, the idea of “land back” is frightening because it seems to be a call to give up our own homes. That interpretation’s logic grows out of the idea that land is property and can only be “owned” by one person or group at a time. Some Native Americans may indeed harbor a desire for whites to be removed from the land, which I think is understandable. But, in my experience, most seek a state where we can live in harmony with each other and the land. In this context, “land back” could take the form of models that return control of land to Indigenous hands, while retaining the possibility for others to live and work with the land. Such models acknowledge the ancestral wisdom of Native Americans in being a part of their tribe’s homelands and the benefits for all beings in the ecosystem of following that wisdom. 

For example, the Dishgamu Humboldt Community Land Trust, in the Humboldt Bay Area of Northern California, returns land to the stewardship of the Wiyot tribe. The Wiyot manage the land and direct land use decisions toward regenerative economic development, affordable housing creation, and ecological and cultural restoration. The projects and enterprises that take place on entrusted land include both native and non-native people. Models like this could be replicated with tribes throughout Turtle Island (North America), empowering tribes to care for the land that their ancestors nurtured for generations and building cooperative relationships with descendants of settlers. Community Land Trust arrangements like Dishgamu Humboldt could transform not only how we live on the land, but how we think of the land in relation to our lives.

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Sources
Farnham, Priscilla. 2014. Expanding Our Understanding of the Past: The Sod House and Dakota Kin at the Gibbs Museum. Ramsey County History: 49(3), 22-27. Ramsey County Historical Society.

Humann, Julie A. 2000. The Two Worlds of Jane Gibbs: The Gibbs Farm and the Santee Dakota. Ramsey County History: 35(1), 4-13. Ramsey County Historical Society.

Ljung, Don. 2021. “The Vikings Invade Minnesota.” Personal communication, telling the story of my grandfather, Allen Ljung’s, grandparents.

Minnesota Historical Society. “Minnesota Treaty Interactive.”
https://www.usdakotawar.org/history/treaties/minnesota-treaty-interactive#

Olson, Britta. 1940. Memories. Translated from Swedish and printed by her grandchildren, Mrs. Arthur Anderson and Irene Ljung (my grandmother).
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Westerman, Gwen and Bruce White. 2012. Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Zibell Weber, Deanne. 1996. ‘Little Bird That Was Caught’ and Her Dakota Friends. Ramsey County History: 31(1), 4-16. Ramsey County Historical Society.

Serial Document. No. 4015, 56th Congress, 1st session. 1897. Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1784-1894. Library of Congress. https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwss-ilc.html