Showing What Does Justice Look Like?: The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland by Waziyatawin

CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries
August 2009 Vol. 46 No. 11
Social & Behavioral Sciences
Review by F. E. Knowles, Valdosta State University

In this important work, Waziyatawin (Indigenous Governance, Univ. of Victoria, BC) develops the history of the Dakota Indians in Minnesota. She reveals through summaries of Sioux [sic] interaction with the Ojibwa and then white settlers that what Americans know as Minnesota has always been the homeland of the Dakota. Further, the historic accounts of the interaction between Native Americans and white colonizers have necessarily been told in the voice of the colonizer. There is another half to history. The author discusses the origin accounts that are inherent in the Dakota culture that, as is the case with many if not most Indian people, are at odds with the conventional wisdom held by Western academia.

While Waziyatawin’s use of origin and history to establish the Dakota in what is now Minnesota is fascinating, it is merely a foundation for the gist of the book—the impact of first contact with whites and the continuing effects of colonization. Waziyatawin makes a convincing case that the devastation of colonization continues through public policy and the hegemonic construction of public opinion. In that sense, the book’s impact can be felt in the daily lives of many Native Americans today.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.


The Circle: News from a Native American Perspective
January 2009, www.thecirclenews.org
Review by Louise Erdrich

A passionate and unyielding voice for justice, Waziyatawin advocates for Minnesota Truth vs. Minnesota Nice. This book is first of all a terse and eloquent recapitulation of Minnesota history in relation to the Dakota, in other words, it is a clear eyed and sorrowful account of genocide. Waziyatawin uses the loaded word genocide with a careful explanation of its accuracy. She is painstaking in her efforts to bring clarity to a divisive subject.

It is so important for Indigenous people in Minnesota, whatever their tribal origins, to stand together. … Considering our mutual history, we should all rise above the small, the petty, the all-too-human ways that tribal people are forced to struggle with each other for recognition by the power brokers in a dominant culture. Waziyatawin’s forceful recommendations for reparation, if adopted, could make Minnesota a leader in the difficult task of integrating the ugly truths of our history into an understanding of this state’s, and this country’s, relationship with Indigenous People.

Acknowledging the truth makes a people stronger, not weaker. As a specific example, Waziyatawin compares Fort Snelling’s disgraceful “fun fort” self-depiction with the somber reality that imbues other concentration camps and Holocaust memorials. The compelling facts about Fort Snelling include the sacred nature of the land itself, and the fact that it is filled with the marked and unmarked graves of Dakota ancestors, including women who starved themselves to death out of grief, women raped by soldiers, children and elders dead of sicknesses that raged through the fort. Minnesotans also hanged Dakota leaders on that earth. And so when Waziyatawin quite reasonably advocates returning the Fort to the Dakota to do with as they decide, it would seem an act of unquestionable justice. It seems, in fact, a great idea.

Nobody who reads this book will ever drive to the airport again without seeing the devastated woman on the cover—a young woman interred in what became a death camp in the winter of 1862–63. If Fort Snelling was to become a Dakota garden and ceremonial ground, the young woman’s thousand-mile stare would at last rest with the living.