{"id":2843,"date":"2019-12-16T17:38:12","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T17:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/?p=2843"},"modified":"2019-12-16T17:39:19","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T17:39:19","slug":"from-the-sioux-massacre-to-the-dakota-genocide-a-sixth-grade-social-studies-curriculum-on-the-legacy-of-the-u-s-dakota-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/from-the-sioux-massacre-to-the-dakota-genocide-a-sixth-grade-social-studies-curriculum-on-the-legacy-of-the-u-s-dakota-war\/","title":{"rendered":"From the \u201cSioux Massacre\u201d to the \u201cDakota Genocide\u201d: A Sixth-Grade Social Studies Curriculum on the Legacy of the U.S.-Dakota War"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I acknowledge <\/a>that the University of Minnesota Twin Cities stands on Min\u00ed S\u00f3ta Makh\u00f3\u010dhe, the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary Homelands of Dakh\u00f3ta Oy\u00e1te. The University occupies land<\/a> that was cared for and called home by Dakota peoples from time immemorial. Ceded in the treaties of 1837 and 1851, I acknowledge that this land has always held, and continues to hold, great spiritual and personal significance for Dakota. By offering this land acknowledgment, I recognize the sovereignty of Dakota, and I acknowledge, support, and advocate for Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those forcibly removed from their Homelands. I will continue to raise awareness of Indigenous peoples, histories, and cultures in my work, especially within social studies education, and I will continue to work to hold the University of Minnesota accountable to Dakota and other Indigenous peoples and nations. It is my sincere hope that the curriculum project discussed below will serve as a catalyst for recognizing and unsettling settler colonial narratives in social studies classrooms across Minnesota, especially sixth-grade Minnesota Studies classes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In mid-August of 1862, the Pioneer and\nDemocrat<\/em><\/a>, as short-lived settler newspaper printed in St. Paul,\nMinnesota ran an article with the headlines: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTerrible Indian Raid.
The Frontier Desolated
The Inhabitants Murdered
Shocking Barbarities.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article,\na mix of news and editorial content common in early reporting, stated: \u201cWe can\nno longer shut our eyes to the fact that the Sioux Indians have commenced a war\nupon the settlements of our own frontier, and have massacred hundreds of men,\nwomen, and children.\u201d Such accounts of what would come to be called the \u201cSioux\nMassacre\u201d became the first rough drafts of the history of the war. Indeed, one\nof the earliest published histories of the war, Isaac Heard\u2019s History of the Sioux War and Massacres<\/em><\/a>, published by Harper\nand Brothers of New York in 1863, draws on reporting from, among other\nnewspapers, the Pioneer and Democrat<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

One hundred fifty years later, in mid-August of 2012, the Minneapolis\nStar Tribune<\/em> ran a series<\/a>\ntitled: \u201cIn the Footsteps of Little\nCrow: 150 Years After the U.S.-Dakota War.\u201d One article<\/a>\nfeatured headlines quoting Taoyateduta (often\nknown as Little Crow), a leader of the Dakota during the war: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2018When men are hungry, they help themselves\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With his people starving and treaty payments too late to help, Little\nCrow is pushed toward war. A bloody confrontation lights the fuse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such headlines seem\nto suggest a marked shift, both in terms of language and narrative, in how the U.S.-Dakota\nWar is popularly portrayed, at least within the media. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

What might these two\narticles, written 150 years apart, tell us about how popular narratives and\ncollective memories of the U.S.-Dakota War have shifted over time in Minnesota?\nTake, for example, the shift from earlier articles that suggest an unprovoked\n\u201cmassacre\u201d of Euro-American settlers to the later recognition of the continued\nmaltreatment of the Dakota, who are ultimately \u201cpushed to war.\u201d Do shifting accounts\nof the war, as reflected in media reporting, mimic changing public memories and\nattitudes within the state, especially among non-Indigenous Minnesota\u2019s, or are\nthey simply examples of settler-constructed narratives shifting strategically over\ntime to maintain settler dominance over land and ensure a \u201csettler futurity\u201d<\/a> for generations to come?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These questions were\ncentral to a project<\/a> led by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies\u2019 Director, Professor\nAlejandro Baer , and Research and Outreach Coordinator, Joe Eggers, who, along\nwith a undergraduate and graduate student researchers, gathered and analyzed\nhundreds of newspaper articles from Minnesota River Valley and the Twin Cities newspapers\nat 25-year intervals from 1862 to 2012. The aim of the project was to better understand\nhow the U.S.-Dakota War has been remembered over time, with each generation,\nand space in Minnesota. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using the rich data from this project, with additional funding\nfrom a Minnesota\nLegacy Grant<\/a>, and in keeping with the CHGS\u2019s  mission of educational outreach, I was asked\nto think about how the newspapers collected and analyzed during the project might\nbe made available and useful for teachers and students. The result is a\ncurriculum, \u201cFrom the \u2018Sioux\nMassacre\u2019 to the \u2018Dakota Genocide\u2019: Minnesota\u2019s \u2018Forgotten War\u2019 in the State\u2019s\nNewspapers from 1862 to 2012,\u201d<\/strong><\/a> which was designed to supplement a study\nof the U.S.-Dakota War in sixth-grade social studies classes.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The curriculum is organized around a single-day core lesson\nplan, which was designed to be taught in one roughly-50-minute class period. This\ncore lesson introduces students to examples of newspaper headlines from the\nMinnesota River Valley and Twin Cities, allowing them to catalog and analyze\nhow the narratives of the war have varied over time and space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Additional two and three-day lesson plans offer teachers and\nstudents the opportunity to extend the core lesson for deeper content and\nskills development through reading and analyzing examples of full-length\narticles and analyzing data form the project in the form of graphs and charts. Each\nlesson encourages students to engage in an attentive and thoughtful reading of\nnewspaper articles as primary source documents, developing critical media\nliteracy skills. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I began to work on developing the curriculum, what I was\nmost drawn to was the possibility for \u201cauthentic\nlearning<\/a>,\u201d in which students would construct knowledge through the use of disciplinary-based inquiry that would\nalso have value beyond the classroom. I imagined students doing work \u2013 reading\nand analyzing newspapers to draw conclusions about narratives of the\nU.S.-Dakota War \u2013 which would be very similar to the work that had been done by\nacademics and student researchers at the University of Minnesota. This\nauthentic work, involving qualitative research and analysis, would help them to\nunderstand the shifting nature of historical narratives over time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, despite\nthe exciting possibilities for teachers and students to engage with this\nauthentic learning, the curriculum should be taken up with a note of caution.\nFirst, the lessons, by and large, fail to bring much needed Dakota (and other\nIndigenous) voices and perspectives into the classroom, often framing the\nDakota (and, to a lesser extent, settler) as perpetually static, monolithic,\nand opposing groups. Additionally, many earlier newspaper articles not only\nlack Dakota perspectives, but they are also filled with derogatory language,\nsuch as \u201cred skins\u201d or \u201csavages,\u201d which, without careful introduction and\ncontextualization, could easily further perpetuate hurtful stereotypes. However,\nthis fairly blatant derogatory language is perhaps less concerning than the\nmore subtle erasure of Indigenous voices and perspectives within the narratives\ndeveloped within the articles. These newspaper articles, after all, represent a\nsettler archive, where even the more recent articles from 2012 were written by\nnon-Indigenous authors and very often still lack Dakota voices. This provides a\nchallenge for teachers and students to engage with these articles critically and\nread them not only for what is present but also for what is absent in the\nreporting and editorializing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As with any study\nof history, students studying the U.S.-Dakota War should be pushed to examine\nsources and narratives critically and continuously ask questions to nuance\ntheir understanding of events and peoples. Despite its limitations, examining\nthe shifting settler narratives of the U.S.-Dakota War over time and space\nwithin Minnesota may help students better understand the roots of contemporary\ndebates, such as those to rename Historic Fort Snelling<\/a> or Bde Make Ska<\/a>, and become more thoughtful consumers of media. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Download the full curriculum: \u201cFrom the \u2018Sioux Massacre\u2019 to the\n\u2018Dakota Genocide\u2019: Minnesota\u2019s \u2018Forgotten War\u2019 in the State\u2019s Newspapers from\n1862 to 2012\u201d<\/strong><\/a>. We are\nespecially interested in hearing about your and your students\u2019 experiences with\nthe curriculum. Send any feedback to George Dalbo at dalbo006@umn.edu<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

George Dalbo is the Educational Outreach Coordinator for\nthe Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a Ph.D. student in Social\nStudies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in\nHolocaust, genocide, and human rights education. Previously, he was a middle\nand high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5th-12th\nin public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years\nat an international school in Vienna, Austria. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I acknowledge that the University of Minnesota Twin Cities stands on Min\u00ed S\u00f3ta Makh\u00f3\u010dhe, the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary Homelands of Dakh\u00f3ta Oy\u00e1te. The University occupies land that was cared for and called home by Dakota peoples from time immemorial. Ceded in the treaties of 1837 and 1851, I acknowledge that this land has always […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2081,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[142,96749],"tags":[34,65176,14568,102607],"class_list":["post-2843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-teaching-genocide-and-mass-violence","tag-education","tag-genocide-education","tag-minnesota","tag-u-s-dakota-war"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2081"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2843"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2848,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2843\/revisions\/2848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}