History of Survivance: Upper Midwest 19th-Century Native American Narratives

"Chippewa Braves"

This image may not be reproduced for any reason without the express written permission of the Nicollet County Historical Society.

Nicollet County Historical Society, 1851 North Minnesota Avenue, St. Peter, MN 56082; http://www.nchsmn.org

http://reflections.mndigital.org/cdm/ref/collection/nico/id/1614

http://54.245.164.12:3000/mdl/items/umn10280.tif

The traditional colonial narrative of Minnesota tells the tale of Indians, a homogenous and ultimately ill-fated indigenous population – doomed by lack of resistance to disease, doomed by an inherently violent culture, and doomed by their inability to adapt to change. It is frequently the story of savage Natives attacking defenseless White settlers with no warning, being defeated by a brave and outnumbered Army, and then disappearing into the untamed, faceless West.
 The full story, inclusive of Native perspectives, is necessarily more complex. In the following section are some images relating to colonial views of the Natives peoples of Minnesota.

Colonial Narratives

Ancient Legacies

Colonization

Conflict

Reservation Era

Survivance

Red Bird Yankton, a Sioux Indian woman, performed in the Sun Dance Opera.

Uintah County Library Regional History Center

http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/Uinta_Thorne/id/1053

http://54.245.164.12:3000/mdl/items/8316.tif

Uintah County (UT) Library

Mountain West Digital Library

Probably better known by her Yankton name, Zitkala-sa, or her American name, Gertrude Simmons-Bonnin, Red Bird (1876-1938) appears every inch a “traditional” Sioux woman in her heavily beaded hide dress, hairpipe necklace, and long braided hair. The child of a Yankton woman and a Euro-American man (who, like Seth Eastman, abandoned his Native family shortly after his child’s birth,) Zitkala-sa grew up on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota. In 1884, missionaries took her and several other Yankton children to the White’s Manual Labor Institute boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. She later attended Earlham College. Through these experiences, she managed to both keep her home culture alive and use her Western education to fight for Native land rights and citizenship, becoming the author of several books about Lakota culture, an opera based on the Sun Dance, and the speaker for the National Council of American Indians.