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

Colonial Narratives

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This short tract in the Dakota language describes the American Bible Society, founded in 1816. The Santee Normal Training School instructed Dakota children in the Dakota language. These children came from families who were removed from Minnesota to Nebraska after the U.S.-Dakota War in 1863. Reverend A.L. Riggs founded the school in 1870 as an academy to train Native teachers. The school developed a printing press in 1871 and produced many materials in the Dakota language.

Synod of Lakes and Prairies, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 2115 Cliff Drive, Eagan, MN 55122

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Loss of land, culture, religion, and livelihood began in earnest for the Native people of Minnesota starting with the early 19th century. The establishment of American Army forts not as places of trade so much as places to keep Indians out started in 1819 with the founding of Fort Snelling near modern-day Minneapolis. Though missionaries were in the area long before actual congregations, the oldest established church in Minnesota was St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Mendota in 1840; it was built with the specific mission to minister to both the settlers and the Indians of the area. The first railroad began to snake its way through the territory in the mid-1850s, bringing with it a new rush of White settlers.
All of these colonial missions necessitated treaties between the US government and Native nations ceding Native land. While treaties may have started out small-scale in the early 1800s, by the 1830s the United States was claiming huge swathes of Native land by force and coercion.

Colonization

Ancient Legacies

Conflict

Reservation Era

Survivance

Portrait of Poh-ah-be-one and Pony Hoof, Thief River Falls, Minnesota

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Studio portrait of Pony Hoof and Poh-ah-be-one. Pony Hoof is wearing a bandolier bag.

Borry, Jacob; Borry's Photograph Gallery (Thief River Falls, Minnesota)

Pennington County Historical Society, P.O. Box 127, Thief River Falls, MN 56701; http://www.pvillage.org

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This circa 1908 studio portrait of Poh-ah-be-one, an extremely elderly Red Lake Ojibwe man, and his young relative, Pony Hoof, shows the two handsomely dressed in traditional regalia over Western clothes – a practice that was commonplace among Native Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While Western literature written about Indian people of the time tells the story of a primitive race dressed head to toe in buckskins, the photographic record says something different: that Native Americans, consistently insisting on the expression of their traditional culture, negotiated the indigenous and Western worlds with grace.