“...old times there are not forgotten.”
- Daniel Decatur Emmett
Whistling Through the Graveyard
This lynching is nothing new.
They recall it dimly across Mankato’s arid wastes. A college town these
days, ever crawling with the most thick-headed, bloodthirsty townies
imaginable, who’ll roll you soon as look at you— assuming you’re inebriated
enough to make for moderately easy pickings, don’t appear sufficiently capable
of putting up any considerable unwanted resistance, are one of those
indistinguishable, pickled herrings come flopping out from the rank, ubiquitous
brine barrels littering their boulevards, disheveled academics on ways home
from the burg’s many repellent watering holes with their desperately quirky
names, like “the Haze” and “the Smell” and “the Taint”. These ill-treated
scholars are themselves no better, either, precisely—sots and carousers in toto, if one faction is fortunate enough to
imbibe off the rail, whereas the other prefers pulling from fastidiously
funneled and carefully rationed jugs of shine, concocted in home-brewed stills,
from trailer sinks and tenement bathtubs—just a different economic stratum,
derivation of those selfsame settler colonists who stole this acreage off its
earlier inhabitants. They are the
ones we’re interested in discussing here, incidentally. Not these comparatively
well-to-do European descendants, who made this town they’d purloined from the
indigenous people among the most septic herpes capitals of the nation, who
forced the closure of an elaborate tunnel system devised for navigating campus
during those onerous winter months because they could not refrain from pouncing
upon defenseless classmates in the dark of nights. Mankato, that unsurpassed
destination for visitors desiring to accrue baroque rap sheets of drinking
citations from their late teens through early twenties, an ideal spot to find
yourself embroiled in a gory room-clearing apartment brawl, after some frat
brute takes an unmotivated poke, at a girl deemed too insolent for his liking.
Mankato, pioneer sloppiness exemplified, graphic testament to expropriation at
its most rapacious, keenly assisted via liquor’s insidious plying. There,
manifold evils antecedent generations sowed, the children now find themselves
tasked with unpleasantly reaping. Sins
of fathers sons repeat, get visited upon daughters. History reruns itself in
ghastly echoes, tromping like hoof beats a gallop, across a bleak and wintery
stage, wiped fearfully sterile at long last, cleansed coldly with measured
precision... Mahkato, whose town motto somehow remains “Leading the Way”.
This story is transcribed in your dubious honor, to your less than
sterling credit. You call yourself the
‘Key City’ eh… What, then, was the
lock? And can you truly claim not to
have forced it open, like trembling legs, for the brutal assault which
followed? Students in attendance, and
barbarous plebeians obliged to endure their insufferable gallivanting, both:
you may vaguely recall certain rumors circulating, regarding your city’s
historical hallmark, the act singed upon its legacy like a slave’s branding. Or
perhaps on your bleary stumbles homeward, or during quiet moments alone
blasting tin-cans from distant stumps, you’ll on occasion chance to catch some
whispers in the wind—from an insistent chorus of stiff, wooden voices, many of
them conversing at once in a strange and unfamiliar tongue, overlapping each
other discordantly. Allow us to translate these cryptic words you’re hearing,
so that you may understand what they’ve been trying vainly, continually to
communicate to you for so very, very long, in language you can grasp.
One ghost is louder than the rest. Let’s hear from him.
My story is short and ugly, like most you can learn from.
It was our own Old Chief Sleepy
Eye who led the first interlopers to this place, where the Blue Earth and
Minnesota rivers converge, showed them the best spots for building to exploit
transit capabilities along the waters, demonstrated lucrative strategies for
protecting envisioned constructions against flooding. I can only surmise that sage leader must
surely have been nodding off behind the reins, as they are so often wont to, if
he was not plain venal. Sleepy Eye would
be rewarded for these kindnesses the same way the rest of us were,
regardless.
It would not be a decade after
the township’s founding, that we should all be run off—to a man, woman, and
child—like pestilent dogs, from this land of ours we in a spirit of brotherhood
introduced them to. Robbed of its verdant pastures, abundance of fishing and
game, nourishing wild rice and maple syrup.
They drove my people to the barren Dakotas, and alien Nebraska. If we dared set foot upon our native soil
again, those squatters defending it could lawfully kill us on sight, present
our scalp to their authorities and receive a $25 reward, for the trouble of
removing it.
A statue in South Dakota
dedicated to Sleepy Eye’s memory describes the venerable statesman as being ‘Always a Friend of the Whites’—there
lurks a certain mutual exclusivity in that arrangement, don’t ever think there
won’t be; it’s a fence you cannot straddle and manage a foot on both sides of,
effectively—in recollection of that habitual groveling he did famously, before
America’s supposed presidents. And signing half a dozen devastating treaties,
prior to expiring quietly on a reservation he was subsequently forced
onto.
It was his nephew actually, inheritor of that same illustrious name, whom I knew personally, who fought beside me
bravely in the great uprising of ‘62.
It was too late for us to do all that much, by then, alas; the
damage had already been effected, quite egregiously.
On ranches, they call the goat
who authoritatively leads his fellow livestock to be slaughtered each time,
gets permitted to escape butchery every culling for doing so, ‘Judas’. A hundred years henceforth, in Germany, they
would accuse any Jew who brokered accords with the Nazis, advised them
shrewdly, of being a ‘collaborator’.
They emphatically would not
erect statues to commemorate such betrayers, who’d helped facilitate their
people’s determined, businesslike annihilation, though that Fuhrer might well
have opted to—had the fascists triumphed in their crusade across the Easter
continents, the way your West was so callously won.
Their missionaries told us
Lincoln was our ‘Great Father’, watching over we children from his capital
those many years. One has to laugh,
recalling that image of Saturn’s parenting techniques, which the Spaniard Goya
painted on a wall of his home so strikingly.
Abe, if he were truly honest,
would have to admit he treated us analogously.
Nor would we deign to recognize
their Christian rites, when the clergymen offered them to us, in those final
hours. These same sorts would quite
conceivably have crucified their precious savior himself, obediently albeit
apologetically, were they ordered to, was he here beside us in confinement—having perpetrated some recent destruction
to Roman property, disrupted usurious lending and caused a tumult at the temple. Charlatans and hypocrites every one, speaking
confidently nonetheless, as though at their messiah’s behest. With the audacity
to invoke his name and philosophy whilst persecuting, before martyring…
***
This was truly not so very far
back, relatively speaking. When your
father was born, men still walked this earth who’d seen it pass, remembered it
happening, though time had rendered them ancient and hobbling by then. But still, a meager century, before the year
the U.S.
announced its trade
embargo against Cuba. Not long ago at
all.
Yet, think, that mn├н s├│ta had
been a state—in the eyes of your government—for but the merest handful of
years, not even half of a decade then.
The ink was drying, that goes to say, still is. The papers themselves were already becoming
visibly whited out, however, more than might be preferable; it left a surplus
of blank space, in need of filling in…
To my people, I went by the name Wa-kin-yan-wa. You may call me ‘Little Thunder’, if you care
to—it’s what that translates to, in your vulgar Saxon tongue.
I am of the Dakota nation. Very possibly you have not heard of it.
We were paid no especial tribute,
did not figure prominently into your schemas for assimilation, or merit
recognition as one of those ‘five
civilized tribes’ preferenced by the occupying forces—having no taste for
your religion, or plantation slavery, ourselves. The Cherokee and Choctaw,
Muscogee and Seminole and Chicasaw were more adaptable, keener about such
things. They took quicker to legalese and market economy, had no qualms about
owning and working a man in their power.
Those penchants would not save them either,
exactly.
Our people, taken collectively,
make up a paltry third of a percent now, don’t even comprise a solitary hundredth of those walking upon our
ancestral lands, these dismal days.
The French trappers asked our enemies what to call us by.
They reported ‘Sioux’.
Meaning,
the ‘Snake’.
We are not snakes, but like anything with teeth will bite if forced to,
are mistreated or threatened sufficiently. You can judge for yourself whether
nippings delivered were vindicated, in the eyes of posterity. Things undeniably
got heated, on that narrow stretch of uncultivable land we were herded
onto.
In due course, it would be
remembered as a period of great political and social upheaval. At the time, we
were truly only starving and betrayed.
We had been promised space
enough. Farmable tracts. Territory which could sustain our mothers and
daughters, our grandmothers would find comfort upon. They went first, in the
famine to follow.
The promised rations never
arrived, war efforts quashing the confederate insurgency taking logical
precedence in the eyes of officials managing associated municipal coffers, who
controlled their divvying, made executive decisions regarding allocation of
finite resource. Vows once coolly ratified and agreed upon with confidence,
before our tribe’s relocation, were suddenly deemed impossible extravagances,
nonessential or downright prodigal, in light of more pressing priorities remedy
of the American empire’s fracture demanded.
So we waited, quite patiently I
swear to you. We lost our elders first, then it came for our youngest. The
babies bawled and withered, finally succumbing one after another as well.
An official tabulation of
colonizer slayings dispensed at our hands throughout the conflict was never
compiled, conspicuously. This only
aggravated speculatory inflation and embellishment—amongst a population whose
public lives principally gravitated between the telling of fish tales and
campfire stories, whose main stocks and trades consisted principally of various
brands of yarn and embellishment.
Our crimes hence gravitated
almost immediately into the realm of things virtually mythic. There are grains
of truth in them, surely. I will spare
you the upset of recounting details overly harrowing. When you hear described all manner of
grandiose, unsubstantiated carnage, of fetuses cut from flailing wombs,
children nailed to trees and fenceposts, have no doubt: what atrocities related
are grounded in reality were patently inexcusable, uncontrovertibly. But let the
fever and senselessness engendered by similarly shattering afflictions, which
served to catalyze our despairing wrath, at minimum somewhat mitigate each
retaliation, and explain from whence it originated—if not justly, at least
explicably.
Realize before that, how long we
continued trusting in the white man, and his silvertongued promises. Civilly we
sought answers, explanations, to contrive some viable solution.
They only scoffed.
I was in the peanut gallery
myself, silent, that fateful day my people met with the government traders,
when a base scoundrel speaking for their whole snickered at our plight, mocked
our emaciated babes, our parents who had passed on so early, too soon before
their designated times. He had the nerve to smirk,
at me individually it almost seemed, and tell us we should not be starving,
when there was so much grass for the
eating.
Forsooth, that became the final straw, for myself as much as the rest of
them.
In the moving pictures, projected
upon those cinema screens we once rode on horseback across in droves—landscape
which, even there, we have since disappeared from—they would describe it as a
smash cut. I stood on the platform, a unique scaffold built for this singular
occasion, unprecedented and handsome, erected between the prison and the river,
which would become Mankato’s claim to fame in the annals of Western
history.
On either side of me, a
succession of brothers in arms from my native tribe, amounting to thirty-eight
of us altogether.
The story goes, that Lincoln
said, ‘You may hang one for each step
leading up to this white house of mine built by slaves.’ And just before I
fell, toward that dirt I so revere, an image passed through my mind, of that
demon’s lifeless face, eyes bulged, mouth crammed full of all the grass we
could fit in it—until it came spilling riotously out, onto the prairie’s hard,
unforgiving ground. And just before I plunged, I softly smiled.
Only when we had all gone stiff
and still, did those five thousand gathered there to watch get up the nerve to
start their cheering. They cast all our carcasses into one large hole together
by the river.
Less dramatic, or perceivably
worthy of monuments, was the contagion which swept immediately thereafter,
claiming the lives of another three hundred interned aboriginals, incarcerated
deplorably in their own filth at Pike Island…
Our bodies actually escaped
that pit though, ultimately, I should mention.
No comments :
Post a Comment
We welcome your comments related to the article and the topic being discussed. We expect the comments to be courteous, and respectful of the author and other commenters. Setu reserves the right to moderate, remove or reject comments that contain foul language, insult, hatred, personal information or indicate bad intention. The views expressed in comments reflect those of the commenter, not the official views of the Setu editorial board. рдк्рд░рдХाрд╢िрдд рд░рдЪрдиा рд╕े рд╕рдо्рдмंрдзिрдд рд╢ाрд▓ीрди рд╕рдо्рд╡ाрдж рдХा рд╕्рд╡ाрдЧрдд рд╣ै।