When we revisit a historical event, such as the U.S.-Dakota War, we reconsider ourselves. Who are we because of that war? Who might we have been if things had happened in a different way? How might this event be remembered if there had been others involved? How might this event be remembered if alternative perspectives were heard?
The Star Tribune, through reporter Curt Brown, has done an outstanding job of re-remembering the Dakota War. I use the word "re-remembering" because the paper has worked to provide alternative perspectives -- not just the white, male voices of powerful officials who presided over war tactics and government actions. Star Tribune articles have celebrated Dakota voices, biracial (white and Dakota) voices, and the voices of white settlers. The newspaper's work is evidence that this state is making progress in facing the ugly facts of the Dakota War.
However, there is a voice that has not been expressed in the Star Tribune: Sarah Wakefield's. Her voice -- also ignored in her time -- is one that I wish to insert into the modern conversation.
At the onset of the Dakota War, Wakefield's husband decided that she should travel with her children to Fort Ridgely. He thought it would be safer there, as white homes were being raided and captives taken. George Gleason, a clerk at the Lower Agency warehouse, drove Wakefield, 33, and her children -- a baby daughter, Lucy, and a 4-year-old son, James.
Their journey was interrupted by two Indians: Hapa, the man who would antagonize Wakefield throughout her captivity, and Chaska, the man who became Wakefield's savior.
After stopping Gleason and Wakefield, Hapa wished to kill both of them.
"I begged Hapa to spare me," Wakefield would write, "put out my hands towards him, but he struck them down. I thought then my doom was sealed and if it had not been for Chaska, my bones would now be bleaching on that prairie, and my children with Little Crow." Chaska persuaded Hapa to spare Wakefield, and she was taken as a war captive.
Wakefield spent six weeks living among the Mdewakanton Dakota, often in danger from a few Dakota who felt captives should be killed. Chaska and his family intervened. Wakefield was still nursing her daughter. Her body was weak and unaccustomed to the outdoors. Throughout her firsthand account of her captivity, Wakefield describes various ways that Chaska and his family protected her from murder, starvation and, at one point, from sexual assault.
