PIPESTONE, MINN.
Dennis Red Owl pushed his 86-year-old mother's wheelchair over a crack in the asphalt Friday where South Dakota Hwy. 34 meets Minnesota Hwy. 30 at the border.
Elder Ada Red Owl, wrapped in a shawl, bowed her head and swept the smoke of burning sage over her face. A "Welcome to Minnesota" sign stood just across the road.
Traffic was halted as drum beats and prayer chants filled the unseasonably crisp air among the cornfields. More than 300 people circled around Ada and seven other Dakota grandmothers -- four on each side of the border -- as they exchanged eagle feathers at a symbolic welcome-home ceremony for exiles on the 150th anniversary of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.
In the wake of the war, in which hundreds of settlers, U.S. soldiers and Dakota fighters were killed, Congress passed a law in 1863 banishing the Dakota from Minnesota. Several hundred Dakota had gone to war after broken treaties and late annuity payments left their
families starving to death in a narrow reservation along the Minnesota River. Their intent was to win back their land from a wave of immigrants sweeping into early Minnesota. The federal law, although unenforced, remains on the books.
"None of us would be here today if it weren't for these women," said J.B. Weston, a tribal preservation officer from the nearby Flandreau Santee Sioux Reservation, referring to those who survived the first harsh winters after the war. Weston, who organized Friday's event, said the eight women in Friday's ceremony were chosen to honor those survivors.
Dennis Red Owl had driven over from Lincoln, Neb., stopping to pick up his cousin, Grace LeMere Mantich, in Omaha. Then they gathered up Ada and another cousin, Brenda Frazier, in Sioux City, Iowa. The family, which like thousands of fellow Dakota traces its roots to Minnesota, was scattered after the brutal six-week war a century and a half ago. "But here we stand," said Mantich, as hugs, smiles and tears were shared after the prayer ceremony.