#settler state

“On December 26, 1862, a week before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln ordered the hanging of the thirty-eight Dakota men at Maka To (or “Blue Earth”--present day Mankato, Minnesota) as retribution for the 1862 US-Dakota War. The execution of the Dakota thirty-eight remains the largest mass execution in US history. Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey, who helped negotiate the 1851 Treaty with the Dakotas, then ordered the extermination or complete banishment of remaining Dakotas from the state. Settlers were encouraged and rewarded to take their own revenge with government-issued $25 scalp bounties which later increased to $200. When the Civil War came to an end, very few confederate officials and soldiers were sent to prison, and only one was hanged for war crimes. After surrender, many confederates went back to public office. General Sibley ordered that the Dakotas were to be treated as criminals, and not as prisoners of war. The aftermath of the war to maintain slavery, which cost half a million lives, was profoundly different from the aftermath of the Dakota uprising--and rarely are the two stories told side by side.”

“On the heels of a fiver-year recession, from 1878 to 1887, the desire for cheap or ‘free’ Indigenous land in Dakota Territory infected white settlers like a fever. The decade, during which the white population in the region nearly doubled, was known as the “Great Dakota Boom.” In 1887, under increasing pressure to open more of the remaining 1868 Treaty lands, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, signaling a new assault on Lakota and Dakota lands. Dawes sought to disintegrate collective Native identities and communal land practices by allotting private plots to Native families and opening millions of acres of ‘excess’ land for white settlement.”

"[The] key problem with the politics of recognition when applied to the colonial context… [is that it] rests on the problematic assumption that the flourishing of Indigenous peoples as distinct and self-determining agents is somehow dependent on their being granted recognition and institutional accommodation from the surrounding settler-state and society… [Within in this scheme,] not only will the terms of recognition tend to remain the property of those in power to grant to their inferiors in ways that they deem appropriate, but also under these conditions, the Indigenous population will often come to see the limited and structurally constrained terms of recognition granted to them as their own. In effect, the colonized come to identify with “white liberty and white justice."