Abstract

"Dakota People’s Economic Life under US Occupation, 1858-61"

Heather Menefee, Northwestern University (heathermenefee2015@u.northwestern.edu)

This paper draws on previously unexamined sources to show how Dakota people living near the Lower Sioux Agency in Minnesota navigated US surveillance of their economic and political life during a crucial period. The US Indian Agent at Čhaŋšáyapi, Joseph Renshaw Brown, recorded economic transactions among Dakota men in his ledger book from 1858-61. Brown’s ledger reflects his cultural assumptions and political ideology as a Democratic appointee who understood property ownership as a fundamental tenet of personhood. Still, the ledger also reveals aspects of Dakota people’s daily life under increasingly oppressive US policies. As Ella Deloria later wrote, Dakota society has a distinctive economic and political structure, in which “kinship is the only ‘power’ compelling people to act,” such that it would be impossible to “earn a living in the white man’s way in a Dakota community.” By examining Brown’s ledger through Dakota people’s written records and oral histories, I offer a detailed account of how Dakota people navigated US attempts to impose capitalism as a normative economic and moral structure before 1862.

Alongside entries of debts and credits owed to traders and labor exchanged among Dakota people, Brown evaluated Dakota people based on their participation in economic systems that benefitted settlers. His annotations often carried condemnations: “has done nothing… long hair… sold his clothes and went north… had a frame house & it was subsequently given [away].” But they also contain evidence of Dakota people’s labor and dedication to sustain their thióšpaye, oyáte, and their relationship to Dakhóta makhóčhe – relationships that Brown and other US officials were actively working to destroy. Although Brown’s ledger tracks change in terms of capital and labor, I show how we can read against settler economic records to understand the enduring reality of Dakota kinship.