Encounter on the Great Plains : Scandinavian settlers and the dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930 / Karen V. Hansen.
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : Oxford University Press, [2013]Description: xxviii, 332 pages : photographs ; 24 cmISBN:- 0199746818 (hbk. : alk. paper)
- 9780199746811 (hbk. : alk. paper)
- Scandinavian settlers and the dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930
- Dakota Indians -- North Dakota -- Interviews
- Indian allotments -- North Dakota -- Devils Lake Region (Lake)
- Indians of North America -- Land tenure -- North Dakota -- Devils Lake Region (Lake)
- Norwegians -- North Dakota -- Interviews
- Rural women -- North Dakota -- History
- Scandinavian Americans -- Land tenure -- North Dakota -- Fort Totten Indian Reservation
- Scandinavian Americans -- North Dakota -- Devils Lake Region (Lake) -- History
- Fort Totten Indian Reservation (N.D.) -- History
- North Dakota -- Ethnic relations
- Spirit Lake Tribe, North Dakota -- History
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book | Main Library | NonFiction | 305.8009 H249 | Available | 33111007529825 | ||||
Not for Loan | Main Library | North Dakota Collection | 305.8009 H249 | Not for loan | 33111007153709 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
In 1904, Scandinavian settlers began moving onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. These land-hungry first and second generation immigrants struggled with poverty nearly as severe as that of their Dakota neighbors, often becoming sharecropping tenants of Dakota landowners. Yet the homesteaders' impoverishment did not impede native dispossession: by 1929, Scandinavians owned more reservation land than did Dakotas. In the words of one settler, who staked a claim with her widowed mother in 1905: "We stole the land from the Indians."Encounter on the Great Plains captures this encounter to bring together two key processes in American history: the unceasing migration of people to North America, and the protracted dispossession of indigenous peoples who inhabited the continent. Although this historical encounter at Spirit Lake took place in a small corner of eastern North Dakota, it encapsulates the story of conquest and white settlement and the less publicized, but equally important, story of the dispossession and survival of Native Americans. The material wealth and the nationalist mythology of the United States are built upon this history.Karen V. Hansen captures this moment in time through the distinctive, uniquely American voices of this particular encounter while providing insights into similar cultural meeting points between Native Americans and European immigrants that played out across the western United States.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-322) and index.
Introduction: illuminating the encounter -- An unlikely encounter -- Indians never knocked: fear frames the encounter -- The Scandinavian flood: land hunger, dislocation, and settlement -- The reservation land rush: allotment and landtracking -- The entangled lives of strangers -- Spirit Lake transformed: the nexus of schooling, language, and trade -- Marking nations, reservation boundaries, and racial-ethnic hierarchies -- Fighting the sky and working the land -- The divisions of citizenship and the grip of poverty -- Divergent paths to racialized citizenship -- A fragile hold on the land -- Conclusion: Strangers no more -- Appendixes -- A. Historical timeline -- B. Oral history interview subjects.