Writer Lewis Hyde on the History of Little Crow's Burial

[Dakota chief Taoyateduta, or Little Crow.]

There's a local angle in Chistopher Lydon's wonderful Open Source podcast this week, a thoughtful discussion by the writer Lewis Hyde about .

I first discovered Christopher Lydon's work when he guest hosted the MPR flagship talk show program over ten years ago, in the brief interim between Katherine Lampher and Kerri Miller. I've been a fan ever since. He's an amazing interviewer and his discussion with Lewis Hyde is a good example of that. Hyde was a sociology major at the University of Minnesota, and his new book is called "A Primer for Forgetting," and includes some info about Minnesota's traumatic 1862 Dakota Wars and their aftermath.

Here's the excerpt about Little Crow and Minnesota history, from about 12 minutes into the conversation. Hyde describes the story of Little Crow and his burial:

Little Crow… Yeah so the 1860s in Minnesota, he was a Dakota Sioux a leader of what was called the Sioux rebellion. The Sioux had entered into a treaty with the US government in which the Sioux would settle along the river and they would be given annuity and certain goods and then what happened was that the US government reneged on this treaty, so the Sioux were mad. They rebelled. The rebellion was put down. Many were killed. 

Little Crow escaped, but then there was a bounty on his head. There was a bounty on a head of any Sioux to be captured and killed, and there was a double bounty on Little Crow’s body. And he was shot while foraging for berries in Hutchinson, Minnesota by a farmer. And they took him into town, took the body and they dragged it through the streets with dogs picking at his head. And they scalped him. 

And when I was in college in the late 1960s the scalp of little crow was owned by the Minnesota Historical Society. I knew this because I was friends with the poet Robert Bly, and the Vietnam war had one of its almost hidden motivations a kind of ancient American racism. It was easier for us to kill people of color in a foreign land, because we had been killing people of color in our own land 100 years ago. 

So it’s almost like cases like this require the proper burial, the remains of the Indians who were killed the Indian Wars in the 19th century. I have aphorisms in this book and one is to be steeped in history, but not in the past. And to be steeped in history is to be steeped in many of these stories and to know what our past contains. 

And in this case, I would say that the proper burial of Little Crow’s scalp would be an act of foreign policy, in that it would lay to rest a kind of local impulse that has been exported into our foreign wars. 

Check out the whole conversation at the Radio Open Source website.