Gary G. Kohls, MD, and Rev Kevin Annett’s “Nativity”
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“I have the honor to inform you that the thirty-eight Indians and half-breeds ordered by you for execution were hung yesterday at Mankato at 10 a.m. Everything went off quietly and the other prisoners are well secured.” Respectfully, H. H. SIBLEY, Brigadier-General.”
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On the first day of Christmas, 1862, 38 Lakota warriors that had participated in the so-called “Sioux Uprising” were hanged at Mankato, Minnesota, without benefit of a jury trial. The hangings were considered to end of the brief US-Dakota War of 1862. The mass executions had been approved long distance by President Abraham Lincoln. To his credit, Lincoln, who had very little idea of what had happened in the Minnesota territory, had commuted the death sentences of several hundred other native men who had been captured after the final battle.
The hundreds of imprisoned native survivors, along with the thousands of other tribal members who had not been hanged that day had also – unbeknownst to them at the time – been condemned to exile from their homeland, a slower kind of death, for they were denied their liberty and they were imprisoned, starved to death and ultimately banished from their ancestral home to concentration camps on desolate land that the US government had no use for. The tradition of hunting and gathering that had sustained the First Nations for thousands of years was denied them and then, to make matters even worse, the later discovery of gold on some of that reservation land would result in yet another round of treaty-breaking and ethnic cleansing.so that white European immigrants could occupy and exploit their land. Much of that exploitation was for the economic benefit of land speculators like the future Governor of Minnesota, Alexander Ramsey. More
