Place / Antecedent

A Continuum of Federal Violence

A history of indigenous-US relations in Minnesota in the wake of the murders of Nicole Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

by John R. Legg via Clio and the Contemporary on February 9, 2026

...through violence, surveillance, and exclusion in Minnesota’s Indigenous past. By returning to the aftermath of the US-Dakota War of 1862, I show how physical and structural violence against Indigenous peoples shaped state development and federal practices that continue to structure the present.

Federal and State Violence in the US-Dakota War

The longer history of federal violence begins with the conditions that produced the US-Dakota War of 1862. The failure of the federal government to deliver annuity payments promised under the 1851 Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota precipitated the conflict. The withholding of provisions and funds produced widespread starvation among Dakota communities, pushing many to a breaking point. Violence erupted after four young Mdewakanton Dakota hunters killed settlers near Acton, Minnesota, an incident that rapidly escalated into open warfare between eastern Dakota bands and white settlers, settler militias, and eventually the US Army.⁴

The war spread like wildfire in the Minnesota River Valley. Battles affected not only Dakota people, but white settlers wanting to stay out of the action. The war destroyed towns, pushed people into refugeedom, and even led to the Dakota taking white captives. By September 1862, US Army troops defeated Taóyateduta (Little Crow) and his warriors at the Battle of Wood Lake.⁵ Violence shaped the aftermath of the US-Dakota War. While Taóyateduta and others escaped west, those who remained were deceived into surrendering under the promise of release. Instead, a military tribunal rushed 393 Dakota men through trials that often lasted no more than two minutes, without translation, legal counsel, or meaningful evidence. The tribunal sentenced 303 men to death. After reviewing the transcripts, President Abraham Lincoln reduced the number of executions to thirty-eight. On December 26, 1862, one week before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the US Army hanged all thirty-eight Dakota men at once in Mankato, Minnesota, in what remains the largest mass execution in United States history.⁶

Execution was only one component of a broader regime of removal and confinement. The US Army forcibly expelled Dakota women, children, and elders from their reservations along the Minnesota River and marched them to Fort Snelling in St. Paul. For Dakota people, they called the space Fort Snelling occupies Bdote, which was—and remains—a sacred Dakota cultural center. As University of Minnesota historian David Chang recently noted, Fort Snelling has long served as a site of federal occupational power since its inception in the early nineteenth century.⁷ The army confined approximately 1,600 Dakota people in a concentration camp enclosed by wooden palisades, where disease, malnutrition, and neglect ran rampant. Between November 1862 and March 1863, an estimated 300 people died. In Spring 1863, the Army transported the survivors hundreds of miles by steamboat and overland to the Crow Creek Reservation in present-day South Dakota, where people faced the continued threat of malnutrition and disease, while living on land deemed unhealthy for white farmers.