opinion

"Uprising," state Rep. Dean Urdahl's new novel about the 1862 Dakota War, might be just the diversion I need during a long airplane ride, I thought as I packed for vacation earlier this month.

It turned out to be that and a good deal more. Urdahl's only-slightly fictional account of the bloodshed in the Minnesota River valley in 1862 makes a timely and useful contribution to the Great Minnesota Birthday Party this state is about to throw.

As Minnesotans blow out the candles next year on 150 years of statehood, they'll do well to acknowledge that there were people living on this land long centuries before 1858. And that for those original people -- and their descendants, still very much here -- statehood wasn't the beginning of something grand, but the ending.

Permit a synopsis: "Uprising" recounts the plight of the Santee Dakota people in years following the 1851 treaty that confined them to a narrow strip of land along the Minnesota River, in exchange for the promise of an annual payment from the U.S. government.

The payment was very late in the Civil War summer of 1862. Previous payments had been irregular and had been mostly usurped by unscrupulous white traders. Crops had failed in 1861. Game was scarce. Pleas for release of foodstuffs from white-controlled granaries were ignored. The Dakota were dying of starvation.

Then four reckless young Indians killed a white family on Aug. 17, 1862, and a war was on. Before it was quelled six weeks later, between 300 and 800 white settlers and several times that many Dakota were dead.

The episode resulted in the largest mass execution by the U.S. government in the nation's history: Thirty-eight Indians were hung in Mankato the day after Christmas in 1862. Thousands more were interned in concentration camps -- one at Minnesota's hallowed Fort Snelling -- before being forced into exile in Dakota Territory.

The fiction Urdahl introduces is the appearance of a Confederate undercover agent, sent by Jefferson Davis to stir up Indian trouble on the Minnesota frontier just as Gen. Robert E. Lee leads the Army of the Confederacy into Maryland.

Even that idea isn't too far from reality. "That possibility is mentioned in several sources of Minnesota history," Urdahl, R-Grove City, said when I caught up with him last week.

But other "Uprising" characters, and their words, deeds and shared humanity, are quite real. So is the sense the book conveys that injustice to native people is among this state's formative ingredients.

That reality weighs hardest on Minnesotans of Dakota ancestry. But it is also felt by Jane Leonard, the executive director of the commission planning next year's sesquicentennial observance.

"What I've learned from Dakota people is that many of them see the events that surround statehood as something to be mourned," Leonard said last week. "Statehood came on the backs of many Indian people who were pushed out, so farmers could have land." The uprising and its aftermath sealed the separation with mutual hatred.

Pam Halverson, tribal history preservation officer for the Lower Sioux Community in Morton, said that while time has eased the enmity somewhat, "we still need healing from the Dakota War. ... The truth of that war needs to be told. The truth will bring the healing that the people need."

There's likely no better opportunity for some serious truth-telling about early Minnesota than the yearlong history lesson this state is about to commence.

The lesson should reveal this truth: Minnesotans share a place, a climate, a government. But they do not share one culture. They never did. And this state's success -- maybe now more than ever -- depends on its people's ability to respect cultures other than their own and peacefully resolve conflict between cultures.

The conflict resolution method of 1862 must never be repeated.

Urdahl, Leonard and Halverson each have ideas for doing more Dakota War truth-telling. Urdahl, a former high school history teacher, has written a history lesson disguised as a novel. But he'd also like to see a permanent memorial erected to tell the story of the fallen Dakota warriors -- preferably in his district. (That's only fitting. His district is where the worst of the conflict played out. His great-great grandfather built the stockade that saved many lives in Forest City in September 1862.)

Halverson's idea is similar: She wants her band to take control of the historic site at Lower Sioux, now operated by the Minnesota Historical Society, and expand it into a year-round interpretive center.