Truth To Tell (2010-05-12)
Mary Lethert Wingerd, author of North Country: The Making of Minnesota, the untold history of how the land of the Dakota and Ojibwe became the State of Minnesota. This is an all-new a new history of our fair state, but beginning way back there when this was a land stewarded by our indigenous predecessors, the Ojibwe and Dakota (Sioux), centuries before Europeans first arrived and blended in with their brothers, then turned on them to settle those same lands by cheating trade and false treaties.
Mary Wingerd and TTT’s Andy Driscoll talk about her book and touch on her oral history project at St. Cloud State University, where she is a professor of history. Wingerd is also author of Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul .
From the University of Minnesota website:
“In 1862, four years after Minnesota was ratified as the thirty-second state in the Union, simmering tensions between indigenous Dakota and white settlers culminated in the violent, six-week-long U.S.–Dakota War. Hundreds of lives were lost on both sides, and the war ended with the execution of thirty-eight Dakotas on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota—the largest mass execution in American history. The following April, after suffering a long internment at Fort Snelling, the Dakota and Winnebago peoples were forcefully removed to South Dakota, precipitating the near destruction of the area’s native communities while simultaneously laying the foundation for what we know and recognize today as Minnesota.
“In North Country: The Making of Minnesota, Mary Lethert Wingerd unlocks the complex origins of the state—origins that have often been ignored in favor of legend and a far more benign narrative of immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange. Moving from the earliest years of contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the western Great Lakes region to the era of French and British influence during the fur trade and beyond, Wingerd charts how for two centuries prior to official statehood Native people and Europeans in the region maintained a hesitant, largely cobeneficial relationship. Founded on intermarriage, kinship, and trade between the two parties, this racially hybridized society was a meeting point for cultural and economic exchange until the western expansion of American capitalism and violation of treaties by the U.S. government during the 1850s wore sharply at this tremulous bond, ultimately leading to what Wingerd calls Minnesota’s Civil War.”
June 24: Mary Letherd Wingerd discusses North Country: The Making of Minnesota at Magers and Quinn Booksellers.
Author and Professor Mary Lethert Wingerd