Grace: 180-mile ride sheds light on resilience of Dakota …

SANTEE INDIAN RESERVATION, Neb. The riders gathered in a muddy parking lot in the pouring rain, no one minding the muck or the wet.

The older men with broke-down backs from their bronc-breaking days joked between cigarettes about needing to ride sawhorses. Teenage girls trotted on a couple of mares in need of a stretch. And one of the youngest among them, a 5-year-old from South Dakota, soaked his Converse sneakers in giant puddles as they all waited to begin.

These members of the vast Dakota Sioux diaspora met here on a gray Memorial Day to remember a series of events that occurred 152 years ago: a war, an imprisonment, a mass execution and an expulsion from an ancestral home in Minnesota to the rugged no mans land of central South Dakota. Some members of this group later left South Dakota for Nebraska.

The full story, which involves broken treaties, unfair dealing and a tidal wave of white immigrants, was not widely known, even among Dakota people who might have heard bits and pieces over the years.

That is one big reason why Jim Hallum organized this weeklong, 180-mile memorial ride from his Santee Reservation in northeast Nebraska to the Crow Creek Reservation in central South Dakota. He wanted to raise awareness of a dark chapter of our shared American history and find healing.

My grandmother never talked nothing about this, said Hallum, who is 56. But I wonder what (elders) knew and I wonder what their mothers knew. But they wouldnt say nothing. I didnt know about it until I did a little research.

This was a common sentiment among the riders, regardless of age or tribe. One 15-year-old South Dakota girl who came was incredulous.

Were from Minnesota? she asked of her tribes past.

This weeks ride highlights a tumultuous period for American Indians.

In 1862, drought, broken government promises and corrupt middlemen called Indian agents made matters worse for the already-squeezed Dakota Indians, reeling from a bad treaty a decade earlier that stripped them of most of their ancestral Minnesota land. Their reservation was too small and waves of white settlers were encroaching on even that little space as game stocks diminished. Whats more, the annual government payment that covered food and provisions had not arrived. People were hungry. Children were getting sick. Accounts tell of one storekeeper who notoriously showed his indifference when he said if the Indians were so hungry, they could eat grass.

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Grace: 180-mile ride sheds light on resilience of Dakota ...