Dakota Homecoming

In the morning my left hip aches so that it hurts to stand, hurts to walk to the kitchen for my coffee. In the two days that I have not walked with the march, leaving the group at a community center in Henderson after a long day that ended with several bone-chilling miles in the sleeting rain, the pain has grown worse, as if I walked all night to make up for the lost days. At night I would fall asleep and dream of the eagle staff moving steadily down the road ahead of the group, my legs following behind with strong, sure steps. In the morning I woke tired, my knees sore, my hip aching. When the flyer went out announcing the Dakota Commemorative March, it was the first time in 140years that the original march in 1862 had been publicly acknowledged, much less grieved. How many people saw it, read it, and tossed it away, while others felt those words immediately begin to stir something in the blood, a heartbeat that echoed across the country as a small group of marchers recognized a call, a summons to be present. History was about to repeat itself as we retraced the original 150mile forced march from the Lower Sioux reservation to a prison camp at Fort Snelling. For many of us the march would become one of the most significant events in our lives. I could feel the marchers moving closer, feel their presence as they approached Prior Lake, now a sprawling urban city. The group had grown larger with each passing day as more marchers arrived from the Santee Reservation in Nebraska, from the Sisseton Reservation in South Dakota, from reservations across Canada where Dakota people had fled in 1862 rather than risk hanging or imprisonment. This was their homecoming, [End Page 340] the return of the Dakota so many generations later to land that was their heritage. The march followed the original route as closely as possible, passing through the towns of Sleepy Eye, New Ulm, Mankato, and Henderson, names made infamous by the townspeople who had battered the original marchers with sticks and rocks and scalding water, channeling their own grief into a murderous hatred of all Indians. But this march is relatively peaceful, passing through these towns without incident. The route grows more arduous as the long caravan of marchers and cars leaves behind the bucolic back roads near the Lower Sioux reservation and is forced to walk on the shoulder of increasingly busy highways. On the morning of the seventh and last day of the march, the day when we would arrive at the original site of the Fort Snelling prison camp, I woke at 5:00 A.M., drank my coffee, burned sage with a prayer for strength for the marchers, swallowed four ibuprofen, and drove through the predawn morning to the Little Six Casino in Prior Lake. After breakfast the marchers regrouped at mile marker 92 on Highway 13, where they had ended the previous day's march. The woman who offered the morning prayer wept as she spoke. Already the mood of the group had begun to shift, feeling the weight of six days of remembering, of sharing stories with other descendants, combined with the sense that we were about to arrive at the final destination of this long, exhausting journey. The march was approaching what had been a prison camp at Fort Snelling, the winter home where many more would die of disease and broken hearts. We walked along the shoulder of the highway with red prayer ties braided in the women's hair, tied to the antennas of a long line of cars and vans, wound around the arms of the men who carried the eagle staff at the head of our procession. The wind was strong and cold that morning, rising up to meet this group with its own challenge, the air whipped by the passage of fast-moving cars and trucks. We crossed freeway entrances by stopping traffic...

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