Life in Minnesota

[An analysis from reference 10. Page xxiv says that capitals are language families, lower case are individual languages. Dagger for extinct]

Life in Minnesota, that is, in the middle of the 19th century. When central heating had not been invented and there were still plenty of Indians about, a lot of them angry about the theft of their way of life. A lot of them speaking a language called Dakota, which went on to give its name to the two states to the immediate west of Minnesota.

Dakota being just one of a complex web of languages used at that time in north America, the classification of which continues to absorb much brain power. By the second half of the twentieth century it was estimated that there were just 20,000 speakers of languages of the Siouan family left, while at the time the novel of present interest is set, it seems that quite a lot of the settlers from parts further east spoke it.

All this prompted by reading the historical novel at reference 2, set in and around the six-week Dakota War of 1862, using material from reference 3 and its purchase prompted by the article at reference 1. As always with historical fiction, I am slightly uneasy about the blend of fact and fiction. One just hopes that the author has done her homework and has not made things up which do not need to be made up. In any event, it seems that Moore has plugged some of the gaps in Wakefield’s account using material from her own, troubled early life.

Inter alia, the (largely fictional) chronicle of a housewife, caught up in the middle of this war, telling us of just one of what one imagines to be many unsavoury episodes in the colonisation of what is now the US. And to think that some people in the US have the cheek to be sanctimonious about similarly unsavoury episodes in the European colonies and conquests.

Part of the heroine’s early life is spent in a place (in New England) which doubled as both a workhouse – called a poorhouse in the US – and a mental hospital, which sounds a bit grim. But to be fair, even when one separates out the two functions, there is going to be a good bit of overlap. Some US background is to be found at reference 8.

One of the way-stations in the novel is a place called Shakopee on the Minnesota river, now a southern outpost of the presumably then non-existent Minneapolis. Up on the northern fringes of the Mississippi valley which fills so much of the continental middle of the United States.

At one point, we are told that the Dakota (glossing here, the various tribes in and around Minnesota speaking Dakota of one flavour or another) women loved to spend warm evenings sitting around a fire smoking and gossiping, the racier the better. With the men being quite keen too. No books or televisions to keep them amused. I was moved to inquire what we did to manage gossip and the best that I could do was the commandment about not bearing false witness, but BH thinks there is more explicit guidance in the Old Testament, advice drawn on by the Scottish hell-fire preachers of old. And turning to Bing, I find there is plenty of stuff in both Proverbs and the New Testament, with Christians in the US quite apt to get stirred up by the whole subject. With one post telling me about how bearing down on ‘gossip’ was sometimes used as a corporate device to crack down on any kind of dissent.

Wars are messy and worse from the point of view of those caught in the middle. In this case the many half breeds, the colonists living among, with or as natives, the natives living among, with or as colonists and the children of such people. All to likely to be despised, mistreated and worse by the those on both sides. I associate to those now caught in the middle of the conflict between the Ukrainians and the Russians – the troubled legacy of which will be with them for decades to come. Think Northern Ireland.

We are reminded that the native tribes were often fighting among themselves, sometimes torturing each other, long before the colonists turned up with their supplies of manufactured goods, weapons, booze and disease. But colonists they were, taking the land from the natives and destroying their way of life. Rather more drastic than, say, the still violent  and oppressive takeover of Saxon England by the Normans.

Colonists who, collectively, did not link the savage if useless revenge taken by the natives to their own behaviour. They just went in for savage revenge of their own, sometimes dressed up in Biblical or judicial clothes.

Mistreatment of natives may have been made worse by the shortage of Federal funds arising from the Civil War, then absorbing huge numbers of men and vast amounts of money.

An interesting, easy-read book. Quite short at just 170 small pages. Maybe I shall move onto other books by the same author, perhaps references 4 and 5.

PS: not for the first time, most recently after the service noticed at reference 7, I wondered about what has taken the place, if anything, of the ten commandments in the education of our children. My own upbringing was public service atheist, but I remember a certain amount of religion from my primary school, some more from my secondary school, this last Bible history rather than Bible. There was also a certain amount of civics, but that was more in praise of the English way of politics – more plausible then than now – than about morals. Or about the evils attendant on bearing false witness, either in a legal setting or in telling salacious & entertaining but untrue stories about one’s neighbours. But then, I was on the sciences side of the great divide. Perhaps those on the arts side did rather better, in this regard at least.

References

Reference 1: At Odds with Two Worlds – Brenda Wineapple, NYRB – 2023. ‘Susanna Moore writes of the past with quiet insight, through the eyes of women who frequently move from a form of innocence to some collision with history’.

Reference 2: The lost wife – Susanna Moore – 2023.

Reference 3: Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees – Sarah Wakefield – 1863. A book which Moore makes use of in her fictional version, a book which I may well once have owned, but now retired.

Reference 4: Miss Aluminum – Susanna Moore – 2020. A memoir.

Reference 5: Sleeping Beauties – Susanna Moore – 1993. An autobiographical novel.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_Moore. A few years older than I am. Knocked around a bit. Moderately prolific, with ten books listed here, a mixture of fiction and memoir. Strong on families that don’t work.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/ascension-day.html. 

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_for_the_Benefit_of_the_Indigent_Insane. 

Reference 9: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/winnebago-diversion.html. A previous outing for the Winnebago who appear below the Dakota in the snap above.

Reference 10: A guide to the world’s languages: Volume 1: Classification – Merritt Ruhlen – 1987. My copy lately of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College Library, probably via Abebooks.