White people will not find it easy to read "In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors." The essayists, who range from professors to artists, say that what white Minnesotans did to the Dakota was ethnic cleansing and genocide. They say that, in the name of Manifest Destiny (the idea that whites are superior and had a divine right to the land), the Dakota were forcibly evicted from the state after the war in 1862.

Waziyatawin Angela Wilson's essay, "Decolonizing the 1862 Death Marches,'' should be required reading in every school in the state. It's a revealing and often-horrifying account of white treatment of the Dakota in the 19th century, including the forces that led up to the 1862 conflict and the subsequent expulsion of the Dakota people from the place they called Minisota Makoce (Land Where the Waters Reflect the Sky).

As early as the 1850s, Indian people had been tricked or bullied into giving up all lands east of the Mississippi. By 1862, Wilson writes, Dakota social structure had been broken down by white demands that Indians become Christians, dress like white people and learn to farm. Treaties promised the Dakota food, but it never came. When starving Indian men stole eggs from white settlers, the war's first shots were fired.

This was the atmosphere in which Gov. Alexander Ramsey declared as official policy that "the Sioux Indians must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of this state." In 1863, the Dakota were driven from their land and bounties were placed on the scalps of any who dared to return.

"In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors'' includes several essays by people whose relatives were driven from the Lower Sioux. Their families' oral histories tell of the cruelty suffered by Dakota who made the 1862 march. Soldiers and white citizens in the towns along the route brutalized the people, including dumping scalding water on them. One baby was snatched from its mother and killed. Many others died, and nobody knows what happened to their bodies.

While the women and children were taken to Fort Snelling, 392 men were sent to Mankato to await death. Thirty-eight were eventually hanged in the largest mass execution in the state's history.

The book includes candid photos taken of the contemporary marches and old pictures of some of the Indian women incarcerated at Fort Snelling. The text includes a list of the heads of families and number of family members in the Dakota camp at the fort, as compiled by the U.S. Army; a list of the condemned Dakota men; and a glossary of Dakota terms.

Minnesota History, Spring 2007
Review by Collette Hyman, professor of history at Winona State University.

This volume, edited by historian and march organizer Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, a descendant of one of the women on the original march, provides searing accounts of the war and of the violence directed at the Dakota….

Yet the volume as a whole also offers a possibility of hope. Dakota participants found relatives, rediscovered physical and spiritual strengths, and began a process of reconciliation among themselves. Most powerful, perhaps, among the stories of the second march were those recognizing that the war imposed difficult choices on Dakota people struggling for survival. As a result, some fought against the U.S. Army and some worked as scouts for the army; some converted to Christianity and some sought to maintain the traditions that had sustained them for generations. As Wilson notes, “The march allows us to address these issues and to develop a sense of compassion for all of our People.”

In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors provides a powerful account of Dakota history through the voices of Dakota people. It also compels the reader toward an understanding of the on-going effects of that history and contemporary efforts to heal the wounds that it inflicted.