Encounter on the Great Plains : Scandinavian settlers and the dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930
Title:
Encounter on the Great Plains : Scandinavian settlers and the dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930
Author:
Hansen, Karen V.
ISBN:
9780199968916
9780199369478
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (xxviii, 332 pages) : photographgraphs.
Contents:
Introduction: illuminating the encounter -- An unlikely encounter -- Indians never knocked: fear frames the encounter -- The Scandinavian flood: land hunger, dislocation, and settlement -- The reservation land rush: allotment and landtracking -- The entangled lives of strangers -- Spirit Lake transformed: the nexus of schooling, language, and trade -- Marking nations, reservation boundaries, and racial-ethnic hierarchies -- Fighting the sky and working the land -- The divisions of citizenship and the grip of poverty -- Divergent paths to racialized citizenship -- A fragile hold on the land -- Conclusion: Strangers no more -- Appendixes -- A. Historical timeline -- B. Oral history interview subjects.
Abstract:
In 1904, Scandinavian settlers began moving onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. These land-hungry first and second generation immigrants struggled with poverty nearly as severe as that of their Dakota neighbours, often becoming sharecropping tenants of Dakota landowners. Yet the homesteaders' impoverishment did not impede native dispossession: by 1929 Scandinavians owned more reservation land than did Dakotas. Although this historical encounter at Spirit Lake took place in a small corner of eastern North Dakota, it encapsulates the story of conquest and white settlement and the less publicized but equally important, story of the dispossession and survival of Native Americans.
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Electronic Access:
EBSCOhost http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=667810