Post by hushasha40 on Apr 23, 2007 18:52:44 GMT 1
More at stake than money, descendants say
Their Sioux ancestors were forced generations ago to abandon life in Minnesota. Now families want to lay claim to their heritage.
April 23, 2007, Minneapolis Star Tribune
by Kevin Diaz, McClatchy Washington Bureau
SANTEE SIOUX RESERVATION, NEB. - The gravestones, tilted and fading, stand in the shade of cedar trees on a hilltop cemetery overlooking the Missouri River.
These are Nancy Mackey's Minnesota relatives, reminders that she and thousands of others grew up in exile and tough times on the Santee Sioux Reservation, where Nebraska's rich farmlands give way to scrubby river bluffs.
"If they were looking for a way to punish us, they did a pretty good job by sending us here," she said.
One grave belongs to Maggie Frazier, Mackey's great-great-great grandmother. It is through Maggie, banished from her home in Minnesota after the 1862 Dakota Conflict, that Mackey is trying to reclaim a heritage both cultural and financial.
Like thousands of modern Mdewakanton Sioux all across the nation, she has boxes full of birth records and baptismal certificates to make a link to people like Maggie Frazier and Maggie's husband, John.
The search stems from a court decision in Washington holding that descendants of Indians like John Frazier -- who appeared on an 1886 Minnesota census -- could gain the benefits of lands set aside for the "loyal Mdewakanton." Those lands now form part of the modern Mdewakanton Indian communities in Prairie Island and Shakopee, which maintain profitable casinos.
The Fraziers, with some 1,200 living descendants around the nation, are one of the biggest family groups making claims as part of a lawsuit named for Sheldon Wolfchild, an ex-tribal leader at the Lower Sioux Indian community in Morton, Minn.
Whether descendants like Mackey ever collect, she says there's more at stake than money.
"It's about what happened," Mackey said. "If it hadn't been for the 1862 war, we wouldn't be here."
For Mackey, it has become a personal quest, which is why she often finds herself carting boxes full of Frazier genealogies across the reservation.
"I have about 5,000 Indians riding around in my trunk," says the 49-year-old mother of two. "Sometimes I can hear them wailing, and I have to tell them to quiet down."
The story of the Frazier clan
For Mackey, the key is John Frazier. He was the son of Jack Frazier, identified by Henry Sibley, Minnesota's first governor, as one of his Indian scouts during the 1862 Sioux uprising.
John Frazier, or Hanyetuduta, was one of hundreds of fighting-age Sioux men imprisoned briefly in Mankato after the war. According to most modern histories, angry white settlers scarcely distinguished between the friendly and the hostile after the war. In the end, 38 of the Indians were hanged with President Abraham Lincoln's blessing.
John Frazier's two wives, Maggie and her "sister-wife" Jennie, were imprisoned along with many of the other women, children and elderly held at an encampment at Fort Snelling. Both ended up in Santee, by way of Crow Creek, S.D., where the exiled Indians nearly starved.
Along the way, Maggie gave birth to her third child, Charles.
Once reunited with John Frazier in Nebraska, the family found out they had a problem common to many newly Christianized Indian families: John Frazier couldn't keep two wives.
Maggie thus became what the Sioux called a "put away" -- the discarded wife, according to a history written by Native American author Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, a great-granddaughter of Charles Frazier.
John Frazier, who had turned to Christianity in prison, then legally married Jennie and returned with her to Minnesota, where he would be counted on the 1886 census before dying in 1887.
Alone in Nebraska, Maggie raised her three children, Star, Mary and Charles, and died in 1909.
According to Sneve, Mary settled her accounts, Charles paid for the funeral and Star paid for the tombstone.
Mackey, who grew up on the modern Santee Reservation, is the great-great-granddaughter of Star Frazier.
But the Mdewakanton Diaspora didn't end in Santee.
By the time Maggie died, Charles had become a Congregational minister and moved to Rosebud, S.D., pushing the Frazier family tree -- and ultimately the Wolfchild litigation -- farther west.
Life in Rosebud, S.D.
Early on a subzero January morning in Rosebud, S.D., four generations of Fraziers gathered in a pale blue one-story house to get ready for school.
Living on one of the nation's poorest Indian reservations, 80-year-old Mary LaPointe, Charles Frazier's granddaughter, often ferries the children to school, 15 miles down a two-lane road through rolling seas of grass.
Together with her husband, Jim, a retired trucker, LaPointe is the family's prime mover, motivator and genealogist. She takes her 6-year-old great-granddaughter, Korilyn, by the hand and helps stuff her into a tiny pink parka.
Korilyn's mom, Catina, a part-time housekeeper, has to care for her youngest child, 14-month-old Kevin.
Catina's mother, Mary, divorced from an alcoholic husband, is getting ready for her job at a reservation hospital.
There in the living room, under a photo of LaPointe's son Larry, who was killed in Vietnam, it's the start of another day. In LaPointe's eyes, the Minnesota inheritance of their Frazier ancestors could generate even better days.
"This is what it's all about," says LaPointe, nodding to Korilyn, who's chewing her last sthingyful of Cheerios.
For the sake of future generations
LaPointe, known on the reservation as Dolly, does not expect to live to see any money from the government. She says she joined the Wolfchild suit for the sake of her children and grandchildren.
That feeling is shared by many elders in the Frazier clan, including Norman Wilson, 75, a former Rosebud tribal chairman and a descendant of Star Frazier. "Maybe the money can go into education, or health funds, or fighting drugs," he said. "But I don't expect to see any of it."
Money or no money, the lawsuit often keeps LaPointe up nights, poring over family records she has been sending away for over the past year.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks: A fire that destroyed Charles Frazier's family home during their first Christmas in Rosebud in 1901 also took with it many of the family's papers. Lacking any official government record of Charles' birth during the family's exile in 1863, LaPointe had to resort to an old family Bible and his 1938 death certificate. Both listed his father, John Frazier, the family patriarch from Minnesota.
"I don't remember my grandparents talking about the past," LaPointe said. "If they did, it might have been in their own language [Dakota].
"Even if nothing comes of it, it's nice that we found out about our ancestors, and that we can say we did come from someplace."
Divisions in Indian country
Mackey knows there is not universal sympathy for her cause in Indian Country.
"Indians can be very jealous people," she said. "But then, they also take care of each other."
Encouraged by a series of rulings in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which found a breach of trust to the "loyal Mdewakanton," as many as 22,000 Indians like Mackey and LaPointe have joined lawsuits against the government laying claim to the lost trust lands of their Minnesota ancestors.
They list addresses from California to Washington, D.C.
Not surprisingly, all this has taken a toll on families involved in the case. That includes the family of the late Norman Crooks, the founder of the modern Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux (Dakota) Community, which owns the Little Six and Mystic Lake casinos in Prior Lake.
Crooks' son, Stanley Crooks, the current tribal chairman, counts Wolfchild as a cousin.
Now they find themselves on opposite sides of a divide created by the wealth that tribal membership at Shakopee provides.
While Crooks would not be interviewed for this article, the tribe's attorney, William Hardacker, called the suit "an attempt to rewrite history based on personal opinion, personal greed and personal vendettas."
Elsewhere, Native American reservations have been rife with accounts of family squabbles based on who is and who isn't a direct lineal descendant of the "loyal Mdewakanton" on the 1886 census -- a key to inclusion in the Wolfchild suit.
Corby Shoots The Enemy, a tribal historian in Crow Creek, S.D., descends from a family that was forcibly removed from Minnesota after the 1862 war. To him, it's a source of pride.
"The ones who stayed behind became Christians and lived like wasichu [white people]," he said.
Others who claim connections to the Minnesota lands say they simply couldn't find the records to prove it in court.
Identity or dollar signs?
Lisa Lengkeek Rockwood, a Crow Creek tribal administrator, was inspired by the Wolfchild case to research her family's ties to Minnesota. "I've been teaching my children the wrong history," she said. "I thought we were Plains Indians, and it turns out we are lake people."
But like many others in Crow Creek -- the first stop in the Mdewakanton exile -- she couldn't produce documents tying her to the 1886 census.
Finally, where some Indians see a search for Mdewakanton identity, others see only dollar signs.
"What other reason would they have?" asked Santee Tribal Chairman Roger Trudell, who opposes the Wolfchild lawsuit.
While the rush to lay claim to the Mdewakanton Sioux lands in Minnesota may not unite the fractured tribe, Mackey sees a certain historic vindication in the search itself.
"The government did a lot of things wrong, but it did one thing right," she said. "They kept good records."
Kevin Diaz • kdiaz@mcclatchydc.com
©2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
www.startribune.com
Their Sioux ancestors were forced generations ago to abandon life in Minnesota. Now families want to lay claim to their heritage.
April 23, 2007, Minneapolis Star Tribune
by Kevin Diaz, McClatchy Washington Bureau
SANTEE SIOUX RESERVATION, NEB. - The gravestones, tilted and fading, stand in the shade of cedar trees on a hilltop cemetery overlooking the Missouri River.
These are Nancy Mackey's Minnesota relatives, reminders that she and thousands of others grew up in exile and tough times on the Santee Sioux Reservation, where Nebraska's rich farmlands give way to scrubby river bluffs.
"If they were looking for a way to punish us, they did a pretty good job by sending us here," she said.
One grave belongs to Maggie Frazier, Mackey's great-great-great grandmother. It is through Maggie, banished from her home in Minnesota after the 1862 Dakota Conflict, that Mackey is trying to reclaim a heritage both cultural and financial.
Like thousands of modern Mdewakanton Sioux all across the nation, she has boxes full of birth records and baptismal certificates to make a link to people like Maggie Frazier and Maggie's husband, John.
The search stems from a court decision in Washington holding that descendants of Indians like John Frazier -- who appeared on an 1886 Minnesota census -- could gain the benefits of lands set aside for the "loyal Mdewakanton." Those lands now form part of the modern Mdewakanton Indian communities in Prairie Island and Shakopee, which maintain profitable casinos.
The Fraziers, with some 1,200 living descendants around the nation, are one of the biggest family groups making claims as part of a lawsuit named for Sheldon Wolfchild, an ex-tribal leader at the Lower Sioux Indian community in Morton, Minn.
Whether descendants like Mackey ever collect, she says there's more at stake than money.
"It's about what happened," Mackey said. "If it hadn't been for the 1862 war, we wouldn't be here."
For Mackey, it has become a personal quest, which is why she often finds herself carting boxes full of Frazier genealogies across the reservation.
"I have about 5,000 Indians riding around in my trunk," says the 49-year-old mother of two. "Sometimes I can hear them wailing, and I have to tell them to quiet down."
The story of the Frazier clan
For Mackey, the key is John Frazier. He was the son of Jack Frazier, identified by Henry Sibley, Minnesota's first governor, as one of his Indian scouts during the 1862 Sioux uprising.
John Frazier, or Hanyetuduta, was one of hundreds of fighting-age Sioux men imprisoned briefly in Mankato after the war. According to most modern histories, angry white settlers scarcely distinguished between the friendly and the hostile after the war. In the end, 38 of the Indians were hanged with President Abraham Lincoln's blessing.
John Frazier's two wives, Maggie and her "sister-wife" Jennie, were imprisoned along with many of the other women, children and elderly held at an encampment at Fort Snelling. Both ended up in Santee, by way of Crow Creek, S.D., where the exiled Indians nearly starved.
Along the way, Maggie gave birth to her third child, Charles.
Once reunited with John Frazier in Nebraska, the family found out they had a problem common to many newly Christianized Indian families: John Frazier couldn't keep two wives.
Maggie thus became what the Sioux called a "put away" -- the discarded wife, according to a history written by Native American author Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, a great-granddaughter of Charles Frazier.
John Frazier, who had turned to Christianity in prison, then legally married Jennie and returned with her to Minnesota, where he would be counted on the 1886 census before dying in 1887.
Alone in Nebraska, Maggie raised her three children, Star, Mary and Charles, and died in 1909.
According to Sneve, Mary settled her accounts, Charles paid for the funeral and Star paid for the tombstone.
Mackey, who grew up on the modern Santee Reservation, is the great-great-granddaughter of Star Frazier.
But the Mdewakanton Diaspora didn't end in Santee.
By the time Maggie died, Charles had become a Congregational minister and moved to Rosebud, S.D., pushing the Frazier family tree -- and ultimately the Wolfchild litigation -- farther west.
Life in Rosebud, S.D.
Early on a subzero January morning in Rosebud, S.D., four generations of Fraziers gathered in a pale blue one-story house to get ready for school.
Living on one of the nation's poorest Indian reservations, 80-year-old Mary LaPointe, Charles Frazier's granddaughter, often ferries the children to school, 15 miles down a two-lane road through rolling seas of grass.
Together with her husband, Jim, a retired trucker, LaPointe is the family's prime mover, motivator and genealogist. She takes her 6-year-old great-granddaughter, Korilyn, by the hand and helps stuff her into a tiny pink parka.
Korilyn's mom, Catina, a part-time housekeeper, has to care for her youngest child, 14-month-old Kevin.
Catina's mother, Mary, divorced from an alcoholic husband, is getting ready for her job at a reservation hospital.
There in the living room, under a photo of LaPointe's son Larry, who was killed in Vietnam, it's the start of another day. In LaPointe's eyes, the Minnesota inheritance of their Frazier ancestors could generate even better days.
"This is what it's all about," says LaPointe, nodding to Korilyn, who's chewing her last sthingyful of Cheerios.
For the sake of future generations
LaPointe, known on the reservation as Dolly, does not expect to live to see any money from the government. She says she joined the Wolfchild suit for the sake of her children and grandchildren.
That feeling is shared by many elders in the Frazier clan, including Norman Wilson, 75, a former Rosebud tribal chairman and a descendant of Star Frazier. "Maybe the money can go into education, or health funds, or fighting drugs," he said. "But I don't expect to see any of it."
Money or no money, the lawsuit often keeps LaPointe up nights, poring over family records she has been sending away for over the past year.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks: A fire that destroyed Charles Frazier's family home during their first Christmas in Rosebud in 1901 also took with it many of the family's papers. Lacking any official government record of Charles' birth during the family's exile in 1863, LaPointe had to resort to an old family Bible and his 1938 death certificate. Both listed his father, John Frazier, the family patriarch from Minnesota.
"I don't remember my grandparents talking about the past," LaPointe said. "If they did, it might have been in their own language [Dakota].
"Even if nothing comes of it, it's nice that we found out about our ancestors, and that we can say we did come from someplace."
Divisions in Indian country
Mackey knows there is not universal sympathy for her cause in Indian Country.
"Indians can be very jealous people," she said. "But then, they also take care of each other."
Encouraged by a series of rulings in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which found a breach of trust to the "loyal Mdewakanton," as many as 22,000 Indians like Mackey and LaPointe have joined lawsuits against the government laying claim to the lost trust lands of their Minnesota ancestors.
They list addresses from California to Washington, D.C.
Not surprisingly, all this has taken a toll on families involved in the case. That includes the family of the late Norman Crooks, the founder of the modern Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux (Dakota) Community, which owns the Little Six and Mystic Lake casinos in Prior Lake.
Crooks' son, Stanley Crooks, the current tribal chairman, counts Wolfchild as a cousin.
Now they find themselves on opposite sides of a divide created by the wealth that tribal membership at Shakopee provides.
While Crooks would not be interviewed for this article, the tribe's attorney, William Hardacker, called the suit "an attempt to rewrite history based on personal opinion, personal greed and personal vendettas."
Elsewhere, Native American reservations have been rife with accounts of family squabbles based on who is and who isn't a direct lineal descendant of the "loyal Mdewakanton" on the 1886 census -- a key to inclusion in the Wolfchild suit.
Corby Shoots The Enemy, a tribal historian in Crow Creek, S.D., descends from a family that was forcibly removed from Minnesota after the 1862 war. To him, it's a source of pride.
"The ones who stayed behind became Christians and lived like wasichu [white people]," he said.
Others who claim connections to the Minnesota lands say they simply couldn't find the records to prove it in court.
Identity or dollar signs?
Lisa Lengkeek Rockwood, a Crow Creek tribal administrator, was inspired by the Wolfchild case to research her family's ties to Minnesota. "I've been teaching my children the wrong history," she said. "I thought we were Plains Indians, and it turns out we are lake people."
But like many others in Crow Creek -- the first stop in the Mdewakanton exile -- she couldn't produce documents tying her to the 1886 census.
Finally, where some Indians see a search for Mdewakanton identity, others see only dollar signs.
"What other reason would they have?" asked Santee Tribal Chairman Roger Trudell, who opposes the Wolfchild lawsuit.
While the rush to lay claim to the Mdewakanton Sioux lands in Minnesota may not unite the fractured tribe, Mackey sees a certain historic vindication in the search itself.
"The government did a lot of things wrong, but it did one thing right," she said. "They kept good records."
Kevin Diaz • kdiaz@mcclatchydc.com
©2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
www.startribune.com