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| Minnesota Mni Sóta Makoce | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Capital | Saint Paul |
| Largest city | Minneapolis |
| Area | |
• Total | 225,365 km² |
| Population | |
• 2021 estimate | 5,742,036 |
• Census | Minnesota State Demographic Center |
Minnesota is a state in the United States. Bordered by Canada to the north, Lake Superior and Wisconsin to the east, Iowa to the south, and North and South Dakota to the west, Minnesota encompasses 225,365 km² and has a population of approximately 5.7 million. Minneapolis and Saint Paul are the major metropolitan, commercial, and political center. In recent decades, Minnesota has seen the growth of financial services, health care, and retail sectors, while its traditional industrial and mining base has been devastated by the global crisis of the steel industry.[1]
Minnesota is governed by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, a capitalist party that serves the interests of Minnesota's corporate and financial elite while maintaining a base of support among sections of the trade union bureaucracy and middle-class.[1]
History[edit | edit source]
The territory of present-day Minnesota belong to the two major Indigenous peoples: the Dakota the eastern division of the Sioux, also called the Santee, who occupied the woodlands and prairies of the southern and western portions of the territory, and the Ojibwe, who inhabited the northern forests and the shores of Lake Superior. With economies built upon agriculture, hunting, fishing and gathering wild rice. The Dakota cultivating corn, beans, and squash along the river valleys, the Ojibwe harvesting wild rice from the northern lakes and irrigated by the seasonal cycles of the northern forests.[2]
Along with extensive trade networks, agricultural resource-management practices and systems of governance along diplomacy between their nations. First European contact within Minnesota were colonial French fur traders and missionaries in the latter half of the seventeenth century and negotiated between the Dakota and Ojibwe to facilitate French access to their fur which integrated them into the world market as suppliers of raw materials but this negotiation had an invisible consequence as it subordinated the Indigenous peoples' economies to the requirements of European mercantile capital.[2]
The establishment of Fort Snelling in 1819 at the union of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers on land sacred to the Dakota was the beginning of the settler-colonial expansion within Minnesota. The mechanism by which the Dakota and Ojibwe were ethnically cleansed was the treaty, a bourgeois legal instrument that cloaked the violent dispossession of land. Through a series of treaties in the 1830s and 1850s, the Dakota were forced to give up the vast bulk of their ancestral territory.[2]
The 1851 Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, negotiated under conditions of coercion, fraud, and outright bribery, stripped the Dakota of the entire southern half of Minnesota. By 1858, the same year Minnesota was admitted to the Union as a state, over 7,000 Dakota Sioux were forced onto a tiny reservation on a narrow strip of land along the Minnesota River. They had been forced to surrender 90% of their land. An estimated 150,000 American settlers had violently moved into Dakota territory over the course of time and the Dakota were no longer able to support themselves through their traditional means of agriculture and hunting. [2]
This dispossession, massacres, starvation, and systematic fraud had left the Dakota vulnerable to a poor harvest and a difficult winter which resulted in many Dakota were starving, forced to sustain themselves on roots and whatever they could forage. Starving and desperate as a result of the colonialists, broke into the warehouse at the Yellow Medicine Upper Agency to obtain food, the Minnesota militia threatened them with cannon fire. [2]
On August 17th 1862, four young starving Dakota men returning from a unsuccessful hunting expedition killed five white settlers at Acton, Minnesota in a conflict over stolen hen eggs. Dakota leaders upon hearing this, met in council to debate their course. They understood that the American state would respond disproportionately with excessive force regardless of whether they surrendered those responsible and tried to make amends Taoyateduta, a leader of the Mdewakantonwan band, argued for going on the offensive as it was pointless to be diplomatic despite his initial calls for peace. [2]
On the morning of August 18th 1862, Dakota warriors attacked the Lower Agency settlement which started the Dakota War of 1862 where over 600 white settlers, an estimated 200 soldiers, and as many as 300 Dakota died in the fighting. An estimated 20,000 white farmers abandoned their crops and fled. Though facing the combined force of the U.S. military which was inevitable whether they started the uprising or not, the Dakota surrendered on September 23, 1862. American troops rounded up thousands of Dakota in concentration camps including hundreds of women, children, and elderly who had no part in the conflict.[2]
As the Dakota were being marched towards their concentration camp, the white settlers actively targeted the elderly, women and children with vigilante violence. As they were kept in these unsanitary concentration camps, epidemics spread and by September 28 to November 5, 1862, nearly 400 Dakota men were sentenced to death and the trials were typically one minute long and guilt was based on whether one had fired a rifle in any form of combat and the commissioners were the military officers who had fought against the Dakota.[2]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia of China. Minnesota [EB/OL]. (2023-02-28). https://www.zgbk.com/ecph/s/2c405349dab9cb9.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 "History of Minnesota | History | Research Starters | EBSCO Research." EBSCO, www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/history-minnesota.