Gary Clayton Anderson > Quotes

“Hurry up and go back and come over here quick, you cock suckers.” . . .[Counsel for the claimants objected unsuccessfully to this language.] What Akipa meant to have them understand was that he had no fear of them; that he despised them. The Indians had no curse words, or oaths, and they used this expression to express their contempt.”
― Gary Clayton Anderson, Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862

“The main dance that still attracted the largest crowds remained the Medicine Dance and Feast. Christian Indian Lorenzo Lawrence revealed some of the society’s secrets. He noted that Indian mentors of the dance continued to “teach him [the initiate] to make feasts.” Henry Benjamin Whipple, the new Episcopalian bishop of Minnesota, who visited the reservation in spring 1862, noted the growing debate over feasts versus hoarding. It led to constant “councils . . . and a strange restlessness among the Indians.” For the first time, he wrote, “Indians refused to shake hands with white men.” Even worse, the Scalp Dance was on the rise: “Each day there was either a scalp dance, a begging dance, a Monkey dance, or a Medicine Dance.” During the Scalp Dance, Whipple saw”
― Gary Clayton Anderson, Massacre in Minnesota: The Dakota War of 1862, the Most Violent Ethnic Conflict in American History