Dakota 38

Dakota 38 – As it happens, I have just watched a DVD of the Maysles’ brothers Gimme Shelter. In that great documentary every image poses a question: what are these people thinking? What do the expressions on these faces mean? What is happening and why? Dakota 38 presents the opposite experience, and one that is, undoubtedly, more comfortable for most people: no questions are asked and every image tells you how to think about the subject matter. There is no ambiguity about why people act or what motivates them. Every picture is designed to teach a clearly established moral. For this reasons, the producers of the film, a collective called Smooth Feather, encourage educators to acquire copies of the movie for instructional purposes. Dakota 38 commemorates a ride on horseback made in December 2008 from an Indian reservation (Standing Rock it seems) in South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota, the site of the hanging of 38 Dakota warriors on the day after Christmas in 1862. The ride is alleged to be the result of a dream that came to an eccentric tribal elder, a Vietnam vet, named Miller. Miller, we learn, has killed – by his count – 38 men in Vietnam and asserts that he dreamed of the hangings in Mankato, a historical event that he says he knew nothing about. (Like most of what Miller says, this is all highly questionable – on other occasions, Miller says that his great-grandfather was hanged in Mankato. If he knew about his great-grandfather’s hanging, the entire notion that he was unaware of the event and had to reminded of it by a dream vision makes no sense.) As a gesture of reconciliation, Miller leads some unknown number of riders eastward on a 16 day trek through bad weather to Mankato – the film’s narrative is inept: sometimes the cavalcade contains fifty horses, sometimes only three. Miller says that he loves everyone repeatedly and all the people that his riders meet on the road are friendly and welcoming. Everyone uniformly feels awful about the events of 1862 and says so in the most maudlin terms. The white people are ashamed of their forefathers’ acts and provide lavish meals for the Indian horsemen. At Mankato, at the film’s climax, a weasly-looking politician reads a lengthy series of “whereases” before a resolution that, essentially, apologizes for the hangings. (This is a strange anti-climax to the film: a politician reading a resolution crafted by a city council? It certainly is an episode that falls flat on the screen). There are lots of pretty horses and some impressive landscapes. But the movie is exceptionally tedious – nothing of interest happens on the ride, there is no real conflict, and all the villages through which the Indians (and their friends) pass are uniformly generous and contrite. As history, the film is nonsense – a bunch of tribal elders who repeat ponderous clichés about the mistreatment of the Sioux. Several scenes obviously shot in a lavish Indian casino don’t acknowledge that location at all. We get some nascent conflict about who will lead the expedition – for a moment, the film seems about to devolve into reality TV, but that would be tawdry, and entertaining, and amusement is the last thing that this didactic exercise is willing to deliver. There are some interesting faces and the film saves a shock – that I expected from about half-way through the film – for the last image: a disconsolate young man, who hates white people, turns out to be a suicide a few years after the movie was produced. The film is supposed to make you feel good but it is so tedious and cloying and simple-minded that it is almost unendurable.

A Q & A – The film makers responsible for Dakota 38 were present at the screening that I watched at the Geffen auditorium at the Mayo Clinic. If Dakota 38 was uninteresting and tedious, the Q & A was sheer torture. Miller with his wife, sister, and son, took the podium. Miller is an old bullshitter and nothing that he said made any sense at all. Like many presentations of Native American spirituality, the presentation was really just an excuse to ask for money. Although the showing, which was just access to the film on a big YouTube screen, was supposed to be free, the film makers pleaded for money aggressively and passed old Miller’s cowboy hat. I put in 20 dollars (four of us attended the film) as penance for my sins. Miller claimed that his great-grandfather was hanged in Mankato in 1862. But Miller fought in Vietnam and is about sixty-three – accordingly, he can’t possibly be telling the truth. Again and again, the speakers said that “we must speak the truth” to one another while indulging in the most outrageous lies. Two of the women claimed their grandmothers had been at the Little Big Horn. Neither of these women were older that fifty – again, this claim can’t possibly be correct. Miller claimed that everyone on the reservations suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. His wife went so far as to make the racist and scientifically suspect claim that Native Americans are “genetically” afflicted with PTSD. Even worse than the Native American speakers were the white women in the crowd rushing to the microphones to make self-congratulatory statements about their own generosity, historical sensitivity, kindness to Indians, and commitment to cultural diversity. One woman who, lamentably, teaches history claimed that she never heard of the Sioux Uprising and the hanging in Mankato until this year but that she is going to correct this deficiency in her education by teaching the subject (inaccurately and unfairly it seems) and “discussing the hanging” with her students. Of course, I am 58 and all my life have known all about the Sioux Uprising. The subject was treated at length in every history book that I ever studied in Junior and Senior High School. And the treatment was always 1950’s bland, but fair: the Dakota were cheated, lied-to, pushed to the limits of their endurance, snapped, committed atrocities, fought bravely to defend their land, were defeated and brutally expelled from Minnesota and the 38 were hanged. This is the official story and has been the official story since long before my birth – in fact, this was the story as early as the winter of 1862 and hasn’t really changed since then. People were decrying the cruel treatment of the Indians even before the hanging. Several people asked this question: how can we learn about this event? The speakers said: Get our movie. Audience members cried out: there’s been a cover-up and no one knows anything about this. And these words were spoken not three blocks from the Rochester Public Library which probably contains 200 books on the subject. How can you learn about this subject? Go on Wikipedia and then, read a book.