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Jameson R. Sweet, "Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello. And welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about a very interesting book titled Mixed Blood Race Law and Dakota Indians in the 19th Century Midwest, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2025, which takes as its subject, as the title suggests, a group of people that are often sort of missed out in some of these histories.
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Right.
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We're not talking about settler colonials, settler colonial populations by themselves. They're obviously going to come up, but we're not focusing on them. We're also not focusing on kind of, for example, the entire Dakota Indian tribe. We're looking at a sort of specific subset of people that have mixed ancestry that are often sort of not focused on because in many ways often kind of something that is mixed, someone that is mixed is sort of like, well, doesn't really fit nicely into a category and therefore we're not going to focus on them. Right. But those are real people who have a history who, as this book shows, have a history that influences all sorts of things. So definitely a worthy subject for us to be discussing, obviously through the lens of the book. And so who better to tell us about the book than the author? Dr. Jameson Sweet is here to tell us all about his work. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining me.
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Oh, well, thank you for having me.
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Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Yeah. So. Well, thank you for listening, everybody. My name is Jimmy Sweets. I'm a professor in the American Studies department at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I'm Lakota and Dakota, although I'm not enrolled in any further recognized tribe right now. My family descends from the Rosebud tribe, excuse me, the Rosebud Sioux tribe of South Dakota and the Santisu tribe of Nebraska. So really how I got into this and why I wanted to write this book is it started really about 25 years ago, and it was me delving into my family history. And so this was before I even went to college. I didn't start college until I was 27, and then went on to grad school in my 30s. But in my early 20s, I was really kind of interested in learning more about my family history and began exploring that, asking relatives and what. Pretty quickly, I actually got pretty good at researching. And so before I even started my undergraduate degree, I'd spent countless hours sitting in front of microfilm machines, going to libraries and archives, analyzing documents and things like that, and went to college, became a historian, and decided to go on to grad school and quickly realized, like, well, hey, wait a minute. I can use these kind of, like, family history skills I'd built and along with these historical skills to do something here. And so this book is kind of like a melding of the deeply personal and the academic is where I bring in my family history as part of this academic history book. And it's not a. It's not a book about my family, but they're there as a little bit of kind of like a backbone, kind of like telling some stories that run through the course of the book first. So for me, it's just really been a labor of love of something that is deeply personal, learning about my own family's history, my own people's history, but also, you know, melding that with kind of like this academic history. And it's been really important to me in that sense.
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B
That's really helpful to hear the sort of backstory of the project. And I think so often interesting projects come from a combination of kind of academic interest and personal interest as well. And obviously in your book, those come through on the page, too, not just in the backstory. So helpful to have that laid out at the beginning of our conversation. Of course, another key element that goes all throughout the book kind of comes up in the title, too, is around sort of terminology. Right. So the book is titled Mixed Blood Histories. That obviously has a lot sort of packed into those words there. Can we talk more about how you've approached questions of terminology in the project?
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Yeah, and so that is, you know, a difficult part of this. Like anybody who knows who's writing about the history of race, it is really hard to do in a meaningful way with. With good language, because the reality is, most of the racial language we use is problematic in some way or problematic to somebody. And it can change over time, over generations, where what's acceptable and what's not. And so, as you allude to in the title, I use the term mixed blood, and there's kind of a reason for that. But, you know, mixed blood is kind of the common term that's used in the Native community today. It's also used pretty, pretty commonly among academics who study these people as well. And yet that term mixed blood, and especially that concept of blood, of belonging or race or Indianness kind of coming from your blood, is not an Indigenous concept. It's very much a settler colonial concept. And so I wanted to move away from that and just not to, you know, I don't have any problem with other folks who choose the term to use the term mixed blood, but I've decided to move away from it in favor of using a term, mixed ancestry. Now, it's not a perfect term either, but I think it's a somewhat better term that kind of gets us away from the old kind of like, racist tropes of which this concept of blood and race kind of comes from, and get us at least a little bit closer from an Indigenous conception of race. And along with that, too, you know, in the book, I often use the term Indian, but I also use Native American, American, Indian, Indigenous, all kind of interchangeably. That's actually, you know, for those who aren't used to reading these kinds of histories, the reality is a lot of Native people use the term Indian. It's not quite the bad word that most people have been raised to believe. And Native American itself isn't necessarily an innocuous term. I mean, Native people are. Find Native American to be problematic in that it names the people after the nation that has committed genocide against them, for example. So why would they want to be named after that? So the reality is, getting into this idea is like, there really isn't any good terminology is part of the problem we're dealing with here. And so dealing with race. So again, the issue of race is something that I've had to deal with in terms of terminology. And another term that often comes up here is Metis. So the Metis people are a distinct Indigenous people with their own sense of Indigenous nationhood, their own separate identity. They're not Native Americans or First nations in Canada. They're Metis. It's something different. It's their own kind of nation, their own identity. But very often that gets used as a synonym simply for people of mixed ancestry, and it's not the same thing. So the people I'm writing about, actually, for the most part are not Metis. So some of the mixed ancestry Dakota did join that community and essentially developed that identity and became Metis, including at least one branch of my family. But for the most part, the people I'm writing about aren't Metis. And in fact, they recognize the differences between their communities and themselves. And so that's another thing we have to deal with is very often the misuse of the terminology of Metis, again I want to make it very clear, is like the people I'm writing about are not Metis. That's a separate Indigenous identity with their own sense of Indigenous nationhood. And that's not the people I'm writing about, which is why I choose to use the term mixed ancestry. Another big part of the terminology here, though, is because we're writing in English about race and speaking in English and reading books in English. We're using racial concepts that come to us from the Western world for the most part, and not Indigenous concepts of race. We have to understand, if we examine Indigenous languages, we can find Indigenous concepts of race and many other things. We can find that what they're talking about is something radically different than our understandings of race or whatever it might be in English. And so an example of that from the Dakota example. Thinking about the Dakota language, there are several words and phrases in Dakota that refer to mixed ancestry people. One of them is washichu chincha, and the literal translation is the offspring of white people. And so that kind of suggests that Dakota peoples view those of mixed ancestry as something different, kind of pushing them away. And yet there's another term, iesca, and a literal translation of that is translator, which suggests that they see mixed ancestry Dakota people as a really important key people that are kind of the gateway in between both Euro American and the Native communities and have an important role as diplomats, as in between, in a sense, in that way. So it's a completely different kind of set of racial conceptions here. The Lakota dialect, Lakota and Dakota are, you know, are closely related dialects of the same language. I mean, they're mutually intelligible. But the Lakota have a term called ausi to mean mixed ancestry people. And the literal translation of that is yellow armpit. And this comes from a kind of Lakota racial stereotype of mixed ancestry people that they sweat more and therefore yellow the armpits of their shirts. But all this to say is that racial language in Native languages is often almost as complex, if not just as complex as it is in English, but often comes from very different kind of sets of understandings. Of looking at the world. And pretty much every indigenous language has its own terminologies for race, racial mixedness that are just as complex, but sometimes even just as problematic as they are in English. But we don't really explore those that much. And so that's one of the things I wanted to do at least a little bit in this book, is to bring in the Dakota language to kind of explore some indigenous concepts, not only of race, but also of other things, like legal concepts as well. Like one quick example of that is for the word treaty. You know, this is a legal history book and we talk about treaties quite a bit, but the Dakota word for treaty is wo, Dakota. And that prefix wo is something that makes. Turns it into a noun and makes it something like an instrument for doing something. And so when we say wo, Dakota meaning treaty, what that's basically saying is you're making somebody Dakota or making another people Dakota, you're making them you. So a sense. It's kind of like the ultimate way of thinking about a peace treaty is you're making that person part of you. And so, yeah, so that was one of the ways I was approaching terminology here, is just trying to get into the difficulties of talking about race, but also to try to get into as much as possible the indigenous concepts of race, legal concepts and so on.
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Yeah, there's so much in there that is interesting and important, obviously, as you said, sort of legally and historically too, and linguistically. So lots and lots of nuance from what seems like a sort of niche question. It's niche and not kind of at the same time. So thank you for taking us through that. Of course, the other aspect of the title is of course, that the focus is on the 19th century Midwest. But your book doesn't sort of magic start in 1801 or something like that. You do help us understand, obviously, what happens importantly before. So can you tell us a bit about the role of mixed ancestry people and families from sort of the early 1600s through the revolutionary period? You mentioned a little bit a moment ago about kind of the important social role that some of these families had. Can you tell us more about this?
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Yes. And so understand if we're thinking very broadly of this question about mixed ancestry people in North America, let's say that history going to be very different and work differently in different regions, different time periods among different indigenous nations. But thinking about the Dakota and maybe kind of like the western Great Lakes a little more broadly, we're talking about contacts between the indigenous people there and Europeans, usually the French and Later, French Canadians, going back to about the mid-1600s. And of course, that's going to be earlier when you get into a little bit east of there, into Michigan, and even earlier towards the coast. But so what that means for the Dakota people in this region is the most important part of this. The most important aspect of this is the fur trade. The fur trade was probably the most important kind of economic activity that was going on in North America for the 1600s, 1700s, and maybe even into the early 19th century. Really hugely important. So what's going on is so many fur traders are coming west, they're coming to Dakota Territory, the territory of the Dakota people, and realizing they want to trade, but realizing that Native people aren't necessarily willing to fully trade people, or at least not in the long term, unless they're related, unless they create some kind of kinship connection. And the best way to create a kinship connection is to marry somebody, to marry into the tribal nation. And so these fur traders, these are white men, they're coming from the east, and they're coming to these tribal nations and realizing, hey, wait a minute, if I want to have real success in a trade, I have to become kin. Usually that's through intermarriage. Sometimes it's through kind of like ritual adoption or both. But so the thing was, is very quickly then, these perpetrators learned they had to come in, they had to marry to create those kind of reciprocal kind of kinship relations that are going on there that are the backbone of Dakota society and many other tribal societies. And so what that meant was, with these intermarriages, even though in this early period, really up until probably the mid to late 1700s, in this region, most of these intermarriages were fairly short lived, where these fur traders might come back every season for several years, in some cases maybe a decade, maybe longer. But at some point, they're going to retire back to the east and not have a big hand in, say, raising their families. And so what that means in these early years, for the most part, these children largely grew up fully enculturated into Dakota culture. Whatever. Their tribal culture is not necessarily recognized as something different, although they might have recognized themselves as like, they come from some mixed heritage. And so these folks are kind of like growing up in these communities, sometimes becoming chiefs and things like that. But that really starts to change certainly earlier in the East. But when we're talking about, say, the western Great Lakes, Wisconsin, Minnesota, that region, maybe it's not till like the mid to late 1700s, but the fur trade is Kind of like remaining important. But by then, by, by the mid to late 1700s, these fur traders are staying longer and longer, where maybe they're not. They're. Maybe they're not just coming in for the season, going back home for the winter, and then coming back every season for a number of years. They're in fact overwintering. They're staying there, and sometimes they're staying there for the rest of their lives where they're not retiring. And so some still certainly were, but many of them are starting to stay. And so that means then their are starting to grow up more bicultural than previous generations of those of mixed ancestry, because, you know, their fathers are sticking around, they're helping raise them. So these children are growing up bilingual or sometimes multiple languages. They speak many different indigenous languages, but they're bicultural. Maybe they're exposed to Christianity a little bit. And so we also at this time in the Midwest, we're starting to see the foundation of new communities, what Lucy Murphy likes to term Creole communities. She's got a great book called Great Lakes Creoles, one I would definitely read if this is something you're interested in. But these are communities that kind of grow up. Many of them are dominated by these mixed ancestry families, but also later generations of white fur traders who are coming in, but also full ancestry native people. And on occasion, even some enslaved African Americans are brought to these communities. And so a lot of like the towns and cities that are still there have their foundations in these kind of communities, like St. Louis, Missouri, St. Paul, Minnesota, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Omaha, Nebraska, Council Bluffs, Iowa, things like that. These are communities that had their start as these kind of fur trade communities, many of them with these mixed ancestry families in the 1700s. And so that fur trade kind of remains important. That idea of kinship, of becoming family becomes hugely important. And over time, the later generations of these mixed ancestry people, as they're growing up, many of them themselves are getting involved in the fur trade. The men are getting involved in the fur trade like their fathers were. The women are marrying other fur traders sometimes. And so, yeah, that's kind of like that important history, like that background we kind of need. Like the mixed ancestry community isn't something that emerged overnight. It took time. And there's some deeper histories there with the creation of these cities and things that have that kind of like foundational history. They didn't necessarily last long. I mean, pretty quickly as Euro Americans are heading westward, they're kind of like taking over these cities and things like that and implementing their own kind of governmental apparatus in these places, creating territorial governments and things like that. But in this early period, yeah, it's kind of like a slow burn. They're kind of creating these communities over time. And it takes some time for these descendants then to fully kind of develop and be perceived as something different from other indigenous people. But it certainly that differentiation is really kind of starting to grow. By the late 1700s, starting a business.
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Yes. And so remember, half breed is something that was just a term that was used so commonly in that period, is largely perceived as derogatory today. So we kind of don't use it. But you know, in this case, we kind of have to use it to be able to talk about the terminology and the status here. But so that idea of the so called half breed, you know, really has an earlier history. We could go back to 1705, Virginia. There's this important law that's put into place that's based on slavery, where they're trying to categorize people, trying to figure out the racial and legal status of whether you're African American and white, native American and white, or native and black, or whatever kind of that mixture might be. But also then what legal status they might hold, are they legally enslavable, that kind of thing. And so that's where we see this kind of category of half breed in North America has really come out in an early period, early 1700s, as a form of kind of like figuring out issues of slavery, like who's a slave, who's not, that kind of thing. But in this context of this history, it kind of grows and it really kind of becomes an important term in the early 19th century. I should point out too though, as in These earlier years, there's a lot of racial terminology that's thrown around that doesn't get used today. A lot of it would be perceived as derogatory. But in Latin America, in a Spanish speaking world, because you have these communities of people of native descent, European descent and African descent, all kind of intermixing and things like that. In Latin America, they developed dozens and dozens and dozens of different niche, kind of racial term for every kind of possible categorization there that didn't really exist in the English speaking world of North America, although there was more terminology than we have today. But really by the early 1800s, in terms of thinking about Native Americans, half breed is the terminology that really comes into use at that time. And so it really becomes important in the early 1800s as treaties between the US government and these indigenous nations are coming about. And understand is like there are hundreds of these. You know, the very first treaty that the US government signed as a fledgling nation was in 1778 with the Lenape or Delaware nation. And we have to remember too that treaties are nation to nation agreements. And so making a treaty with somebody is like a de facto recognition that they're a sovereign nation. But the US government ratified something like 400 treaties between the federal government and various indigenous nations. And it really took off in the 19th century. So there's about a 90 year period from 1778 to 1868 where the US government ratified hundreds of these treaties. Right. But some of these early treaties in the early 19th century, particularly in the 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, had separate provisions in them for people of mixed ancestry. And again, they're using the terminology of half breed, particularly at first, setting aside specific lands for them, sometimes, you know, lands for named individuals, but also creating specific Indian reservations for the use of people of mixed ancestry. And so that was written into these treaties. And so for the Dakota context, There was an 1830 treaty that created two reservations, one in Minnesota and one in Nebraska, for this explicit use of people of mixed ancestry. And so they're using the term half breed. And so it becomes codified in law through these treaties of this is a separate class of people that have legal rights to this land. And sometimes there were later treaties that set aside money for them for people of mixed ancestry, again using the term half breed, saying they're entitled to these payments through this pot of money. But they never defined what the legal definition of half breed is. And so it's not just all Native Americans. Right. So they're creating, though, this legal category, this formal kind of Category that's both legal and racial, but they don't define it. And so early on, American officials are really confused at what to do with this. You know, what does half breed mean? Does that mean somebody who's literally one half native American and one half white, or does it mean just anybody of mixed ancestry? Eventually the latter is what takes hold in la, because as they saw from Native Americans, like for the most part, when the American government was coming in talking about this term half breed, they just saw that as anybody of mixed native and non native ancestry. But that took a lot of time to figure out. And it wasn't kind of like a universal in the U.S. relationships with different tribes. They might use it a little bit differently. But American officials were really confused in early 19th century, even before some of these laws and some of this legal categories came into play is they're running into these mixed ancestry populations within tribal nations, and they're confused if they're saying, well, are these white people? Are they Indians? Are they a separate category? And so it was really confusing and they were trying to figure out, well, what does that mean then for their legal rights? What does that mean for their legal status? What does that mean for the racial hierarchy in America? And, you know, so by by creating half breed as a legal category, a category of people who had particular rights but not defining it, they just kind of opened a Pandora's box and made really a mess for the most part among indigenous people. They. They didn't really see this as just anything other than it just refer. It's a synonym for people of mixed ancestry. Although there were occasionally internal disputes, we see that among the Dakota where there's a group of people calling themselves half breeds and another group calling themselves quarter breeds and kind of disputing what's in some of these treaties, not because they're expressing a personal identity that they have, that there's actually like a community or identity or meaning really behind the particular blood quantum or how much Native ancestry they have. But rather it's just them recognizing like, hey, if I am one half blood quantum, if I say it has to be defined this way, then I can receive more land or more money if we kind of like shorten or make the pool of people who are eligible under this law much smaller. And so we see some of those debates, but for the most part, yeah, it became codified in law, but it wasn't really formally legally defined and it just caused a lot of problems.
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Yeah, I mean, the way you're describing that, it's clear that Lots of problems came up from it. In addition to land, though, what sorts of problems and maybe solutions came about from these sorts of questions around what this all meant for citizenship.
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So thinking about, of that, so, you know, as this confusion is going on, you know, as they're trying to figure out the legal status of people, mixed ancestry people themselves, largely became somewhat politically adept, you know, as the American kind of like legal apparatus is moving westward as new territories are created, and then they're creating new county governments, bringing in courts and things like that. But Native people themselves found that, you know, hey, why not, you know, become a part of that. And so even by the early 1800s, you already see mixed ancestry people who are executing land deeds, powers of attorney, those kinds of things, or having marriages or divorces recorded, you know, you know, civilly through the US Government and things like that, probate records, maybe even like, you know, going to court and suing in court. And this is, you know, they don't necessarily have an explicit right to that. But at the same time, because of the confusion on the ground, people didn't really know what their rights were. And so they start taking advantage of that. But certainly by like the 1830s, 40s, 50s, as more settlers are coming in and kind of creating these new governments, they realize that some of these mixed ancestry families on the ground were quite powerful. You know, they had a lot of political influence. So they couldn't necessarily just completely erase that. You know, they couldn't just come in and override that. They needed them as they're doing this. And so as part of that, there's these kind of ongoing debates that are coming up about citizenship. I mean, do they count as Americans? Are they Native Americans? Is there a difference? You know, what does that mean? And so already we see evidence of Native people voting in elections in this region, going back to the 1820s, possibly earlier, and starting to run for political office by the 1840s and winning. And there's kind of like these issues of, like, what to do with that. So, I mean, already we see a native, mixed ancestry, native man serving in the Wisconsin territorial legislature by 1842. And there was no like, language though, to figure out, like, what, what is, what were their legal rights? I mean, do they count as American citizen? So by the late 1840s, the states and territories in this region were kind of debating that to figure it out. And so when Wisconsin, you know, was acquiring statehood in 1848, they had to come up with a state constitution. So figuring out U.S. citizenship, they had a clause in there Saying, you know, Native people could gain citizenship. It was very limited based on. And they were using terminology that had to be civilized and things like that. And that becomes yet another kind of legal term than like, well, what does that mean? Like, how do you define legally civilized? And so on. So it largely came to mean people of mixed ancestry. The very next year, 1849, Minnesota is becoming a territory. And one of the first laws that they pass is to enfranchise Native people of mixed ancestry. And it's a much more liberal interpretation, saying largely that as long as they're mixed, they have kind of legal rights as American citizens in Minnesota territory. And so they run for office, they vote. And so there were mixed ancestry Indians and Metis people serving in every session of the Minnesota legislature from 1849 to 1862. They're holding political power. And so there was a lot of debates, though. It's really fascinating to look at the. The debates at the times of constitutional conventions in the Midwest is to see these arguments. So in the Minnesota example, by the time Minnesota became a state in 1858, you have these kind of political arguments where the Democrats are very supportive of enfranchising Indians of mixed ancestry, largely because the vast, vast majority of them are Democrats. Every single indigenous person that served in the legislature was a Democrat, as were the white men married to Native women who had indigenous families. They were also Democrats. And so they very much wanted to support this community because they would be an important voting bloc. The New Founds, the newly founded Republican Party, is, you know, really adamant. I mean, well, a minority of them, but a very vocal minority, are interested in suffrage and citizenship rights for African Americans. And they think that they could use suffrage for mixed ancestry Native people to leverage that for U.S. citizenship for mixed ancestry people of African American ancestry. It doesn't quite work, but the debates about this are fascinating. And so at the same time, though, what's really important is you see these Native people who are becoming US Citizens, but they're not losing their status as indigenous people. They're not giving up their status at all. In fact, they still count themselves as essentially citizens of their indigenous nations. They still perceive themselves as Dakota people, as still, you know, beneficiaries of future treaties between the Dakota Nation and the American Nation. And so they see themselves as belonging essentially to two nations where they're kind of operating in both. And so, interestingly, they don't give up their identities fully as Indigenous people or as Dakota people. They just see themselves as straddling a line of both nations kids.
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They Grow up so fast. One day they're taking their first steps and the next they don't fit into the tiny sneakers they took them in. You blink your eyes and their princess dress is two sizes too small. And their dinosaur backpack isn't cool anymore. But don't cry because they're growing up. Smile because you can profit off of it for real. There are a bunch of parents on depop looking for the stuff your kid just grew out of. Download depop to start selling. Yeah, that's a really key point to emphasize because it is, I think, a lot more like sort of dual citizenship that we might have today. You know, you have a passport from two countries sort of thing, rather than sort of getting completely subsumed by one or the other. But of course, balancing between those different identities isn't always the easiest thing. And when we're talking about the sort of mid-1800s period, the sort of obvious thing that can cause problems to that is the 1862 U.S. dakota War. So can you tell us about how and why mixed ancestry people were involved in the conflict and immediate aftermath?
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Right, so this war kind of comes about in 1862. By this time, the Dakota Nation, you know, had been largely coerced into signing a dozen, you know, dozens of treaties between 1805 and 1858. Excuse me, you know, probably something in the neighborhood of 15, 20 different treaties that they had signed with the U.S. government. A number of them were land session treaties. And, you know, as I say, so often these treaties were coerced with, often with threats either veiled or just straight up threats of, well, you better sign this treaty and give up some land or else. And that or else might be, we'll just come take it anyway and you'll get nothing. Or it could be like military action, genocide, or it could just be we'll drive you off this land or whatever it might be. There were these kinds of threats to Sinaway Land. And so the Dakota Nation, not just the mixed answers to people, the entire nation, is relegated to this small reservation in western south, excuse me, western Minnesota, on the south bank of the Minnesota river, which was just a tiny fraction of the land that they had owned just a generation or two earlier. For mixed ancestry people, though, being mixed was very beneficial at this time. Like, as I said, it's like you could enjoy US Citizenship, you can enjoy separate treaty provisions for you of land or money, but also you didn't lose your Dakota status. So you could enjoy other provisions in those treaties, or you could go to the reservation and live there. If you so chose. So there was a lot of benefit to that. And because so many of them were also working in the fur trade, sometimes as clerks and things like that, there were animosities that developed between those of mixed and full ancestry. And, you know, full ancestry Dakota people were starting to feel like, well, hey, wait a minute, they're cheating us. They're not giving us good trade in these fur trades and things like that. And so when the war breaks out in 1862, this is largely a resistance by Dakota people. I mean, I don't need to get into particulars of that, but they decide to just go all in. And, like, we have to resist, you know, the settler colonialism. We're losing our way of life. There's the real specter that their culture might disappear, but they might disappear as a people. And so that was the real fear at the time. They were, like I said, they were on a small part of their land. They were almost completely dependent on the federal government, which was by design by the federal government. And so they fight back, you know, very ferociously to try to resist. And so in this war, though, that just kind of, at least from the perspective of white settlers and these mixed ancestry people, it kind of comes out of nowhere. And mixed ancestry people fought on both sides. And I mean, I just can't help but think of how difficult that might have been when literally your mother's people and your father's people are at war with each other. Like, how do you pick a side? So as I said, though, some fought on both sides, many more just tried to stay neutral and stay out of it. But those who did fight, the majority actually fought on the US Government side. And part of that was that the Civil War is going on at this time. Some mixed answer to Dakota people had enlisted, joined the army and were fighting in the South. And so there were Dakota people who were fighting at Gettysburg and places like that. Well, that's a little later, but in other battles and things like that. And so dozens of them had just enlisted in the summer of 1862 when this war breaks out and they're pressed into service, like, well, sorry, you're gonna have to go fight your own people. You're not heading south. And they did, but some of them volunteered to fight against their own people as well. But during this, the Dakota Nation captured about, I think about 300 people. About 150 of them were mixed ancestry Dakota people. The rest of them kind of like white captives, white settlers. But there were these 150 mixed ancestry people that they captured. And they were running debates among the Dakota about what to do with them. And some of them argued like, hey, we need to kill them. They're part of the problem. Well, they never did, largely because of kinship responsibilities and things like that. Is they might say something along the lines of like, these folks are awful, they've been cheating us. But my cousin here is cool, or my nephew or something, or niece are great, let's leave them alone. But everybody had somebody like that. And so because of those important kinship connections, nothing really happened. But the mixed ancestry people did end up fighting on both sides. The fighting in Minnesota only lasts a couple of months. The war does continue to the west and what's now north and South Dakota, as the US Government continued to kind of send out punitive expeditions and they were just finding anybody that was Dakota or Lakota and just killing them. Which kind of led to some of the later wars of the 1860s with the Lakota and so on. But anyway, so the war largely ends in Minnesota by October of 1862, and hundreds of people are rounded up. Many thousands of Dakota people flee eventually to Canada. And many of their descendants are still there today. But many of these men are rounded up and they're placed in a military tribunals where they're tried for, you know, essentially murder or rape or whatever kind of charges. It was like essentially if they admitted to being at a battle and firing a shot, they were convicted of murder. These were very much kind of sham trials where they wanted to not even have an interpreter or not a very good one. They didn't have counsel, they didn't really understand the proceedings. And dozens of the roughly 400 men who were tried were of mixed ancestry, Dakota descent, who were Dakota, but they were also US citizens. So they didn't enjoy the rights of the legal rights that they should have enjoyed as US Citizens and gotten the civil trial and those kinds of things. But importantly, there were a number of mixed ancestry Dakota men who became kind of key witnesses in these trials where they were giving testimony against a handful of other mixed ancestry men, but particularly full ancestry Dakota men, leading to their convictions. And so These tribunals convicted 303 Dakota men of various crimes and sentenced them to death. President Lincoln commuted the sentences of most of them, but still sentenced 38 of them to death in the largest mass execution in American history. Three of those 38 were mixed ancestry Dakota men who were also US citizens, who had also voted in previous elections and things like that. But other mixed ancestry people are serving in the US army as Scouts in the year following, kind of manning this line of forts and kind of the frontier area between western Minnesota and what becomes Dakota territory against Dakota attacks into Minnesota. But one important aspect of this war is it largely soured public interest in the U.S. citizenship of Native Americans. And so, like I said, indigenous people had served in every session of the territorial legislature of Minnesota between 1849 and the state legislature up until 1862. After that, no other person of Native descent served in the legislature until 1933. And so they found it much more difficult to vote. They largely just lost their citizenship rights. In fact, Even in early 20th century, they're writing to the federal government asking, like, what's our citizenship status? We don't know. So in the years following this, the Dakota people are removed from the state forcibly. They're put on reservations where they're intentionally neglected. People starve to death. But many of these mixed ancestry people, some of them go to the reservations with their relatives right away. Some of them do stay behind in white communities and maybe go a decade or two later. The majority of them do eventually end up going to reservations. And those who didn't largely just kind of melded into the white community. But yeah, so it was probably the most significant time in Dakota history, this war. But for the mixed ancestry people, they were involved in really important ways in this war, kind of in both sides as combatants, as, you know, witnesses and so on. So, yeah, really kind of important kind of aspect of this.
- [44:23]
B
Yeah, definitely a really important piece. And as you said, sort of at the beginning of that answer, like a really tricky position to be in. Right. What do you do when one half of your family is at war with the other? And as you've described, one people did a lot of different things, but especially for these instances where people of mixed ancestry ended up on the US side, whether by choice or not, that's obviously an issue in the middle of the war, but also afterwards, like, how do you. Can you rebuild those sorts of relationships? Like, as the 1800s progressed, for instance, what did sort of relations between Dakota and Lakota people and mixed ancestry relations, like, how did that work after the war?
- [45:07]
A
Yeah, and so, interestingly, in the decades following the war, as I said, a lot of these mixed ancestry people went to the various reservations with their full ancestry relatives and had little trouble kind of integrating with those largely, again, based on the importance of kinship. And so it wasn't really hard to kind of like rebuild those relationships or things like that. But certainly in terms of kind of like American racial politics in this Period that becomes really evident and really important in this history. So really going back to the early 1800s, as these treaties are creating separate provisions for people of mixed ancestry, American officials were absolutely obsessed with recording the blood quanta of Native people, you know, to say, like, oh, are they 1/2, 1/4, 3, 8, 1, 16, whatever it might be. And it didn't really work against them in any particular way. But certainly by this early day, they're often recording these things for this particular population. And so, as I said, like, you know, up until the US Dakota War, it was very beneficial to be of mixed heritage because you can enjoy U.S. citizens citizenship. That meant you had legal rights. You could sue in court, you could own land, but also you didn't lose your status as an indigenous person. And so you could have the full rights and so on of a Dakota person under those treaties and so on. Now it became a hindrance to them to be mixed ancestry because it meant that they largely lost their U.S. citizenship or at least the ability to carry it out. They couldn't vote anymore. I mean, there's some examples of those two did, for the most part, they found it much more difficult to carry that out, but at the same time, they would also face racism. And so many of them felt like they didn't really have much choice, though, but then to fully kind of incorporate into Dakota society. So that's what most of them did. But then we see, because the US Government is so obsessed with recording their particular blood quantum, by the end of the 19th century, the US government is really using that against them, where they're using that to find them out of existence. And so there are a number of laws and things like that or kind of internal definitions in the Bureau of Indian affairs and their dealings with tribal nations and things like that. Is this decision that largely 1/4 blood quantum, meaning, like, if you're 1/4 native descent, you count as an Indian, you count as Native American. If you're less than that, you don't count as Native American. And therefore you don't have any of the rights through treaties or things like that. And so at this point, being mixed was really a hindrance and came to work against Native people. And so that's one of the major shifts we see by the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th century and still today is that issue of race really starts to work against Native people. And so not only do they face racism as Indians, sometimes legally, they might not be able to be defined and have the rights of their full ancestry, relatives and things like that. So this interesting kind of shift, the politics had changed. There was no more need to enfranchise mixed ancestry Native people anymore because they were largely out of power, out of influence after the war. And so, yeah, so we see the kind of like political shift, but also the racial shift. So there's kind of like the political and racial categorizations and rights and so on. That change in the second half of the 19th century.
- [49:04]
B
Yeah, that's a really important aspect to pick up because of course, so much about race is changing at that point. And the people we're talking about are not immune from it. Right. It's not happening in a vacuum. It's all sort of mixed up together. Are there any other big things you're hoping that readers take from the book that we haven't mentioned yet and we want to include?
- [49:21]
A
Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of really important things like what I was trying to do with this book. So, you know, the scholarship, the historical scholarship on mixed ancestry Native people goes back about 50 years or so, and it's never been a huge part of the overall Native American historical literature. But there's some decent books out there. But for the most part, historians have. Have kind of taken up what officials on the ground in the 19th century were saying that, well, they're not quite white, they're not quite Indian, they're something else. And so they largely wrote about them in a sense of divorcing them from their tribal context as something different. What I'm trying to do is I tried to write a book that was very kind of Dakota centric, meaning it was very much kind of immersed into Dakota culture. Even though I'm writing about this mixed ancestry segment of them, I want to make it clear is these are indigenous people, these are Native Americans. And so what I'm trying to do with this book is, yes, demonstrate that this mixed ancestry community did have a very distinct history and still does today, to some degree, did have a very distinct history. They had distinct motivations for why they did the things they did, but they were Native people. And so what this history shows, not that this is a separate people, but it demonstrates the diversity of Native American history. It demonstrates the diversity of the Native experience. And so that's what I'm trying to do with this book is kind of write this history back into Native history and show how complex, how varied and how diverse Native American history actually is. And there's one other thing I'm trying to do with this book, and let's get to kind of some racial thinking today. So as we've been talking about a lot of the roots of how the broader American public perceives Native Americans today has its roots in this history. And so most Americans perceive Native Americans simply as racial minorities or ethnic minorities and don't perceive tribes as actual sovereign indigenous nations. But the U.S. government today still recognizes 574 tribal nations as sovereign nations, albeit as domestic dependent nations and the language of American law. From a Native perspective, they perceive themselves as fully sovereign nations that predate the existence of the United States. But all that to say is that Native American is not just an ethnic identity, it's a political identity because they belong to particular indigenous nations that still today have their own governments. Federally recognized tribes have their own governments that are full fledged governments that have the same kind of legal and political status as, say, a state government or a city government or something like that. But anyway, this obsession with racial mixedness means that Americans perceive Native Americans simply as just racial minorities and can ignore that. And so that's part of the implication there is to recognize where the roots of that thinking comes from and to play up the importance of indigenous nationhood. But also we're having within the Native community for the last decade or so, I mean, if not longer, there have been these kind of important racial discussions about ethnic fraud or what gets called colloquially pretend ians. And these are people who are not Native, who are faking a Native identity. And this is something that's been rampant in academia in Hollywood, well, for decades really. And so there's been a lot of pushback on that to try to out folks who are faking it and things like that. But also there's debates about how we should go about doing that, make sure we're not hurting legitimate indigenous people while we do that. And so I'm hoping this history, at least in some small way, will help give some context to those kinds of difficult discussions about race that are going on in the Native community today.
- [53:28]
B
Yeah, there's definitely some very clear links to what we've been discussing to those discussions. So thank you for making sure that we understand where those connections can be drawn. May I ask what you're working on now that this book is done, whether or not it's related? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [53:45]
A
Yes. And so I am working on another book, largely the same time period, roughly 1820s to 1850s. In this case, it's more Iowa looking. My case study is more the Sac and Fox, but I'm specifically looking at land theft or land dispossession. And so this kind of came out of the research of the other book. And so usually we think of Indian land dispossession as something that happens at the federal level, whether federal government through these treaties or through U.S. supreme Court cases or through various legislation like the General Allotment act or the Indian Removal act, that that's how dispossession happened. That's how land theft was happening, is it was something that was almost solely through the federal level. And I'm arguing something different to say, well, wait a minute, we need to look at what's going on on the ground. We need to look at what's going on locally. Because as I find that state and territorial governments and local governments are very involved in the dispossession of Native land. So these state legislatures are enacting laws either directly working towards dispossession or at least making it easier. We see the local courts are doing the same thing. They're putting out legal decisions that help dispossess Native people. We even see on the very local level where county sheriffs are confiscating Native land for failure to pay property taxes and things like that, and then auctioning it off. And we also see other things like private land companies, who are also so explicit in land dispossession. So that's what I'm doing. I'm calling the book, tentatively, the Machinery of the Local Machinery of Dispossession, and looking at how, again, it's very much a legal history about how the theft of Native land wasn't just something that happened through the federal government. It was something that was working on the ground locally. And there was a lot of different local legal bodies and local people who were involved in this, much more so than we've often given it credit for. And again, to show that this is a much more complex history than we've often been led to believe. But, yeah, so that's the next project.
- [56:03]
B
Well, that certainly sounds interesting and in many ways related to the book we've been discussing. So for anyone who wants more, they can, of course, go read it. Titled Mixed Blood Race Law and Dakota Indians in the 19th Century Midwest, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2025. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [56:23]
A
All right, well, thank you so much for having me. It's been great.