Genocide in The Sculpture Garden and Talking Back To Settler Colonialism

Quarterly Journal of Speech
ISSN: 0033-5630 (Print) 1479-5779 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rqjs20
Genocide in the sculpture garden and talking back

to settler colonialism
Margret McCue-Enser
To cite this article: Margret McCue-Enser (2020) Genocide in the sculpture garden and
talking back to settler colonialism, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106:2, 179-204, DOI:
10.1080/00335630.2020.1744181
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2020.1744181
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QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH
2020, VOL. 106, NO. 2, 179–204
https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2020.1744181
Genocide in the sculpture garden and talking back to settler

colonialism
Margret McCue-Enser
Department of Communication Studies, Saint Catherine University, Saint Paul, MN, USA
ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In this essay, I explore how Native American rhetoric of resistance Received 15 January 2019
exposes the settler colonial logics that constitute a hegemonic Accepted 15 March 2020
force in the greater social imaginary. Focusing on two sites—the
KEYWORDS
Minneapolis Walker Arts Center’s Scaffold exhibit and The Landing, Settler colonialism;
a historic settlers’ village located twenty miles from the Walker—I decoloniality; talking back;
assess both how settler colonialism is enacted in these spaces and Native American rhetoric
how Native American activism represents a talking back to settler
colonialism. I argue that examining places as networked
arguments reveals the ways in which they can speak to each
other and unsettle dominant ideologies. To better understand the
settler colonial logics that Native American resistance rhetoric
seeks to unsettle, I advocate for critical examination of how
scholars and activists are constituted by those very centering logics.
The great lie it is civilization. It’s not civilized. It has literally been the blood-thirsty, brutal-
izing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization.
John Trudell (Santee Dakota), Trudell1
This is a painful part of history for our Dakota people which includes the overt acts of
genocide directed at our people, not something to be depicted in a sculpture garden next
to a giant rooster or spoon with a cherry.
Cheyanne St. John (Lower Sioux), Statement on Durant’s Scaffold2
In May of 2017, a curious sight began to take shape on the Minneapolis skyline. The two-
year renovation of the 4.5-acre Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, located at the Walker Art
Center and managed by the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Parks Board, was
nearly complete. Situated between the upscale Lowry Hill neighborhood and the historic
Basilica, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is a popular attraction for both residents and
visitors. As the opening weekend approached, and the final installations took shape
around the iconic Spoon Bridge and Cherry,3 one piece was met with astonishment and
outrage. Scaffold was a life-size replica of the gallows used in the December 26, 1862
mass execution of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota.4 Within Minnesota there
are four Dakota bands: the Mdewakantan, Wahpekute, Sisseton, and Wahpeton.5 The
1862 execution, the largest in U.S. history, marked the end of the U.S.–Dakota war and
the expulsion of the Dakota from Minnesota.6
CONTACT Margret McCue-Enser mamccueenser@stkate.edu

© 2020 National Communication Association
180 M. MCCUE-ENSER
By using Dakota history as artistic fodder, Scaffold invited white visitors to playfully
engage the issue of state-sponsored genocide without having to contemplate historical
complicities. In her City Pages article, “Genocide and Mini-Golf in the Minneapolis Sculp-
ture Garden,” local artist Ashley Fairbanks articulates the outrage and pain many felt over
Scaffold. Fairbanks explains the ways in which the structure echoed the memory of the 38
Dakota men hanged as well as that of Little Crow, the Dakota leader, whose scalp and
partial remains were prominently displayed in the Minnesota state capital for years.7
She writes:
It was the mockup of kids playing on it that got me.
The language comparing it to a play structure. White folks having a great day on a gallows
designed to evoke the exact imagery from the largest mass execution in US history. White
folks whose great-greats stood and cheered as those 38 men hung, who went to see Little
Crow’’s remains on display. Now taking selfies on this evil structure.
Their children running up and down the stairs, stairs just like the ones that 38 Dakota men
ascended, singing, and never came back down.8
The structure of Scaffold was immediately recognizable for those familiar with this time
period in Minnesota history. As Fairbanks notes, there was one discernible difference
between the 1862 structure and the Walker Art Center’s Scaffold. Just like the other instal-
lations in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, which are designed to be interactive, Scaffold
included at least three stairways ascending to a platform complete with hand railings so
that, as she says, “white folks” can have “a great day on a gallows … .” For Native Amer-
ican nations of Minnesota, including not only Dakota but also Ho Chunk and Ojibwe, to
see Scaffold take shape not only invoked some of the darkest times in history but revealed
the extent to which the genocide and removal of Native Americans are seen as an unfor-
tunate though nonetheless inevitable aspect of state-building. Through their admonish-
ment, activists “talked back” to settler colonialism and asserted Dakota agency not only
in the present but also in the past. “Talking back,” as history scholar Frederick Hoxie
explains, is the way early-twentieth-century Native Americans “refuse[d] to accept the
definitions others ha[ve] of them” and asserted their own identities and ideologies, creat-
ing a cultural resource for generations to follow.9 Settler colonialism, as genocide scholar
Patrick Wolfe explains, is a system in which “invasion is a structure not an event.”10
Scaffold became a site of controversy in which activists seized on and reworked the
terms of visibility so that instead of the installation reifying settler colonialism, it was a
means to assert Dakota voice.
Examining The Landing and Scaffold as networked sites within a broader public space
reveals discourses of settler colonialism as well as Native American rhetorics of resistance.
The Landing is a curated assemblage of authentic family homes, farms, and businesses
relocated from within the Minnesota River Valley.11 Murphy’s Inn, the site’s original
namesake until its renaming in 2008, is the only structure authentic to the site.12 Prior
to building the inn in 1858, Richard Murphy was Indian Agent at Fort Snelling (1848–
49).13 An important link between Murphy and the Dakota is that The Landing is in the
community of Shakopee, named after Sakpe, who was a Dakota chief who died in 1860.
His son, an elder in 1862, was one of the chiefs who was consulted in the decision to
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 181
go to war. After the war, Sakpe escaped to Canada where two years later he was captured
and taken to Fort Snelling with Wa-kan-o-zhan-zhan (Medicine Bottle).14 The two were
hanged at Fort Snelling in November 1865.15 The Landing is twenty miles south of the
Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and forty miles north of Reconciliation Park, the site of
the hanging, in Mankato.16 Interpreting Scaffold and The Landing in relation to each
other offers unique insight not only into how settler colonialism relies upon silences,
but also into how Native American resistance rhetoric disrupts these silences.
In this essay, I explicate how settler colonialism relies upon and reinforces the silencing
of Native American voices, constructing an exclusive relationship between white settle-
ment and place in the contemporary imaginary. Additionally, I examine how Native
American resistance rhetoric exposes and unsettles these logics. I begin by tracing the
development of decolonization as a central vein in Native American rhetorical studies.
Then, using in situ rhetorical criticism, I assess both Scaffold and The Landing as sites
of contestation between settler colonialism and Native American resistance, arguing
that the intelligibility of each site relies upon silences of the other. It is productive for scho-
lars and activists to expand their analysis and activism beyond sites of acute controversy to
include places that anchor settler colonialism within the broader space. I conclude by con-
sidering contemporary invocations of white land settlement as they are tied to immigra-
tion and nation-building, emphasizing the ways in which land remains central to settler
colonialism in the contemporary socio-political landscape.
Settler colonialism and Native American rhetorical studies

Research on settler colonialism offers much to the field of rhetorical studies. In the
introduction to Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self-Determi-
nation, Casey Ryan Kelly and Jason Edward Black explain that the focus of their col-
lection is “to demonstrate how Native agency is transformative to decolonizing master
narratives and to understanding public discourse in the Americas, writ large.”17 Scho-
lars of Native American rhetoric unmask colonial logics, thus revealing the ways in
which they co-opt and undermine Native American agency.18 They explore the ways
in which Native Americans not only assert their own identity, history, and values
but castigate supposed U.S. American virtue.19 Hoxie explains how Charles Eastman
(Dakota) and his colleagues talk back to American civilization, challenging its
guiding ideologies and the brutal impact they had on Native Americans.20 Eastman
and others, as Hoxie explains:
articulated a vision of Native American culture that inspired persistence in Indian commu-
nities across the nation while laying the foundations for cultural revivals that would take
place in ensuing decades. By talking back to civilization, Eastman’s generation helped
define, preserve, and even stimulate faith in “Indianness” for the remainder of the twentieth
century.21
My analysis suggests that activists used the site of the installation to confront the silencing
of Dakota and assert their agency in the past and present moments. In doing so, they
exposed what Mary E. Stuckey and John M. Murphy explain as the power of naming
and how it “remains largely hidden; not so much concealed as buried within a taken-
for-granted culture.”22 Part of the ways in which colonial logics function is to include rep-
resentations of Native Americans but to do so in such a way that these representations
182 M. MCCUE-ENSER
serve the greater narrative of colonialism.23 In his analysis of the co-option of Chief Seat-
tle’s speech, Black asserts that “as colonial reckonings of Native texts strengthen, Native
cultures themselves disappear.”24 Activists seized on Scaffold as a reflection of invisibility
rendered via settler colonialism and made it a point of visibility and an exercise in deco-
loniality. Settler colonialist culture co-opts Native American culture so that semblances of
it remain, but only insofar as they are in service to colonial narratives.
Settler colonialism is an exclusive relationship between a people and land; as such it
relies upon not only the removal of Native American peoples, but also the obscuring
and maintaining of the systems that engendered removal. Patrick Wolfe defines settler
colonialism in terms of what it negates and what it purports, stating, “negatively,
[settler colonialism] strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a
new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come
to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.”25 Settler colonialism is the normalization
of the systems as they organize spaces and people and not the events that undermined pre-
viously existing systems. As Adam J. Barker explains, settler colonialism is “the power to
displace, the privilege to forget.”26 Displacement and forgetting are akin to The Landing’s
inclusion of an original fur trader’s cabin stocked with goods for trading, with no mention
of the Dakota or the role the often predatory fur traders and Indian agents played in
driving the Dakota to starvation.27 Kay Anderson and Mona Domash explain that
although U.S. national identity is founded on “narratives of the conquest of Native popu-
lations,” those stories often simultaneously disavow conquest. The fur trader’s cabin, then,
reflects both the performance and disavowal of conquest.28 The Landing eschews any
acknowledgement that the land upon which it sits, and compelled settlement, was orig-
inally Dakota.29 The site engineers Dakota displacement as a premise and not as a conse-
quence of white settlement. Writing about neocolonialism, Derek T. Buescher and Kent
A. Ono explain, “neocolonialists depend on a history of successful colonialism, forgetful-
ness that colonialism continues, and the production of therapeutic public stories to quell
any lingering dis-ease with continuing practices of disenfranchisement.”30 Native Amer-
icans are present in nineteenth-century narratives of nostalgia but only as a precursor
to white settlement.31 The Landing anesthetizes the historical events and their lingering
trauma so that they are suppressed, enacting a nostalgic narrative of nineteenth-century
settlement.
Land as a means of constituting identity, particularly as it intersects with nationalist and
white agrarian identities, is central to settler colonialism. Settler colonialism illuminates an
important way in which place constitutes identity.32 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang state,
“[w]ithin settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean
earth (land, for shorthand, in this article). Land is what is most valuable, contested,
required.”33 The idea that white settlers hold a unique and superior right to land is
grounded in the ideology of whiteness as a civilizing force. In his discussion of the
“Myth of the Frontier,” Richard Slotkin explains how the frontier myth was used to
justify oppression, noting that:
the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans
who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of national identity, a
democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and ‘progress-
ive’ civilization.34
When Native Americans assert a historical and/or contemporary connection to land,

they challenge the assumptions of settler colonialism, particularly as they intersect
with ideologies such as the frontier myth. As Jeff Corntassel explains, “[b]eing indigen-
ous today means struggling to reclaim and regenerate one’s own relational, place-based
existence by challenging the ongoing, destructive forces of colonization.”35 Native
American activists face the challenge of not only asserting their identity, but making
explicit the ways in which that identity is constituted via a relationship to land—the
land and people aren’t just related, but synonymous. Part of the incipient nature of
settler colonialism is the way in which sites of significance to Dakota not only fail
to be acknowledged by the broader public but are subsumed into a settler narrative.
As colonialism constitutes both places and people, it is imperative to take up decolo-
nization as theory and praxis.
Scholars, particularly non-Native American scholars, must be attentive to not only
the ways in which their work may perpetuate colonialism but also the ways in
which they benefit from such perpetuities. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes, “research
is not an innocent or distant academic exercise but an activity that has something at
stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions.”36 While studies in
decoloniality are attentive to this, non-Indigenous scholars’ increasing participation
in Native American studies makes the need particularly urgent.37 In their commentary
in American Indian Quarterly, Devon A. Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson
bemoan the practice of non-Indigenous scholars not only failing to incorporate the
work of Indigenous scholars but also publishing research on Native American commu-
nities without consideration for how that work affects communities.38 Paulette Regan
argues that decolonizing requires “unsettling the settler within.”39 Regan explains
how restorative justice efforts can be undermined by a “singular focus on the Other
[which] blinds us from seeing how settler history, myth, and identity have shaped
and continue to shape our attitudes in highly problematic ways. It prevents us from
acknowledging our own need to decolonize.”40 Regan acknowledges her own “compli-
city in the colonial practices related to the IRS (Indian Residential Schools) claims
process that [she] critique[s] even as [she] aspire[s] to work in solidarity with Indigen-
ous people as an ally.”41 The risk of replicating the very systems responsible for that
which the critic seeks to uproot is real. Tuhiwai Smith challenges non-Indigenous scho-
lars to recognize the ways in which the dominant paradigms of research are premised
on the othering of Indigenous peoples and sees “research as a significant site of struggle
between the interests and way of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of
resisting of the Other.”42
Employing in situ methods of criticism is useful not only in terms of method but insofar
as it makes the complexities of position and privilege explicit. Michelle Middleton, Aaron
Hess, Danielle Endres, and Samantha Senda-Cook explain that in situ criticism “highlights
the significance of the embodied, emplaced, material, visual, affective, processual, and ver-
nacular dimensions of rhetorical practice.”43 My analysis is a composition of fragments,
from interacting with the material and discursive elements of both sites to observing
how other visitors interact with the sites.44 As Samantha Senda-Cook, Michael
K. Middleton, and Danielle Endres explain, “the field is a socially constructed place
imbued with meaning(s) that simultaneously enables, constrains, and constitutes rhetori-
cal practices.”45 As a tourist-researcher I was able to navigate both of these sites from a
184 M. MCCUE-ENSER
position of privilege. At the Landing I was able to see my own family story reflected back to
me and at the Walker I was able to take in the Scaffold from the role of observer and not as
an activist. My research was not unlike that of Samantha Senda-Cook, whose recreational
experience, paired with her research ambitions, led her to expect “something different and
difficult.”46 I had been to both The Landing and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden mul-
tiple times and knew how to navigate these spaces as a tourist shepherding my children
and other times wandering alone. Yet these times, while I wore the same practical
clothes, I also carried my notebook and phone. More importantly, I was able to move
between standing in these sites insofar as they constituted me as a visitor even as I
attempted to complicate that identity by virtue of also being a critic. As Sendra-Cook,
Middleton, and Endres explain, “[p]lace functions as a social actor in a milieu of raced
and classed bodies, physical structures, senses, and meanings that is always producing
rhetorics to be reinforced or resisted.”47 Both The Landing and the Minneapolis Sculpture
Garden are rhetorics of place that construct subject positions that reflect and reinforce not
that which is most intelligible to me, but the greater Minnesota gestalt. Position is not
simply a matter of physical proximity but one of privilege.
This analysis highlights the role of non-Native American scholars and activists who
seek to participate in decolonization.48 My original intention for this project was to
explore The Landing as an argument of place that, in its almost exclusive focus on
settler society, obscures evidence of Dakota on the site. Early into the project, having
coffee with Valerie Martinez, a Dakota Standing Rock activist, radically shifted the per-
spective I brought to the project. In talking about why I was interested in the site, I
explained how it reflected my own story as a member of a fifth-generation Irish-American
farming family. I can, for example, identify family homesteads. I ground my work ethic
and love of the outdoors in the farm jobs I had as a child, like picking rocks and
walking beans. Wearing green and marching on Saint Patrick’s Day is compulsory. Some-
where in that conversation it became clear that my scholar/activist urges were better served
writing not about the Dakota story of people and place but my own. This is neither com-
fortable nor familiar territory. By seeking to hear Dakota voices I found that it was my own
that had constructed the very silences I encountered. If our goal as rhetorical scholars and
activists is a greater understanding of the broader social imaginary, even the places we
ourselves call home, we must not only be willing to listen to others but ask ourselves
how our own intellectual and personal epistemologies may perpetuate the silences we
encounter.
So far I have orientated settler colonialism within Native American rhetorical
studies. I have drawn on scholars who warn of the risks of examining Native Amer-
ican rhetoric without acknowledging the ways in which colonial logics inform the
subject and methods of research. I contend that embracing in situ methods of analysis
can lead to deeper understanding of the implications of positionality. I now examine
The Landing and Scaffold as arguments of place that reveal and unsettle settler
colonialism.
Talking back and unsettling settler colonialism

In this section I analyze The Landing and Scaffold as an interplay of silences and voices
within and between the two sites that unsettles settler colonialism and asserts Native
American agency. In order to make explicit the ways in which individuals exist in and
move through these spaces, I center my analysis in the places as I experienced them. I
begin by focusing on The Landing as an argument of place and space that, in its almost
exclusive focus on settler society, obscures the systemic dispossession and violence that
enabled the cultural and economic development not only of the Minnesota River Valley
but also of the state. I then examine Scaffold and analyze the ways in which activists
talked back to the Walker and mainstream Minnesota via their assertion of agency,
both in the contemporary moment and in 1862.
Settler colonialism at The Landing

The Landing is an anesthetized and abbreviated version of the nineteenth-century Min-
nesota River Valley in which the removal of the Dakota is folded into and made sub-
ordinate to white folks’ political, economic, and cultural impact on the area and the
state. The arrangement of the structures, around the crumbling foundation of Indian
agent and state senator Richard Murphy’s inn, centers Murphy as pivotal not only
to the ostensible “development” of the Minnesota River Valley but also to that of
the state. Moving through the site, visitors engage in a participatory enactment of
white settlement starting with the fur trade, proceeding to farmer settlers, and finally
to urban commerce. Special events like “Little House on the River Camp” invoke
and reify nineteenth-century settlement and twenty-first-century silences. Although
the renaming of the site in 2008, from the longtime Murphy’s Landing to The
Landing, was intended to open it up to a broader interpretation, the site’s layout
and structures overwhelm this potential.
As a sort of mythological representation of nineteenth-century Minnesota, The
Landing eschews critical examination of the economic and cultural tensions of the
era. Richard Murphy’s inn, the only building original to the site, is surrounded by
structures that are not original to the land upon which they now sit. Murphy is
framed as an innkeeper, a perspective that positions him as an icon of economic
and civic development rather than as Indian agent to the Dakota. Another celebrated
structure on the site is the Oliver Faribault fur trader’s cabin which, like the other
structures on the site, is authentic though relocated from the surrounding area.49
Similar to Murphy, Faribault’s role as fur trader is highlighted over that of government
interpreter at the 1851 treaties.50 This excised version of nineteenth-century settlement
obscures the role that Indian agents and fur traders played in engineering not only the
settlement of the area but the removal of Dakota. Historian Brian Dippie explains how
once an era is taken out of a purely mythological representation it “generates its own
critiques.”51 A more complete recounting of Murphy and Faribault, perhaps from a
Dakota perspective, would render a more complex account of the settlement era.
The abridged version of the nineteenth-century Minnesota River Valley offered via
The Landing works to continuously resettle the Minnesota River Valley without
having to contemplate the ways in which settler society undermined Dakota existence
on this land.
The ease of movement enabled by the walking path and the layout of the buildings creates
a sense of cohesiveness and comprehensiveness. The arrangement of the buildings and
walking paths encourages visitors to begin at the 1830s Faribault cabin (Figures 1 and 2)
186 M. MCCUE-ENSER
and end in the 1890s village. About 300 feet west of the Faribault cabin, visitors reach the
1857 Berger farm which features two horses and a garden. The two horses stay at the
farm throughout the year, along with the tended garden and a beehive. These elements
create an eerie sense that life continues on the farm, despite the fact that it is well over
100 years old. From this farm the narrative of Minnesota settlement jumps to 1889 with
a farm that reflects the change from subsistence to market farming. This farm has a
bigger barn, a second outbuilding, and a larger home. The distance between the older
and newer buildings gets shorter and shorter, echoing the escalating pace of settlement
and socio-economic development.
Murphy’s Inn, sandwiched between the farms and the village, blurs the distinction
between the decaying but still present past and the fully operational present. The inn is
the only structure in The Landing that has a permanent guidepost, complete with pictures
of Major Murphy and the inn as it looked in the 1890s. Murphy’s Inn spatially and
materially links the trader’s post and farm sites to the collection of nine homes, as well as
to the general store, blacksmith, livery, priory, depot, lumber yard, town hall, gazebo, and
church (Figures 3 and 4). The family homes and businesses are stocked with home goods
authentic to the family and/or time period. Next to Murphy’s Inn, for example, is the
Wilkie home, dated 1880, which includes a bride’s cupboard inscribed with the couple’s
initials and wedding date.52 Just a few homes down and across the gravel road from
Murphy’s Inn is the Druke home dated 1855, made of limestone and sand. And across
the street is Civil War veteran John O’Connor’s home, dated 1865–1880. The dates of
the homes, from the 1850s to the 1880s, blur the central role that land agents, treaties,
and removal played in the settlement of this land.
Through a curated representation of the Minnesota River Valley’s past, The Landing
grounds white agrarian settlement as the origin story of not only the land on which
The Landing sits but the broader space as well. While The Landing is open all year
188 M. MCCUE-ENSER
long, special events offer visitors an opportunity to interact with volunteer actors. The
park’s website invites visitors to:
Visit The Landing - Minnesota River Heritage Park to discover how nineteenth-century Min-
nesotans established their lives on the frontier, farmstead and in villages. Historical buildings
are laid out as a timeline from the pre-territorial era through the late 1800s.53
The park offers summer camps such as “Wilderness Wit and Wisdom Camp” and “Little
House on the River Camp,” which the Three Rivers Park District’s 2019 Summer Camps
brochure describes as follows:
[e]xperience log-cabin life in the Big Woods, just like Laura! Help with farm and garden
chores, cook on a wood-burning stove, practice sewing, and attend school in a one-room
schoolhouse. Play old-fashioned games and explore the outdoors. Take a trip to the
General Store, where a note from Nellie Olesen awaits.54
The Landing, like the popular book series and television program Little House on the
Prairie, eschews the role that racism played in settler society.55 In performing this
decontextualized and anesthetized role of settler, visitors participate in a founding
of the Minnesota River Valley in which the near-absence of Dakota is not only nor-
malized but folded into the narrative of progress. While visitors to The Landing go
back in time to the beginnings of the farm and later the market economy, they
need only step outside the park to see the continuation of these market practices,
evinced by the eight gigantic modern-day grain bins just off the parking lot.56
While settler colonialism is rooted in the wider space via The Landing, its economic
impacts are evident: not only on contemporary agricultural economics but also on
Native American tribes.
Within a few hundred feet of The Landing is a sign for Mystic Lake casino, the popular
casino located on the Mdewakanton (Dakota) reservation. Mystic Lake is one of the most
successful Native American casinos in the United States, and the Mdewakanton tribe that
operates it is one of the largest benefactors in the state and country.57 At night, search-
lights, constantly rotating in and out of the shape of a teepee, can be seen from miles
away. Waziyatawin explains how casinos “were hailed as ‘the new buffalo’ because
[they] provided a single source of revenue that could provide for all the basic needs of
our people, just like the bison did for Plains Peoples prior to their near annihilation.”58
Waziyatawin argues that this phrase “the new buffalo” “denies the connection to land
and life inherent in not just hunting traditions, but any way of life in which people
draw their sustenance directly from the land” and that “the systematic disconnection
(and dispossession) of Indigenous Peoples from our homelands is the defining character-
istic of colonizing.”59 Waziyatawin illustrates how settler colonialism does not just
influence systems of the dominant society; it remakes Native American cultures as well.
Historical means of tribal survival are replaced with the contemporary and contentious
reliance on gaming.
As a material, performative, and discursive space, The Landing does hold the potential
for silenced voices to be heard.60 The river, the land, the woods, and the occasional wildlife
all work to unsettle the governing narrative of the site. Recognition of the complexity of
the site is evident in its 2008 renaming. The director of The Landing, Jefferson Spilman,
was quoted in the Star Tribune, explaining that the name:
reflects a change in the way the village is being seen – and a step away from seeing white
settlement as the defining element of our history … “We realized that Major Murphy was
one person, who only lived here for 20 years,” [Spilman] said. “Native Americans had a
village here before he did, and were here for thousands of years. After Murphy, many
people lived here. We decided that the river was really the key. ‘The Landing’ offers a
broader way of thinking about human history here. Murphy will remain part of our story,
but not the official name.”61
While the naming of the park reflects the variety of ways visitors might encounter the site,
the material, performative, and discursive components overwhelm the potential. Put in
conversation with each other, The Landing and Scaffold reveal settler colonialism as net-
worked arguments across the wider space.
The Great Sioux Uprising and the unsettling of Minnesota

The rhetorical connections between The Landing and Scaffold are illustrated by the public
statements of Walker director Olga Viso and artist Sam Durant, insofar as they lay bare the
extent to which settler colonialism drove the creation and acquisition of Scaffold. In this
section, I examine those statements, as well as the outcry by local and national Native
American activists and allies. I argue that the combination of signs, along with the physical
presence of activists, worked to shift Dakota from inanimate objects to subjects who
exploited the material, discursive, and performative elements of the site in order to talk
back to Walker. In so doing, they asserted not only the contemporary agency of the
Dakota but their historical agency as well.
For those familiar with Dakota history, seeing Scaffold taking shape on the Minnea-
polis skyline in May 2017 was quite startling.62 Although the artist and museum direc-
tor in charge of the exhibit meant for it to acknowledge Native American experiences,
their statements about Scaffold reveal the settler colonialist logic that underlay the
endeavor. Both Durant and Viso explain that they intended the piece to educate
white people like themselves and believed the Mankato, Dakota, and Minnesota’s
tribes’ painful past to be absent in the contemporary Minnesota gestalt. Durant
stated that he envisioned the piece as “a learning space for people like me, white
people who have not suffered the effects of a white supremacist society and who
may not consciously know that it exists.”63 In using Dakota genocide as the raw
material to contemplate state-sponsored executions, Durant simultaneously replays
and denies said genocide. Viso explained:
[w]e recognize, however, that the siting of Scaffold in our state, on a site that is only a short
distance from Mankato, raises unique concerns. We recognize the decision to exhibit this
work might cause some to question the Walker’s sensitivity to Native audiences and audi-
ences in Minnesota more familiar with this dark history.64
Viso’s statement invokes the stereotype of the stoic Native American relegated to the
romanticized prairie. Reflecting a sort of “Midwestern nice” take on Said’s concept of
Orientalism, Viso and Durant’s statements reduce Dakota to objects to be looked upon
at precisely the moment in which their agency was most violently disciplined.65 Despite
this objectification, activists on the site and in the press used Scaffold as a way to talk
back to mainstream Minnesota.
190 M. MCCUE-ENSER
The dismay that Fairbanks articulates in her City Pages piece was echoed in the online
Native American press. In their piece on the controversy, nativenewsonline.net captioned
the image of the installation as “So-called piece of art opens wounds of American
Indians.”66 On the website Indian Country Today, Konnie LeMay challenges the public
apology of Viso and Durant. LeMay writes:
Intentionally or not, the idea that this horrific history of the Dakota people, embodied in a re-
creation of the infamous mass gallows originally erected a mere 80 miles to the south, would
stand in the area along with a giant spoon holding a cherry, an oversized rooster and mini-
golf course rubbed salt into a 155-year-old wound.67
LeMay decries not only Dakota genocide being relegated to a floating signifier but that it
would be so “a mere 80 miles” from the site of the actual “infamous mass gallows.” The
interpretation that Walker director Viso and artist Durant held of Scaffold relies on a
reading of Minnesota history constructed via memory sites such as The Landing. The
Landing, geographically sandwiched between the Walker Art Center and Mankato,
anchors settler colonialism within the wider space. The Dakota spoke back to the
Walker and asserted their historical and contemporary agency via signage and their
material, discursive, and performative presence at the site.
The activists produced an alternative framing not only of the events of 1862 but also
of the contemporary moment through seizing and reworking the terms of visibility.68
On the fence were numerous black and white posters with bold black lettering that
read “Take it Down” along with a graphic of four black nooses (Figure 5). Underneath
the large text on each sign were phrases including: “Shame on Walker,” “Genocide is
not Art,” and “Never Forget 38+2.” The mass-produced smaller signage directing the
Walker to take the piece down was flanked by three handwritten bedsheets upon
which “Remember their Names” and each of the names of the 38+2 were written
(Figure 6).
These large signs, alongside the mass-produced printed signs, transformed the 38+2
from being silent, inanimate objects to speaking, animate subjects. One of the hand-let-
tered signs, “The Great Sioux Uprising,” invoked the institutionalization of the settler
perspective of 1862 and inverted it to reflect Dakota perspective (Figure 7).69 Interpreted
from the perspective of 1862 settlers, “uprising” connotes fear of a perceived threat;
interpreted from the perspective of the 2017 activists, “uprising” connotes pride in an
imminent resurgence. Another hand-lettered sign, “Our Blood is not your Paint,”
which appeared to be written by a child, conveyed ethereal and intergenerational
agency (Figure 8).
192 M. MCCUE-ENSER
The immediate on-site protest was followed by sustained resistance amongst the Native
American art community. Just days after the controversy broke, on May 29, 2017, All My
Relations Arts, a Minneapolis Native American art gallery, issued a “Dakota Elders
Announcement.”70 Among the objectives of the meeting was to “identif[y] the twelve
elders who are available and willing to attend the first face-to-face meeting with the
Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, Minneapolis administra-
tor and the sculptor on Wednesday May 31st.”71 On May 30 the Walker hosted a press
conference at which Tribal Historic Preservation Office manager Cheyanne St. John
(Lower Sioux) issued a statement. That day the Walker commissioned a company to
tear down the piece and artist Sam Durant assigned the full copyright to the Dakota.
After elders objected to the proposal to burn the pieces, as a matter of Dakota spirituality
and respectful use of the wood, the material was turned over to a tribal elder to be buried at
an unspecified location.72 In March of 2018 the Walker hosted a panel featuring four
Native American artists who discussed “valuing the voices of indigenous artists.”73 In
January 2019 the Walker announced an Indigenous public art commission that began
with the words “Taku wanji unkoniciyakapi uncinpi. We want to tell you something,”
and ended with “Pidaunyayapi. We accept your offerings with thanks.”74 The call
explained that the Indigenous Public Art Selection Committee was composed of
“Native curators, knowledge keepers, artists, and arts professionals, including individuals
of Dakota descent and enrollment.”75 Finally, on September 17, 2019, Walker announced
the selection of artist Angela Two Stars (Dakota, Sisseton Wahpeton) as the finalist.
According to the Walker, Two Stars:
has conceived of a sculpture that is simultaneously a sculptural form, a gathering space, and
an interactive work that provides a site for a broad audience to engage with Dakota language.
Two Stars plans to incorporate text as well as a range of medicinal plants native to Minnesota,
which represent a healing reconnection with Dakota language, culture, and traditional
teachings.76
Installation is planned for the fall of 2020.

Recognizing the activist responses to Scaffold as a talking back to the settler colonial-
ism entrenched in The Landing reveals the potential of sites to speak to each other, func-
tion as networked arguments, and complicate broader interpretations of people and
place. My analysis of the Scaffold controversy reveals the ways in which the endurance
of exclusive narratives of white people and places, such as those enshrined in The
Landing, depends upon the maintenance of silences. Sometimes, silences are maintained
even (or especially) by discourses that purport to be disruptive. Because the originators
of Scaffold oriented their message toward white audiences, it exemplified the perspective
of the settler. Once the Dakota voice challenged that narrative, it reframed the U.S.–
Dakota war as something other than simply a historical chapter in the making of Min-
nesota. By talking back, Native American rhetors created an interactive, artistic, Native
American space in which a more expansive and inclusive conversation can occur. Analy-
sis of this case prompts consideration of what implications it holds for Indigenous rhe-
torical studies and activism.
From settler colonialism to decoloniality: Unsettling civic and intellectual

spaces
Studies in decolonization of place and space reveal how Native American activism inter-
venes in and interrupts contemporary discourses of settler colonialism. It is productive to
examine not only how memory sites such as The Landing anchor silences within the
broader space, but how Native American voices resist those silences and talk back to domi-
nant culture. The privileging of the Dakota name for the land upon which Fort Snelling is
built, much like the assertion of voice around Scaffold, challenges settler colonialism by
asserting Dakota presence in the past as well as the present. In September 2019, the Min-
nesota Historical Society announced the renaming of the site to “Fort Snelling at BDote” as
part of a 34.5-million-dollar “revitalization project” which the Minnesota Historical
Society’s Fort Snelling website describes, in part, as “rolling out an interpretive plan devel-
oped with community partners that expands stories of the military, Dakota, African-
Americans, Japanese-Americans, women and more.”77 The move, however, was less
innocuous than that description suggests. In the “renaming” of the fort from “Fort Snel-
ling” to “Fort Snelling at BDote,” the idea that the land was Dakota prior to the fort being
constructed is made explicit—something that touched a nerve with Minnesota legislators.
In April 2019 the Minnesota Senate passed a measure to cut 18% of the Minnesota His-
torical Society’s annual funding over charges made by two senators that the new signage at
Fort Snelling is “‘revisionist history.’”78 In an interview published by the Saint Paul
Pioneer Press, the director and CEO of the Historical Society, Kent Whitworth, defends
the new signage, saying “[t]his is not about addition and subtraction. This is really
about addition.”79 These tensions made visible the ways in which, as Stuckey and
Murphy explain, “renaming the land undermines the desired order.”80 Instead of the
Dakota being seen as transient or impermanent, the discursive privileging of Dakota
asserts their connection to this place prior to and, in many ways, despite the existence
of the fort. A broader interpretation might be that the renaming reflects a desire, as
Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson explain, to attend “to absence as well as presence.”81 The
material resistance by the state legislature reveals how deeply disruptive talking back
194 M. MCCUE-ENSER
can be to the dominant order. These efforts to broaden narratives of people and place
expose and underscore the sustained influence of settler colonialism.
By placing theories of decoloniality into conversation with the rhetoric of place, this
analysis has revealed how the intelligibility of one text both relies upon and reinforces
the silence of another. Perspective is critical to being able to hear silences. Gwen Wester-
man and Bruce White explain that in order to understand Minnesota as a Dakota place,
one must listen to the land. They write:
to “reclaim” Minnesota as a Dakota place is to once again interact with what is sacred and to
recall its stories. We believe the land remembers, and as we walk near Minneopa Falls or in
Blue Mound State Park or around Lake Calhoun, we are surrounded by those memories held
in the land. These stories recount Dakota experiences and help us remember beyond the histori-
cal record. The collective voices of the earliest inhabitants, the explorers, the missionaries, and the
historians of this place tell us unmistakably that this is Mni Sota Makoce—Land of the Dakota.82
Westerman and White clarify that a deeper understanding of place emerges when focus is
placed not on a singular narrative of place but rather on a collection or cacophony of
voices. Native American resistance to settler conceptions of place challenges the ability
to regard a place through the lens of an “explorer,” a “historian,” or a place’s “earliest
inhabitants.” While the perspective of the historians and explorers has been firmly insti-
tutionalized, that of the Dakota has not. Decolonial rhetorical analysis of memory spaces
reflects what Stuckey and Murphy describe as “throwing darts at the trained incapacity
evident in Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis’ and other discourses.”83
Disrupting Turner’s Frontier Thesis has implications for political dialogue as well. The
hegemonic force of white settler agrarianism shapes not only a Midwestern regional ima-
ginary but also the national ethos. As an argument that constructs an exclusive relation-
ship between people and place, settler colonialism historicizes immigration to a particular
people, in a particular time frame, at a particular place. As such, immigration and settle-
ment are framed as historic events in the genesis of the United States rather than as an
enduring process. Contemporary commemorations of immigration, which celebrate it
specifically as a historical phenomenon, shape national border policy. When the president
of the United States announces at the southern U.S. border that “there is no more room,”
he invokes the Jacksonian-era call to clear and settle the frontier not only as a measure of
nation-building but, more importantly, as one that is complete.84 When scholars and acti-
vists foreground Native American talking back, it functions as a pragmatic retort to neo-
Jacksonian public policy.
Rhetorical scholars have a central role to play in the work of decolonization both in and
outside the academy. The work of rhetorical critics, particularly those of us whose agency
is partially derived from a position of epistemological centeredness via the logics of settler
colonialism, is to question the extent to which our agency is derived from and thereby per-
petuates the very injustices we seek to amend. Adopting an “ethic of reflexivity,” as
McKinnon, Asen, Chavez, and Howard explain, calls for critics to be:
mindful of our relationship to the research topic, so that we can be aware of the ways our own
experiences, knowledge, identities, and worldviews shape not only what we choose to study and
what we see as important, but also how we go about interpreting and analyzing the data.85
This article is a response to decolonial scholars’ repeated call for epistemological dives-
titure on the part of white scholars. I began this project eager to explore a memory site
that resonated with my heritage as a rural Minnesotan. What I encountered was a fictio-
nalized narrative which centered my Minnesota forebears and constructed contempor-
ary white Minnesotans as the ideal audience. The loud resistance of contemporary
Native American voices unsettled both the space’s hegemonic narrative and my own
critical consciousness. Decolonial scholarship requires not only that we listen for
those voices that have been silenced by dominant ideologies but also that we actively
question the extent to which our own scholarship is premised on and perpetuates
such ideologies.
Notes
1. Trudell. Directed by Heather Rae (Amherst, MA: Appaloosa Pictures, 2007).
2. Cheyanne St. John, Statement given at Walker Art Center, May 31, 2017, published by Lorie
Shaull, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, May 31, 2017, https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Cheyanne_St._John,_a_member_of_the_Lower_Sioux_Indian_Community_%
26_Tribal_Historical_Preservation_Office_Site_Manager_read_a_statement_addressing_
Sam_Durant%E2%80%99s_sculpture,_%22Scaffold%22_at_the_Walker_Art_Center_2.jpg
(accessed March 25, 2020). Statement confirmed by St. John via email correspondence with
author, April 30, 2019. The legal matter of genocide is borne out most succinctly by Waziya-
tawin in her book What Does Justice Look Like?: The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Home-
land (Saint Paul, MN: Living Justice Press, 2008). A number of legal scholars examine specific
issues central to Dakota history and the war. See: Carol Chomsky, “The United States-Dakota
War Trials: A Study in Military Injustice,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 13 (1990): 13–98,
doi:10.2307/1228993; Colette Routel, “Minnesota Bounties on Dakota Men during the
U.S.-Dakota War,” William Mitchell Law Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 1–77, https://open.
mitchellhamline.edu/wmlr/vol40/iss1/2/; and Howard J. Vogel, “Rethinking the Effect of
the Abrogation of the Dakota Treaties and the Authority for the Removal of the Dakota
People from Their Homeland,” William Mitchell Law Review 39, no. 2 (2013): 538–81,
https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1491&context=wmlr.
3. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Spoonbridge and Cherry (Walker Sculpture
Garden, 1988).
4. Sam Durant, Scaffold (Walker Sculpture Garden, 2017). Prior to being displayed at the
Walker, “Scaffold” was displayed at The Hague in the Netherlands; Edinburgh, Scotland;
and Kassel, Germany. As described by Sam Durant in his May 29, 2017 public letter:
This wood and steel sculpture is a composite of the representations of seven historical
gallows that were used in US state-sanctioned executions by hanging between 1859 and
2006. Of the seven gallows depicted in the work, one in particular recalls the design of
the gallows of the execution of the Dakota 38 in Mankato, Minnesota in 1862 … Six
other scaffolds comprise the sculpture, which include those used to execute abolitionist
John Brown (1859); the Lincoln Conspirators (1865), which included the first woman
executed in US history; the Haymarket Martyrs (1886), which followed a labor upris-
ing and bombing in Chicago; Rainey Bethea (1936), the last legally conducted public
execution in US history; Billy Bailey (1996), the last execution by hanging (not public)
in the US; and Saddam Hussein (2006), for war crimes at a joint Iraqi/US facility. (Sam
Durant, “A Statement from Sam Durant,” Walker, May 29, 2017, https://walkerart.org/
magazine/a-statement-from-sam-durant-05-29-17 (accessed March 25, 2020))
In a public letter to The Circle, a Minneapolis-based local Native American online news
source established in 1980, Viso explains how she first encountered Durant’s piece and
her intention in bringing it to the Walker. She writes:
[W]hen I first encountered Scaffold in a sculpture park in Europe five years ago, I saw a
potent artistic statement about the ethics of capital punishment. Most importantly, I
196 M. MCCUE-ENSER
recognized its capacity to address the buried histories of violence in this country, in par-
ticular raising needed awareness among white audiences. I knew this could be a difficult
artwork on many levels. This is invariably connected to national issues still embedded in
the psyche of this country and its violent, colonialist past. (Olga Viso, “Learning in
Public: An Open Letter on Sam Durant’s Scaffold,” Walker, May 26, 2017, https://
walkerart.org/magazine/learning-in-public-an-open-letter-on-sam-durants-scaffold)
5. First a note on the meanings of “nation,” “band,” and “tribe.” According to Bonvillain:
“nation” is a group of people who speak the same language (or dialects of the same
language), who have a sense of territorial boundaries, and who share many (but not
necessarily all) features of cultural practices and belief. “Tribes” and “bands” are
specific types of societies having different kinds of systems of leadership, decision-
making, and group cohesion. Bands are small, loosely organized groups of people
that are politically autonomous and have minimal leadership. (Nancy Bonvillain,
Native Nations: Cultures and Histories of Native North America, 2nd ed. (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 2)
The Dakota nation is made up of seven bands. The name “Dakota” means “friends” or
“allies.” Depending on the dialect it is pronounced with a “d” or an “l.” From the eighteenth
to the nineteenth century the nation lived on the plains of what is now Minnesota, North and
South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming. The eastern bands, known as Santee, are the Wah-
peton (“dwellers among the leaves”), Mdewakantan (“people of spirit lake”), Wahpekute
(“shooters among the leaves”), and the Sisseton (“camping among the swamps”). The north-
ern band is the Yankton (“dwellers of the end”) and the Teton, the western bands, are made
up of the Oglala (“they scatter their own”) and a collection of six smaller bands: the Sicangu
(“burnt thighs” or Brule), Hunkpapa (“those who camp at the entrance”), Sihasapa (“black-
feet”), Itazipco (“without bows”), Oohenonpa (“two kettles”), and the Miniconjou (“those
who plant by the stream”) (Bonvillain, Native Nations, 196).
6. For a concise summary of the interaction between the Ojibwe, another prominent nation in
Minnesota, and the U.S. government see Carl Waldman, “Wars for the West: Sioux,” in Atlas
of the North American Indian (New York: Facts on File, 1985), 154–9.
7. After his death (in 1863) Taoyateduta’s body was repeatedly desecrated; ultimately his scalp
and one of his forearm bones would be displayed in a class cast at the Minnesota State Capital
until 1918, when the grandson of Taoyateduta saw it at the capital and asked that it be
removed. For fifty years it sat in storage until 1971 when the Minnesota State Historical
Society returned it to Flandreau, South Dakota, where it is buried. See Curt Brown, “Little
Crow’s Legacy,” Star Tribune, August 17, 2012, http://www.startribune.com/little-crow-s-
legacy/166467906/ (accessed March 25, 2020).
8. Ashley Fairbanks, “Genocide and Mini-Golf in the Walker Sculpture Garden,” City Pages,
May 27, 2017, http://www.citypages.com/arts/genocide-and-mini-golf-in-the-walker-
sculpture-garden/424797173 (accessed March 25, 2020).
9. Frederick Hoxie, “Preface,” in Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive
Era, ed. Frederick Hoxie (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), viii.
10. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide
Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409, at 388, doi:10.1080/14623520601056240.
11. My reference to the Minnesota River Valley reflects both a reference common in Minnesota
to the geographical area surrounding the Minnesota River as well as a socio-cultural refer-
ence. There is, for example, the Minnesota River Valley Scenic Byway which is promoted
by the Upper Minnesota River Valley, Explore Minnesota, and America’s Byways which is
an arm of the federal Department of Transportation (hereafter DOT). According to the
federal DOT, America’s Byways:
is the umbrella term we use for the collection of 150 distinct and diverse roads desig-
nated by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation. America’s Byways include the National
Scenic Byways and All-American Roads. America’s Byways are gateways to adventures
where no two experiences are the same. The National Scenic Byways Program invites
you to Come Closer to America’s heart and soul … (“America’s Byways,” US Depart-
ment of Transportation: Federal Highway Administration, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/
byways/ (accessed March 4, 2020))
12. From the time the site was created as a historical village in 1969 until 2008, it was known as
Murphy’s Landing. David Peterson, “A New Mission for the Landing,” Star Tribune, July 5,
2008, http://www.startribune.com/a-new-mission-for-the-landing/22714364/?c=y&page=2
(accessed March 25, 2020).
13. “Murphy’s Inn,” The Landing: Minnesota River Heritage Park, Three Rivers Park District.
The entire sign reads:
Murphy’s Inn
The foundation before you is all that remains of the stone house and inn built by
Richard G. Murphy around 1858. At that time, this property was situated at the cross-
roads of major river and stagecoach transportation routes. In its heyday, Murphy’s Inn
was likely a welcome site to weary travelers journeying up the Minnesota River Valley.
A large main hall on the first floor provided guests with food and drink, while rooms
on the second floor could be rented for overnight lodging.
Who was Richard Murphy?
Richard Murphy first arrived at Fort Snelling in 1848 as President James J. Polk’s
appointed Indian Agent to the Dakota Nation. He was heavily involved in politics
throughout his life, having served for 12 years in the Illinois legislature before
moving to Minnesota. In 1857, Murphy was elected to the Minnesota territorial legis-
lature as Senator from Shakopee. He was president of the senate in 1858 when Min-
nesota voted for statehood. Richard Murphy died in 1875.
For a detailed exposition of Murphy’s tenure as an Indian agent see Gary Clayton Anderson,
Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux (Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986);
Gary Clayton Anderson, Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota–White Relations in the Upper
Mississippi Valley, 1650–1862 (Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1997).
14. “Medicine Bottle,” The US-Dakota War of 1862, Minnesota Historical Society, http://www.
usdakotawar.org/history/multimedia/medicine-bottle (accessed April 10, 2019).
15. The reference used during the Scaffold protest and in other Dakota references to the war, 38+2,
refers to the 38 Dakota hanged in Mankato as well as Sakpe and Wa-kan-o-zhan-zhan. While this
reference is common outside of the Scaffold controversy, it was central to the activism: “Peaceful
protests continue at the site, where the partially erected ‘Scaffold’ can be seen. A website, Not Art
38+2, and a social media condemnation at #Takeitdown also contributed to the art center’s
rethinking of the installation.” Konnie LeMay, “‘Scaffold’ Sculpture Taints Memory of Dakota
38, Prompts Protests,” Indian Country Today, May 30, 2017, https://newsmaven.io/
indiancountrytoday/archive/scaffold-sculpture-taints-memory-of-dakota-38-prompts-
protests-Y7In_G55pkSVY_cVWKF33g. Writing about what Fort Snelling means to Sheldon
Wolfchild, descendant of Medicine Bottle, LeMay writes, “the fort holds particular pain
because it is where his ancestor, Medicine Bottle, was hanged along with Little Six; they are
the two killed after the mass execution and remembered as the Dakota 38+2.” Konnie LeMay,
“Dakota Elders Will Oversee Dismantling, Burning of ‘Scaffold,’” Indian Country Today, June
1, 2017, https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/dakota-elders-will-oversee-
dismantling-burning-of-scaffold-19_sDGCaf0O1hDGe0q80Wg (accessed March 25, 2020).
16. The city of Mankato’s website describes the park, dedicated in 1997, as “a site to reflect, med-
itate and remember.” See: “Dakota Monuments: Reconciliation Park,” Visit Greater
Mankato, https://www.visitgreatermankato.com/mankato/explore/history/dakota-monuments/
198 M. MCCUE-ENSER
17. Casey Ryan Kelly and Jason Edward Black, “Introduction: Decolonizing Native American
Rhetoric,” in Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self-Determination,
ed. Casey Ryan Kelly and Jason Edward Black (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), 19; Italics in
original.
18. See: Jason Edward Black, “Plenary Rhetoric in Indian Country: The Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock
Case and the Codification of a Weakened Native Character,” Advances in the History of
Rhetoric 11/12, no. 1 (2008): 59–80, doi:10.1080/15362426.2009.10597380; Jason Edward
Black, “Native Authenticity, Rhetorical Circulation, and Neocolonial Decay: The Case of
Chief Seattle’s Controversial Speech,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 635–46,
www.jstor.org/stable/41940626 (accessed March 25, 2020); Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric
of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca
Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
6, no. 1 (2009): 39–60, doi:10.1080/14791420802632103; Casey Ryan Kelly, “Orwellian
Language and the Politics of Tribal Termination (1953–1960),” Western Journal of Com-
munication 74, no. 4 (2010): 351–71, doi:10.1080/10570314.2010.492821; and Mary
E. Stuckey and John M. Murphy, “By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North
America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25, no. 4 (2001): 73–98, doi:10.
17953/aicr.25.4.m66w143xm1623704. Important also to this discussion is the work of rhe-
torical scholars who examine Native Americans’ efforts to assert themselves outside of colo-
nialist logics. See: Lois E. Bushwell, “The Oratory of the Dakota Indians,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 21, no. 3 (1935): 323–7, doi:10.1080/00335633509380113; Randall A. Lake, “Enacting
Red Power: The Consummatory Function in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 69, no. 2 (1983): 127–42, doi:10.1080/00335638309383642; Randall A. Lake,
“Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 77, no. 2 (1991): 123–51, doi:10.1080/00335639109383949; Richard Morris
and Philip Wander, “Native American Rhetoric: Dancing in the Shadows of the Ghost
Dance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76, no. 2 (1990): 164–91, doi:10.1080/
00335639009383912; Richard Morris, “Educating Savages,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83,
no. 2 (1997): 152–71, doi:10.1080/00335639709384178; and John Sanchez and Mary
E. Stuckey, “The Rhetoric of American Indian Activism in the 1960s and 1970s,” Communi-
cation Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2000): 120–36, doi:10.1080/01463370009385586.
19. See: Jason Edward Black, American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015); Jason Edward Black, “Re/Performing and
Re/Claiming Native America: Image Events in the Thanksgiving Day of Mourning
Protest,” Enculturation 6, no. 2 (2009), http://enculturation.net/6.2/black (accessed March
25, 2020); Jason Edward Black, “Native Resistive Rhetoric and the Decolonization of Amer-
ican Indian Removal Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (2009): 66–88, doi:10.
1080/00335630802621052; Jason Edward Black, “Remembrances of Removal: Native Resist-
ance to Allotment and the Unmasking of Paternal Benevolence,” Southern Communication
Journal 72, no. 2 (2007): 185–203, doi:10.1080/10417940701316690; D. Anthony Tyeeme
Clark and Malea Powell, “Resisting Exile in the ‘Land of the Free’: Indigenous Groundwork
at Colonial Intersections,” American Indian Quarterly 32, no. 1 (2008): 1–15, doi:10.1353/aiq.
2008.0009; Danielle Endres, “American Indian Permission for Mascots: Resistance or Com-
plicity within Rhetorical Colonialism?” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 4 (2015): 649–90,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0649; Granville Ganter, “Red Jacket
and the Decolonization of Republican Virtue,” American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 4
(2007): 559–81, www.jstor.org/stable/30113977; Casey Ryan Kelly, “Détournement, Decolo-
nization, and the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969–1971),” Rhetoric
Society Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2014): 168–90, doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.888464; Casey Ryan
Kelly, “‘We are Not Free’: The Meaning of <Freedom> in American Indian Resistance to Pre-
sident Johnson’s War on Poverty,” Communication Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2014): 455–73,
doi:10.1080/01463373.2014.922486; and Rachel Presley, “Between a Rock and a Hard
Place: Rhetorical Strategies for Environmental Protection and Tribal Resistance in the
Dakota Access Pipeline Movement,” in Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric:
Communicating Self Determination, ed. Jason Edward Black and Casey Ryan Kelly
(New York: Peter Lang, 2018), 285–302.
20. Hoxie, “Introduction: American Indian Activism in the Progressive Era,” in Talking Back to
Civilization, 5.
21. Hoxie, “Introduction,” 5.
22. Stuckey and Murphy, “By Any Other Name,” 75.
23. While many examples of this abound, the use of Native American figures as mascots is par-
ticularly reflective of putting representations of Native Americans in service to narratives of
colonialism. See, for example, Endres, “American Indian Permission for Mascots.”
24. Black, “Native Authenticity,” 636.
25. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388. See also: Patrick Wolfe,
“The Settler Complex: An Introduction,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37,
no. 2 (2013): 1–22, doi:10.1080/14623520601056240; and Lorenzo Veracini, “‘Settler Coloni-
alism’: Career of a Concept,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 2
(2013): 313–33, doi:10.1080/03086534.2013.768099.
26. Adam J. Barker, “Locating Settler Colonialism,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
13, no. 3 (2012), doi:10.1353/cch.2012.0035.
27. For more on this see: Martin Case, The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land
Became U.S. Property (Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2018).
28. Kay Anderson and Mono Domosh, “North American Spaces/Postcolonial Stories,” Cultural
Geographies 9 (2002): 125–8, at 126, doi:10.1191%2F1474474002eu239xx.
29. To be sure, both Ojibwe and Dakota inhabited this land well into the 1850’s. See: Thomas
Peacock and Marlene Wisuri, Ojibwe Waasa Inaabidaa: We Look in All Directions (Saint
Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009); and Anton Treuer, Ojibwe in Minnesota
(Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010).
30. Derek T. Buescher and Kent A. Ono, “Civilized Colonialism: Pocahontas as Neocolonial
Rhetoric,” Women’s Studies in Communication 19, no. 2 (1996): 127–53, at 130, doi:10.
1080/07491409.1996.11089810.
31. See: Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson, “Burning down the House: Laura Ingalls Wilder
and American Colonialism,” in Unlearning the Language of Conquest: Scholars Expose Anti-
Indianism in America, ed. Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa) aka Don Trent Jacobs (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2006), 66–80. A number of rhetorical scholars have examined
the use of memory and nostalgia. See: Greg Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and
the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 1
(1997): 1–27, doi:10.1080/00335639709384169; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric
Aoki, “Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum,” Western Journal of Communication
69, no. 2 (2005): 85–108, doi:10.1080/10570310500076684; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and
Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian
Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2006): 27–47, doi:10.1080/
14791420500505619; Kendall R. Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric
and Public Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 208–23,
doi:10.1080/10570311003680600; and Bradford Vivian, “Jefferson’s Other,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 88, no. 3 (2002): 284–302, doi:10.1080/00335630209384378.
32. See: Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in
Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 257–82, doi:10.1080/00335630.2011.
585167; and Danielle Endres, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Brian Cozen, “Not Just a Place
to Park your Car: Park(ing) as Spatial Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 50, no. 3
(2014): 121–40, doi:10.1080/00028533.2014.11821814.
33. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigene-
ity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 5, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/
article/view/18630 (accessed March 25, 2020).
34. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 10. A number of scholars take up the cen-
trality of the frontier thesis to nation-building. See: Ronald H. Carpenter, “Frederick Jackson
200 M. MCCUE-ENSER
Turner and the Rhetorical Impact of the Frontier Thesis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63, no.
2 (1977): 117–29, doi:10.1080/00335637709383373; Leroy G. Dorsey and Rachel M. Harlow,
“‘We Want Americans Pure and Simple’: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of American-
ism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 1 (2003): 55–78, www.jstor.org/stable/41939809
(accessed March 25, 2020); and Margret McCue-Enser, “Constituting the Diasporic Collec-
tive: Irish Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century,” Iowa Journal of Communi-
cation 47, no. 1 (2015): 154–76.
35. Jeff Corntassel, “Re-Envisioning Resurgence: Indigenous Pathways to Decolonization and
Sustainable Self-Determination,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1
(2012): 86–101, at 88, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18627
36. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed.
(New York: Zed Books, 2012), 5.
37. See: Darell Enck-Wanzer [Wanzer-Serrano], “Decolonizing Imaginaries: Rethinking ‘the
People’ in the Young Lords’ Church Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1
(2012): 1–23, doi:10.1080/00335630.2011.638656; Lisa Flores, “Advancing a Decolonial
Rhetoric,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 21, no. 3 (2018): 320–2, doi:10.1080/
15362426.2018.1526550; Kent A. Ono, “Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s The New Young Lords
and the Struggle for Liberation: Theoretical Contributions,” Advances in the History of Rheto-
ric 21, no. 3 (2018): 315–19, doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1526549; Vincent N. Pham, “Build-
ing and Being a Community Control,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 21, no. 3 (2018):
323–5, doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1531666; Darrell Allan Wanzer [Wanzer-Serrano],
“Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,”
Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 647–57, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/490122
(accessed March 25, 2020); and Darrell Wanzer-Serrano, “Decolonial Rhetoric and a
Future Yet-to-Become: A Loving Response,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 21, no. 3
(2018): 326–30, doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1526551.
38. Devon A. Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, “Indigenous Scholars versus the Status
Quo,” American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2002): 145–8, https://www.jstor.org/stable/
4128478 (accessed March 25, 2020).
39. Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and
Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010).
40. Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within, 11.
41. Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within, 25.
42. Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 2.
43. Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess, Danielle Endres, and Samantha Senda-Cook, Participatory
Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric In Situ
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), xiii. See also Michael K. Middleton, Samantha
Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and
Tensions,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 386–406, doi:10.1080/
10570314.2011.586969; and Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies:
Parables from Public Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001):
271–94, doi:10.1080/10570310109374706.
44. See: Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary
Culture,” Western Journal of Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 274–89, doi:10.1080/
10570319009374343.
45. Samantha Senda-Cook, Michael K. Middleton, and Danielle Endres, “Interrogating the
‘Field,’” in Text+Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method, ed. Sarah L. McKinnon, Robert
Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2016), 25.
46. Samantha Senda-Cook, “Rugged Practices: Embodying Authenticity in Outdoor Recreation,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 2 (2012): 129–52, at 136, doi:10.1080/00335630.2012.
663500.
47. Senda-Cook, Middleton, and Endres, “Interrogating the ‘Field,’” 38.
48. A number of scholars attend to the question of who can study Native Americans and the
questions that should guide non-Native American scholars in such research. See Devon
Abbott Mihesuah, So You Want to Write about American Indians?: A Guide for Writers, Stu-
dents, and Scholars (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); and Duane Champagne,
“American Indian Studies is for Everyone,” American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1996):
77–82, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1184943 (accessed March 25, 2020).
49. The Landing Journal: Murphy’s Landing, A Minnesota Valley Restoration of 1840–1890,
Spring 1990, Gale Family Library, Minnesota Historical Society.
50. These treaties resulted in the sale of almost all Dakota land; after signing them Dakota were
relegated to a 20-mile strip of land on either side of the Minnesota River. See: “Relations:
Dakota and Ojibwe Treaties,” TreatiesMatter.org, http://treatiesmatter.org/treaties/land/
1837-ojibwe-dakota (accessed August 31, 2019).
51. Brian W. Dippie, “The Winning of the West Reconsidered,” The Wilson Quarterly 14, no. 3
(1990): 70–85, at 85, http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/essays/winning-west-reconsidered
52. “The Landing” brochure.
53. “The Landing,” Three Rivers Park District, https://www.threeriversparks.org/location/
landing (accessed April 13, 2019).
54. 2020 Summer Camps, Three Rivers Park District, https://www.threeriversparks.org/sites/
default/files/pdfs/Summer%20Camps/SummerCamps2020-web_0.pdf (accessed March 4,
2020).
55. See: Wilson, “Burning down the House.” The enduring endearment for the work of Laura
Ingalls Wilder reflects the entrenchment of settler colonialism as a dominant ideology.
56. According to the CHS River Terminal website, the Savage location (next to the Shakopee City
line) has a “bushel storage” of “1,325,000.” “CHS Savage Terminal Storage Available,” CHS
River Terminals and Processing Facilities, https://www.chsag.com/savage (accessed April 24,
2019; accessed March 4, 2020).
57. According to the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community 2018 Donation Report, “In
fiscal year 2018 alone, we provided $18 million in donations for education, youth program-
ming, health care programs, legal aid, community development and infrastructure, women’s
health, arts and culture, local communities, environmental protection, and many more
worthwhile causes and enterprises.” “2018 Donation Report,” Shakopee Mdewakanton
Sioux Community, https://shakopeedakota.org/resources/smsc-reports-links (accessed
March 4, 2020).
58. Waziyatawin, “The Paradox of Indigenous Resurgence at the End of Empire,” Decoloniza-
tion: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 68–85, at 72, https://jps.library.
utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18629 (accessed March 25, 2020).
59. Waziyatawin, “The Paradox of Indigenous Resurgence,” 72.
60. See: E. Cram, “Archival Ambience and Sensory Memory: Generating Queer Intimacies in the
Settler Colonial Archive,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2016):
109–29, doi:10.1080/14791420.2015.1119290.
61. Peterson, “A New Mission.”
62. The timelines of the installation and the resistance are captured in a local online news site,
MinnPost:
The news that “Scaffold” would be a permanent part of the Sculpture Garden – it had
already been installed near the iconic “Spoonbridge and Cherry,” but without most
people knowing what it was – lit a fuse. The response was immediate, fierce and wide-
spread. Native people weren’t the only ones who condemned the sculpture. They were
joined on Facebook and Twitter (#TakeItDown) by non-Native artists, tribal groups,
arts leaders, community leaders, politicians and other supporters. On Friday and
Saturday, protestors gathered outside the chain-link fence surrounding the Garden,
hung signs on the fence and wrote on the sidewalks with chalk.
202 M. MCCUE-ENSER
On Friday The Circle published Viso’s public letter and the Walker Art Center tweeted:
“We have been listening to feedback regarding the ‘Scaffold’ artwork in the Minneapolis
Sculpture Garden.”
By Saturday, the signs posted Friday had been removed. The protests continued and
more signs were added. City Pages published a piece by Anishinaabe artist and
writer Ashley Fairbanks titled “Genocide and Mini-Gold in the Walker Sculpture
Garden.” Dakota activist and artist Graci Horne, who is related to one of the
Dakota 38, circulated an email describing the sculpture and plans for a “peaceful
and prayerful demonstration.” Horne noted that “Dakota People and Various Sup-
porting Native relatives have started to keep space at the nearest location to the sculp-
ture which is on Bryant Avenue S. and Kenwood Pkwy.” A new website, Not Art 38+2,
was born. (Pamela Espeland, “Walker to Discuss ‘Scaffold’ Sculpture’s Future with
Dakota Elders,” MinnPost, May 30, 2017, https://www.minnpost.com/artscape/2017/
05/walker-discuss-scaffold-sculptures-future-dakota-elders/ (accessed March 25,
2020))
63. Durant, “A Statement from Sam Durant.”
64. Olga Viso, “Learning in Public.”
65. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
66. Levi Rickert, “Gallow Used to Execute Dakota 38 Inspiration for Minnesota ‘Art’ Causes Ire,”
Native News Online, May 27, 2017, https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/gallow-used-
execute-dakota-38-inspiration-minnesota-art-causes-ire/ (accessed March 25, 2020).
67. LeMay, “’Scaffold’ Structure Taints Memory.”
68. This approach is reflected in the Idle No More Movement, which began in 2012 in Canada,
and is a productive lens through which to examine the ways in which, despite or perhaps
because of visibility, state-surveillance, is an effective way to assert indigenous sovereignty
and relation to land. The movement uses protest to assert its mission to “‘honour Indigenous
sovereignty, and to protect the land and water.’” Using flash mobs, marches on government
buildings, blockades, and other public actions, Idle No More resists being confined to rep-
resentation via the lens of the settler state and moves beyond it to set the terms of their visi-
bility. “The Vision,” Idle No More, http://www.idlenomore.ca/vision (accessed June 20,
2015). Native American activists in Minnesota have been working with Idle No More
since 2012. See: “Why Idle No More Matters,” Honor the Earth, August 11, 2019, http://
www.honorearth.org/why_idle_no_more_matters; “Hundreds Attend Native American
Protest at MOA,” CBS Minnesota, December 29, 2012, https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/
2012/12/29/hundreds-attend-native-american-protest-at-moa/; and Andrew Crosby and
Jeffrey Monaghan, “Settler Colonialism and the Policing of Idle No More,” Social Justice
43, no. 2 (2016): 37–57, www.jstor.org/stable/26380302 (accessed March 25, 2020).
69. The published and common reference used to sum up the events leading up to and after
August 1862 has changed over the decades. See: Chester M. Oehler, The Great Sioux Uprising
(New York: Oxford University, 1959, 1997). See also: Duane P. Schultz, Over the Earth I
Come: The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Schultz’s
work had the honor of being a 1992 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Finally,
see Kenneth Carley, The Sioux Uprising of 1862 (Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society
Press, 1961, 1976), which was retitled The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil
War in 2001.
70. “Dakota Elders Announcement,” All My Relations Arts, May 29, 2017, http://www.
allmyrelationsarts.com/dakota-elders-announcement/ (accessed March 25, 2020).
71. “Dakota Elders Announcement.”
72. Alicia Eler, “2017 Moments: ‘Scaffold’ Ignited a Debate about Art and Cultural Appropriation,”
Star Tribune, December, 28, 2017, http://www.startribune.com/2017-moments-scaffold-
ignited-a-debate-about-art-and-cultural-appropriation/467032633/ (accessed March 25, 2020).
73. Jenna Ross, “At Walker, American Indian Artists Discuss the Art World: ‘These Changes
Need to Be Permanent,” Star Tribune, March 30, 2018, http://www.startribune.com/at-
walker-native-american-artists-discuss-the-art-world-these-changes-need-to-be-
permanent/478407813/ (accessed March 25, 2020).
74. “Indigenous Arts Commission: Call to Artists,” Walker, https://walkerart.org/call-to-artists-
indigenous-public-art-commission (accessed January 16, 2019).
75. “Indigenous Arts Commission.”
76. “Walker Art Center Announces Artist Angela Two Stars as Finalist for Indigenous Public Art
Commission in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden,” Walker Art Center, September 17, 2019,
https://walkerart.org/press-releases/2019/walker-art-center-announces-artist-angela-two-
stars-as-finalist-for-indigenous-public-art-commission-in-the-minneapolis-sculpture-
garden (accessed March 25, 2020).
77. “Historic Fort Snelling Revitalization Update,” Minnesota Historical Society, https://www.
mnhs.org/fortsnelling/revitalization (accessed April 26, 2019).
78. Bill Salisbury, “‘Fort Snelling at BDote’? Senate Passes GOP Measure Cutting Historical Society
Funds over ‘Revisionist History,’” Twin Cities Pioneer Press, April 25, 2019, https://www.
twincities.com/2019/04/25/fort-snelling-at-bdote-republican-senators-threaten-minnesota-
historical-society-funds-over-alleged-revisionist-history/ (accessed March 25, 2020).
79. Salisbury, “‘Fort Snelling at BDote?’”
81. Brian Ott, Eric Aoki, and Greg Dickinson, “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and
Absence at the Cody Firearms Exhibit,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no.
13 (2011): 235.
82. Gwen Westerman and Bruce White, Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota (Saint Paul:
Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012), 223. Though he examines the Western Apache
nation, his work makes visible the centrality of place to nation; see also Keith H. Basso,
Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
84. “Trump Says ‘Our Country Is Full’ during Border Visit,” CBS Evening News, YouTube, April
5, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-eIvUVzsXU (accessed March 25, 2020). While
many U.S. presidents have had a dire impact on Native American nations, President Andrew
Jackson ranks among the greatest. His paternalism toward Native Americans, as well as his
disregard for the separation of powers and abuse of presidential powers, led to the removal of
the Cherokee nation and the Trail of Tears which resulted in the deaths of 4000 Cherokee
people. Historian Alfred A. Cave explains the division between Jackson and Congress. He
writes:
The Indian Removal Act passed by Congress in 1830 neither authorized the unilateral
abrogation of treaties guaranteeing Native American land rights within the states, nor
the forced relocation of the eastern Indians. Yet both occurred, on a massive scale,
during Andrew Jackson’s administration and were the result, not of an explicit con-
gressional mandate, but of an abuse of presidential power. (Alfred A. Cave, “Abuse
of Power: Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830,” The Historian 65,
no. 6 (2003): 1331–2, www.jstor.org/stable/24452618)
The similitudes between Jackson and Trump are many, not only for the abuse of presidential
power but also for the appeal to white populism. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes of Jackson:
[l]and-poor white rural people saw Jackson as the man who would save them, making
land available to them by ridding it of Indians, thereby setting the pattern of the dance
between poor and rich US Americans ever since under the guise of equal opportunity.
(Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston,
MA: Beacon Press, 2014), 109)
204 M. MCCUE-ENSER
See also: Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, A Chief and Her People: An Autobiography by
the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1993); and
Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the Amer-
ican Indian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975).
85. Sarah L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard, “Introduction:
Articulating Text and Field in the Nodes of Rhetorical Scholarship,” in Text+Field: Innovations
in Rhetorical Method, ed. Sarah L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert
Glenn Howard (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 19–20.

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