During that deathly winter on Pike Island, something fierce happened to the Dakota people amid their suffering. It is not easy to talk about the phenomenon because historians do not propose eternal answers to spiritual questions. But what happened just before those who were hanged sang their death songs was what one might call a mass “conversion.” An immense spiritual about-face was somehow passed along from death row and into the internment camp, where their families were shivering and too often dying in a Minnesota winter. While fevers and disease raged, so did a full-blown religious awakening. Missionaries who stayed with the Santee people before and after incarceration and were angrily reviled for visiting “the savages,” claimed the Holy Spirit came upon the people and created a mass conversion.
The Rev. Stephen R. Riggs, who spent his life as a missionary to the Dakota, explained what happened this way:
The circumstances were peculiar, the whole movement was marvelous, it was like a “nation born in a day.” The brethren desired to be divinely guided; and after many years of testing have elapsed, we all say that was a genuine work of the Holy Spirit.While this reader may be less sure of what happened than was Rev. Riggs, my judgement of what happened spiritually in Mankato, and then on Pike Island, or even to Abbie Gardner, what forces ignited religious enthusiasm or sustained it, is not my concern. Believers claim such “conversions” happen in a thousand ways. What interests me is the effects of a degree of spiritual faith that changes hearts and minds of people who believe they have come into the presence of a being they consider to be “the living God.” What is of importance to the Abbie Gardner’s story and the book itself is what happened in the lives of those people as a result of their “conversions.”
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| Big Sioux River (foreground) and Flandreau, SD |
In 1869, some of the Santees from that small Nebraska reservation determined to take up farming on their own land in the neighborhood of Flandreau. What Abbie Gardner doesn’t tell her readers is that many of the people Abbie met on that visit to Flandreau would never forget their own tribulation, the great sadness of the Dakota War, just seven years—and so much suffering—in the past.
In her memoir, Abbie Gardner doesn’t tell the reader that Santee story, a story she almost certainly had to know.
When she met the Flandreau Santees, descendants of those who’d fought in the 1862 war, she stood before men and women who knew very well what had happened to her 35 years before. Clearly more important to her was that she also stood before people she believed were, as she had been, washed in the blood of the lamb. “It seemed as though a miracle had been wrought in this region,” she says, “and the day of realization was at hand.”
I am suggesting that the climax of Abbie Gardner’s story is not her physical release from captivity of Inkpaduta, which occurs two-thirds of the way through the memoir, but her visit to Flandreau, near the place on the Big Sioux river where she had witnessed the horrible death of her friend, where she was held captive herself by those who had slaughtered the family she loved. But what she’d recognized that day at the Flandreau church, where she had met and spoken with Santee men and women who had experienced, in outline, a similar story of suffering, was a people who, by their own testimony, had experienced horrific cruelty and immense sadness, but also what they all would have called peace. Everyone in those two Flandreau churches had suffered greatly but felt themselves redeemed by their faith. Without the horror, the blood, the grief, the lifelong sadness, and without subsequent spiritual renewal, the triumph of that particular moment in the company of those particular people would have been impossible. That reconciliation is the heart of the story Abbie Gardner wants told in this odd, old blessing of a memoir.
That grand moment of peace, not war, what Abbie Gardner calls her very own “day of realization,” is the climax of the story because that moment was, for her, the most amazing event of all, an occasion for reconciliation, not degradation. She couldn’t help feeling their mutual faith brought her and the Santees together.
In her memoir, Abbie Gardner doesn’t tell the reader that Santee story, a story she almost certainly had to know.
Presbyterian and Episcopal churches of Flandreau, SD
I am suggesting that the climax of Abbie Gardner’s story is not her physical release from captivity of Inkpaduta, which occurs two-thirds of the way through the memoir, but her visit to Flandreau, near the place on the Big Sioux river where she had witnessed the horrible death of her friend, where she was held captive herself by those who had slaughtered the family she loved. But what she’d recognized that day at the Flandreau church, where she had met and spoken with Santee men and women who had experienced, in outline, a similar story of suffering, was a people who, by their own testimony, had experienced horrific cruelty and immense sadness, but also what they all would have called peace. Everyone in those two Flandreau churches had suffered greatly but felt themselves redeemed by their faith. Without the horror, the blood, the grief, the lifelong sadness, and without subsequent spiritual renewal, the triumph of that particular moment in the company of those particular people would have been impossible. That reconciliation is the heart of the story Abbie Gardner wants told in this odd, old blessing of a memoir.
That grand moment of peace, not war, what Abbie Gardner calls her very own “day of realization,” is the climax of the story because that moment was, for her, the most amazing event of all, an occasion for reconciliation, not degradation. She couldn’t help feeling their mutual faith brought her and the Santees together.
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