MANKATO — The group walked slowly and silently around Reconciliation Park on Monday to honor the 38 Dakota who were hanged in a mass execution in 1862.
As each minute passed, a bell rang — 38 chimes in all.
Dave Logsdon, of Veterans for Peace, said this is the fourth year the group has marked Indigenous Peoples Day (formerly Columbus Day).
“We remember the people who used to live here. Their blood and bones are in the ground,” he said.
“We immigrants, it took a long time for us to understand what had been done to them. The mass hanging is a massive stain on our history.”
In past years, Chris Mato, a Dakota elder and retired Indigenous nations and Dakota studies professor at Southwest Minnesota State University, would speak and read the names of the 38 Dakota. Mato is recovering from a broken hip and couldn’t attend this year’s event.
Reconciliation Park, located on Riverfront Drive across from the Blue Earth County Library, regularly plays host to remembrance events for the Dakota.
The U.S.-Dakota War began on Aug. 18, 1862, when the Dakota, who were facing starvation and displacement after food and money promised in treaties were not provided, attacked white settlements at the Lower Sioux Agency along the Minnesota River valley in southwest Minnesota.
The war lasted for five weeks and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of settlers and an unknown number of Dakota.
In the aftermath, the Dakota people were exiled from their homelands, forcibly sent to reservations in the Dakotas and Nebraska, and the state of Minnesota confiscated and sold all their remaining land in the state.
After the war, the largest mass execution in United States history was carried out.
At 10 a.m. on the day after Christmas the 38 Dakota men were led out of a nearby prison to a scaffold specially constructed for their execution.
An estimated 4,000 spectators crammed the streets of Mankato. Col. Stephen Miller, charged with keeping the peace in the days leading up to the hangings, had declared martial law and had banned the sale and consumption of alcohol within a 10-mile radius of the town.