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aimiller's review
2.0
Ugh okay. This book tried to do something very interesting, which was put immigration history and indigenous history in conversation, but it just... messed up so much, it was infuriating! It's pretty clear that Hansen's interactions with Dakota people were something that she did not analyze as much as she could have, nor did she engage that much with super significant literature in indigenous history that really would have enriched her work (specifically with regard to boarding schools and the trauma that project inflicted on indigenous people.) She has so many interesting things there she could consider--like what is settler memory here doing, especially in contrast to the kind of settler forgetting and moves to settler indigeneity that she cites with Jean O'Brien's Firsting and Lasting--but it all gets lost as she traces these two separate histories but doesn't consider them really in connection with one another beyond questions about dispossession. She also makes some really dangerous moves--her sections around boarding schools is one, and other where she is calls the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota peoples "immigrants" to Spirit Lake, even though they 1) were forcibly removed from their own homelands in Minnesota, and 2) probably had kinship ties with Ihannkthunnwann folks who were living there already. Hansen also keeps making these moves to settler innocence for the settlers she's writing about--she literally at one point goes "the Scandinavian settlers didn't want to participate in settler colonialism" which like 1) if they wanted land, then yes they did, whether it was conscious or not, and 2) it doesn't matter if they wanted to because they did!
It was just infuriating to read, and had she had more contact with indigenous studies as a field, she would have known to think more about kinship and sovereignty as these lenses through which to consider Dakota experience, and to think more about questions of dispossession in that way. I guess the good that came out of this book was the amount of oral histories she did, so someone can go back and use them to write a far better book than this, but this book was such a disappointment in its execution.
It was just infuriating to read, and had she had more contact with indigenous studies as a field, she would have known to think more about kinship and sovereignty as these lenses through which to consider Dakota experience, and to think more about questions of dispossession in that way. I guess the good that came out of this book was the amount of oral histories she did, so someone can go back and use them to write a far better book than this, but this book was such a disappointment in its execution.
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