Scandinavian Landtaking on a Dakota Reservation: A Gendered Mosiac
Karen V. Hansen
An elder of the Dakota nation, Grace Lambert, spoke with bitterness about land-taking on the reservation where she was born and raised. After a family tragedy, her father sold their farm, “and then some white man got it.” Helene Ivarsdottir Lynghaugen told the same history through a different lens, reflecting on the journey with her widowed mother and two sisters from a rocky mountainside farm in Norway to North Dakota. She matter-of-factly stated: “We stole the land from the Indians.” In fact, her mother’s acquisition of land followed the letter of the law. However, her retrospective account gets to the heart of how it felt to the dispossessed Dakota and to the guilty minds of many Scandinavian homesteaders.Once the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation (previously known as the Devils Lake Sioux Indian Reservation) was opened to white homesteading in 1904, the land rapidly turned over from Dakota to Euro-American hands. Scandinavians, the largest foreign-born group in the state, took particular advantage of this landtaking opportunity and moved onto the reservation in great numbers, acquiring approximately 25% of the land within six years. In effect, while the Scandinavians came to live as neighbors with the Dakota, they also became the harbingers of the dispossession of Dakota land. They have co-existed for a century, expressing mutuality and cooperation as well as conflict. In a nutshell, my quest is to understand the consequences of legally-encoded gender and ethnic inequality in the landtaking. Using plat maps of the reservation in 1910 to determine land ownership and oral histories to provide insight into the dynamics of co-existence, Hansen’s lecture explored the meanings of the gender and ethnic mix of land owners. Furthermore it assessed the transformation of land ownership as Dakota women lost land, Scandinavian women acquired it, and Euro-American men gained the most.
