Sarah Wakefield

Score another one for Curt Brown's Minnesota history column in the Sunday Star Tribune.

This week's is about a woman named Sarah Wakefield, a white woman who was held, with her two young children, by the Dakota for six weeks in 1862 during the U.S.-Dakota War.

Out of 100 people who testified afterward, Wakefield was the only one who refused to go along with the pressure to paint the Dakota as abusive to the people they held, even when they were not. Her captor, a man named Chaska, protected her from assault and gave her a blanket even when it meant going without himself.

Chaska was one of the 38 Dakota men hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862, despite Wakefield's testimony. Why? He was mistaken for another man of the same name. (Chaska means first-born son.) Authorities later admitted they had killed the wrong man. 

Wakefield published a book in 1864 called Six Weeks in the Sioux Teepees. Brown quotes her criticism of the U.S. government policies that led "a militant faction of starving Dakota to wage war":

Suppose the same number whites were living in sight of food, purchased with their own money, and their children dying of starvation, how long think you would they remain quiet?

It's inspiring to see that a "woman of her time" could see and understand this just as clearly as someone with the benefit of years of hindsight. We have plenty of people in Minnesota today who still don't understand that, and who try to sow dissension about it. 

So I'm grateful to Curt Brown and the people whose research he cites for telling me about Sarah Wakefield, and to the Dakota people who were living their values despite everything white settlers were doing to prevent them.