Who Gets Empathy?

Back while I was reading David Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, and before I started Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, the Star Tribune ran one of its Sunday history columns that I wanted to write about. I saw it as related to these two books, because it was about white immigrant settlers coming to Minnesota just after the Civil War. (Gift link) 

It's a story designed to pull at the heartstrings of an assumed kind of Minnesota reader, about a Swedish man and woman, parents of four kids, who arrived by ship in New York in mid-1865 with plans to take a train through Chicago to Minnesota, where they would homestead land.

Instead, they were tricked by an unscrupulous agent who diverted them to a forced labor camp in Virginia to take the place of formerly enslaved people. The family spent eight months there, where the dad was "paid a pittance" to work and they grew ill from bad nutrition and the poor conditions (i.e., living in the former enslaved people's quarters). They didn't speak English, which compounded their difficulties.

They got out of the situation with help from relatives in the North, and by selling what belongings they had for train fare. They reached Chicago, and then finally Minnesota, where they homesteaded near New Ulm.

The Star Tribune story ends with a quote from one of their descendants who researched the story, about how she is amazed at how well they were doing by 1870, only four years after arriving in Minnesota with next to nothing.

I knew that I was supposed to feel empathy for and identify with this family — and one part of me did. But another part was revolted about that assumption.

Yes, it's bad that they were tricked, but compared to being stolen from another country, locked up in a coastal port, shipped in chains, auctioned off, and enslaved for the rest of your life, with everything that meant in terms of being used against your will, from rape to beatings... their experience sounds a bit overplayed, to be honest.

Then they got to achieve their goal: homesteading on 160 acres of stolen land in Minnesota, near New Ulm of all places. And this was just a few years after 38 Dakota men were hung by the U.S. government for participating in the Dakota War, a last-ditch effort to maintain Dakota land rights in Minnesota after U.S. treaty promises were not upheld.

The descendant who was amazed how well the family was doing by 1870, when the family had almost nothing to start with, doesn't acknowledge that they had 160 acres of stolen land to work with.

This kind of valorization of immigrant homesteaders, living on stolen land, is something you hear constantly when living in Minnesota, and I don't think I've ever heard a white writer or artist confront it. This story from the Star Tribune put an additional twist on it, implying that the family essentially escaped "white slavery." Yes, they were tricked, and taken advantage of. But they were able to sell belongings, able to leave when they wanted to. Able to travel freely.

At the same time, these were real people and that shouldn't have happened to them. But whose land did they end up living on? Where is the story about that? 

It will never be published.