Part of HIST 301: Indigenous Histories at Carleton (Fall 2024). Prof. Meredith McCoy, Carleton College.
By Loren Friedman ’25
Since its inception in 1866, Carleton College has existed on lands coercively obtained from the Dakota people. The 1,000 acres of land that currently constitute the college became part of the United States and the southern half of modern Minnesota following the 1851 treaties between the Dakota and the federal government signed at Traverse des Sioux and Mendota. As historian Waziyatawin (Dakota) highlights, to get the Dakota to agree to the cession of their homelands, US government treaty negotiators “had to repeatedly threaten [them] with the withholding of rations (rations theoretically guaranteed from previous treaties) or threaten to take the land by force leaving the Dakota with no compensation.” Capitulating to these immense pressures, the Dakota would be forced to live on a 20-mile wide, 150-mile-long reservation on the upper Minnesota River until their expulsion from the state following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. The outbreak of the war, which would end with the mass execution of 40 Dakota men (the largest in U.S. history) and the imprisonment of the Dakota community at a concentration camp in Fort Snelling, was in many ways due to the poor economic and material conditions created by the terms of these 1851 treaties and imposed upon the Dakota, which by August of 1862 had driven many to the point of starvation.
Carleton College, although founded more than a decade after the signing of these treaties and just four years after then Governor Alexander Ramsey’s exile of the Dakota from their homelands, is, in many ways, linked to the wider history of settler disposition and genocide of Indigenous people in the present-day United States. More specifically, surviving documents from Carleton’s early presidents, administrators, and associates highlight the ways in which those who shaped the early history of the institution embraced what legal scholar Robert J. Miller (Eastern Shawnee) calls the “religious, cultural, and racial ideas of superiority over American Indians [used by the federal government] to make legal claims to the lands and property rights of Indians.” The work of scholar George Tinker (Osage) ties these ideologies into the motivations behind settler states’ interactions towards Indigenous peoples in the Americas, demonstrating how, in and outside of the missionary context he studied, “the prevailing and thoroughly entrenched philosophical presupposition that fueled all European attitudes towards Indians was one of pronounced cultural and intellectual superiority.” One can see Carleton College embracing and perpetuating these teleological narratives of cultural superiority in two particular contexts: the mundane documentation related to the terms of the college’s earliest presidents.
Although tracing this ideology through Carleton’s archive often requires highlighting the ways in which seemingly innocuous statements and texts betray this racist mode of thinking, in some documents it is much more obvious. One such document is a 1905 invitation to a night “at home” with the college’s then President William Henry Sallmon and his wife. The event is described as a sing along for the senior class with the program detailing the “Cycle of Indian Songs” that were to be sung at the recital. The songs are broken into four sections: Primitive Songs, Ceremonial Songs, Social Songs and Songs of the Warpath. While some titles are relatively generic, others, such as “Maneating Song of the Cannibal Tribe,” “Raising the Calumet Pipes,” “The Ghost Dance,” “Captive Song,” and “Scalp Dance” more directly engage with traditional Native American stereotypes.
The description and categorization of these songs in the program, as well as many of their titles, clearly reflect dehumanizing, racist narratives of savagery, primitivism, and millennialism, underpinning the logic of settler colonialism and its superstructure. In particular, pervasive and patently false tropes found within the document, such as scalping or cannibalism, as well as their general association therein with the vaguely “Indian,” mirror these larger cultural narratives. Historian Robert F. Berkhofer highlights the relationship between these problematic cultural perceptions and the larger project of settler colonialism stating: “If the primitivistic version of Indian goodness promised easy fulfillment of European [imperial] desires, the image of the bad Indian proved the absolute necessity, if difficulty of forcing the Native Americans from ‘savage’ to European ways through the exploitation of their physical bodies, spiritual souls, or tribal lands.” Beyond reflecting the racist attitudes of the event’s organizers (both the College and its president), the harmful, racist stereotypes found within these songs embrace and advance the logic of settler colonialism in the United States.
In this way, this document demonstrates how Carleton College’s early history reflects distinctly settler colonial modes of thinking and conceiving of Indigenous peoples. In revealing the ways in which President Sallmon, one of the men who helped to shape Carleton’s early history and the institution itself, normalized and helped to propagate these negative racial stereotypes, this flier links the institutional history of Carleton College with the larger work of settler colonialism in the United States. Along with many other early documents housed in Carleton’s archive, it implicates the college in a history of misrepresentation, dispossession, and sustained violence against Indigenous peoples in the state of Minnesota and beyond. It indicates that the College cannot deny its complicity in this history nor obfuscate its responsibility to participate actively, financially or otherwise, in efforts for healing, recognition, and reparations.
Works Cited
Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1978.
Miller, Robert J. “The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and American Indians.” In Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith et al., 87–102. University of North Carolina Press, 2015. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/carleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3039536.
President and Mrs. Sallmon at Home to the Senior Class. Collection POF02: President’s Office Records (Sallmon), 1903–1909. Carleton College Archives.
Tinker, George E. Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
Waziyatawin. What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland. St. Paul: Living Justice Press, 2008.
