This historic photo shows a concentration camp for the Dakota at Fort Snelling in 1862
An extended excerpt from an op-ed piece in the StarTribune:
"My 2013 "Account of the 1862 Dakota-US War" in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal was not a comparative study. But rereading it now, I am struck by how much that long-ago war in Minnesota resembled today's Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Long before their respective uprisings, the Dakota and the Palestinians had been forced off most of their land and confined to narrow strips where they could not make a living — the Dakota were limited to a 20-mile-wide strip on either side of the Minnesota River, the Palestinians to the Gaza Strip.The U.S. and Israeli governments both allowed settlers to carve up additional land reserved for Dakota and Palestinians — on reservations in the Dakota case in the West Bank in Palestine.Most Dakota and Palestinians were not militants. But those who were militant attacked at opportune moments when Americans and Israelis were distracted by internecine conflicts — Americans by their Civil War, Israelis by strife and protests over Benjamin Netanyahu's proposed restructuring of the judicial system.Dakota warriors murdered, raped and/or mutilated some 500 Minnesotans; Hamas, 1,200 Israelis. Dakota and Hamas fighters took significant numbers of women and children hostage, whom they used as bargaining chips.American and Israeli military responses were disproportionate. In the wake of the Dakota and Hamas attacks, many more Dakota and Palestinians died than did Americans and Israelis.The histories leading up to both wars were also comparable. Israel was founded by Zionists, the first American colony by Puritans. Both thought of themselves as God's chosen people arrived in a promised land. Nineteenth-century Scandinavian and German Lutherans who flocked to Minnesota and the Dakotas in search of farmland were only one of the successive waves of immigration that fueled westward expansion and pushed the boundaries of "God's country," along with the Indians, farther and farther west..."
Image credit: Minnesota Historical Society
Re the term "distant mirror" (an outstanding book, BTW).
Comments closed and previous ones deleted. I was trying to focus on 1862, not 2023, but the subject matter is such that it brings out all the trolls and latent hate.
