As Minnesota turns 150, how will it face up to its original sin?

By: Nick Coleman

History is not just in books. It's also found in tears.

Twenty years ago, I watched a group of Dakota Indians stand by a trench dug in the prairie dirt alongside St. Cornelia's Church on the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation in Redwood County.

There were men I had known for years: Ernest Wabasha, Dave Larsen and the late Amos Owen, a Dakota spiritual leader. They had come to bury 31 Minnesotans -- their relatives -- who died almost 125 years earlier, in a prison after the Dakota War of 1862.

The anonymous remains -- labeled only as male or female, adult or child -- had been placed in cardboard boxes, which were laid above the grave. The bones had been kept for decades by a museum. Once they had been men, women and children. Few, if any, had taken a major part in the war that cost the lives of hundreds of white settlers and was the last desperate act of a people whose culture and land were being taken from them.

But they were all punished. They were all Dakota.

This isn't an ancient story. It is the story of Minnesota's original sin. And as we prepare for next year's 150th anniversary of statehood, we should remember history is a living and often painful thing.

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