The year 1820 marked a significant point in the relationship between the U.S. government and the Dakota people of Minnesota. The establishment of a Dakota Agency at Fort Snelling served as a regional hub for jurisdictional matters concerning the Santee Dakota. This agency played a vital role in administering interactions and overseeing affairs related to the Santee communities within the region. For over three decades, Fort Snelling’s Dakota Agency was the primary point of contact between the federal government and the Santee.
However, as the population and dynamics of the region evolved, so too did the administrative structure. In 1854, the Dakota Agency at Fort Snelling was superseded by two new agencies: the Lower Agency, situated near present-day Morton, and the Upper Agency, located near Granite Falls. This division aimed to provide more localized and focused administration, reflecting the growing complexity of the relationship between the Dakota people and the U.S. government. These agencies were created with the intention of better serving the needs of the Dakota people and facilitating communication between the two entities.
The landscape shifted dramatically following the Dakota War of 1862. This conflict, fueled by broken treaties, inadequate provisions, and escalating tensions, resulted in significant upheaval and ultimately led to the termination of federal administration in Minnesota. Congress, in response to the war, made the decision to relocate the Dakota people, particularly those deemed "troublemakers" or likely to rebel, to more remote locations in the Dakotas. This forced removal was intended to separate the various Sioux tribes and diminish their collective power. This act dramatically altered the lives of the Dakota people and had lasting consequences on their culture and way of life.
The dispersion of the Minnesota Sioux to the Dakotas was a large-scale endeavor aimed at dismantling the tribal structures and assimilating the Dakota people into mainstream American society. Federal officials scattered the remnants of the Dakota population in disparate pockets throughout South Dakota, hoping to break down their traditional social bonds and weaken their cultural identity. This policy of detribalization sought to erase the Dakota’s distinct heritage and force them to adopt a new way of life.
The Santee Dakota, comprising the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes, along with members of the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands considered militant, were among those forcibly removed to South Dakota. Once relocated, these groups were placed under a different administrative system, further separating them from their ancestral lands and traditional ways of governance. The government intended to sever their ties to their past and reshape their future according to federal policies.
During the period between 1863 and 1868, the majority of the Minnesota Sioux found themselves under the jurisdiction of the Upper Missouri Agency. This agency, formally established in 1819, had served as the primary federal authority for most of Sioux Country. J.R. Hanson was the last of the Upper Missouri agents to oversee the administration of the Minnesota Sioux. This agency played a crucial role in managing resources, mediating disputes, and enforcing federal policies among the displaced Dakota communities.
As time went on, a number of smaller U.S. Agency jurisdictions, which were not formal reservations, were established. The removed Santees were transferred to a newly created agency and reservation in 1866. This marked a shift towards a more fragmented administrative approach, with smaller agencies responsible for specific groups of Dakota people. This change reflected the government’s evolving strategy for managing the Dakota population and facilitating assimilation.
The Crow Creek Reservation became home to some Lower Yanktonais and a small band of Two Kettles. The government established an agency at Fort Thompson, where these tribes remained under federal oversight. Meanwhile, the Lower Brules resided across the Missouri River, under the supervision of a sub-agency staff, until they received their own agency in 1893. Some Lower Brules remained at Crow Creek and were formally recognized as Santees.
The dissolution of the Upper Missouri Agency in 1868 led to the formal recognition of what are now known as the Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Rosebud, and Pine Ridge reservations. These reservations were established by 1878 and defined as jurisdictions by the terms expressed in the Sioux Agreement of 1889. The Santees were confined to the Nebraska roll for federal recognition during the creation of these new agency reservations. This process solidified the geographical boundaries and administrative structures that would govern the lives of the Dakota people for generations to come.
The 1860s brought about a shift in the definition of a "tribe" or "domestic dependent nation" in the eyes of the federal government. No longer was a tribe viewed as a cultural or political entity rooted in Native American tradition. Instead, it became defined as the aggregate of people enrolled at a particular reservation. This redefinition had profound implications for the Dakota people, as it prioritized administrative convenience over traditional cultural identity.
The Yankton were considered to be the purest among the traditional tribes in Sioux Country, but even their tribal identity became blurred when many Santees moved from Crow Creek to the Greenwood area between 1863 and 1866. These Santees were enrolled as "Yanktons" for both administrative and cultural purposes, highlighting the government’s efforts to consolidate and redefine tribal affiliations.
In both Minnesota and South Dakota, Pipestone and Flandreau boarding schools emerged as service centers for "Santee" settlements. However, these settlements were not granted federal recognition as "domestic dependent nations" or tribes until the 1930s. These boarding schools played a dual role, serving as centers for federal administration, education, and healthcare. This was the extent of the federal relationship with the tribes attending Flandreau and Pipestone until the 1930s.
From 1870 to 1934, various Commissioners of Indian Affairs officially recorded that the two groups of Santees lived "as white people." The two boarding schools provided services without formal obligations. This characterization reflects the government’s assimilationist policies, which aimed to erase Native American culture and encourage adoption of mainstream American values and practices.
The Flandreau Santees arrived in the Upper Big Sioux River Valley "as homesteaders," exercising a privilege granted by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Between 1869 and 1878, approximately 325 Santee American Indians assembled as detribalized Indians. As they arrived, heads of families formally renounced tribal connections in Yankton before traveling to Vermillion to enter claims on homestead sites, mirroring the practices of their immigrant Norwegian neighbors.
When economic depression, drought, and grasshopper plagues threatened the Flandreau Santees in 1873, John P. Williamson called for federal assistance. The government responded by appointing a Special Agent for a temporary agency that operated only among the Santee until 1879. After this, the Flandreau Santees transferred first to the Sisseton and then to the Santee Agency, receiving only marginal attention, mainly in the form of education at a day school. For the most part, the Indians strived to survive by personal initiative, again similar to their immigrant Norwegian neighbors.
By the end of the 1870s, Santee agent Isaiah Lightner believed that the greatest threat to the Santee colony was the temptation for Indians to sell their land. Lightner feared that the Flandreau colony would sell off their homesteads. By 1879, there were eighty-six farms, ranging from forty to 320 acres and totaling 13,527 acres. About a third of the Santees were progressing, another third were at a standstill, and the rest were retrograding. Lightner also noted that the Santees were not unlike the white pioneers in their willingness to move on when offered a good price for their land. In general, Lightner thought that more Flandreau Indians maintained their permanent homesteads than their white counterparts.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Flandreau Sioux were economically better off than the other Santees, the Sissetons, or the Devil’s Lake people. They had lost much of their land and were to lose more in the next decades, but they had shown tenacity and ingenuity that helped them overcome difficult obstacles and become moderately successful. Known for their industry and enterprise, the Flandreau Sioux established a reputation for honesty and reliability among their neighbors.
Lightner wrote in 1881 that "they pay their taxes promptly, their word can be relied upon, and they make good neighbors." The amount and kind of help they received from white neighbors cannot be measured, but it is not likely that it outweighed the advantage taken of them by the other whites. Nor was the government support given them disproportionate to the handicaps under which they labored as Indians in a frontier community. Despite the various problems in 1900, the Flandreau colony was the most successful and most secure of the various fragments into which the Santee Sioux had been dispersed since 1862.
Starting in 1903, the Flandreau Indian School Superintendent appointed an "overseer" to deal with Flandreau Santees. Thereafter, all could seek health care and attend the boarding school, but they did so as detribalized Indians. It wasn’t until 1929 that Flandreau Santees gathered to express their desire to tribalize. In 1934, they requested and received federal recognition as a tribe.
John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Harold Ickes tortured the rules on their behalf, knowing that they had neither federally recognized status as Indians nor were they living on reservation land. Congress purchased the first reservation for these tribes and funded New Deal programs on their behalf. Today, in Minnesota, there are four federally recognized American Indian political entities as a result of federal action.
The Flandreau Santees and the Secretary of the Interior approved a constitution and bylaws and formed an executive board to carry on tribal affairs. Since 1935, the Flandreau Santee Tribe has been one with a status equivalent to any other, except that it has never had its own agency. After the school superintendent ceased to look after its affairs, a special liaison from the Aberdeen Area Office took place. Today, the tribe exists with about 600 members as the federally recognized Flandreau Santee Sioux.
More than half are in residence with a flourishing casino and zero unemployment. As always before, members remain formally detached from the Flandreau Indian School. Following the Minnesota Sioux Wars, fifty families of Minnesota Dakotas never left the state. Missionaries and politicians arranged secure locations for them because they had remained peaceful and had assisted white people during the war.
Documents reveal that during the 1870s, while some Santees left their reservation in Nebraska to become detribalized homesteaders around Flandreau, others drifted back into southern Minnesota, defying the Expulsion Act of 1863. Through a succession of laws passed during the 1880s, Congress purchased a small amount of acreages for "federal reservations." Interior Department personnel allowed "assignments" to Indians some plots under two-year, renewable contracts.
To prevent a steady stream out of Nebraska, federal officials declared that eligible regional assignees or their descendants had to prove that original assignees had arrived by the year 1886. Moreover, they had to show that their families had never had taken up arms against non-Indians (this requirement changed in 1980). To provide a designation separate from Santees in Nebraska or from Flandreau Santees, federal nomenclature added the term "peaceable" or "peaceable Mdewankantons."
Unlike Flandreau Santees, most of these people retained enrollments at the Santee, Yankton, or Travers Reservation jurisdictions. Yet in Minnesota, they lived as six enclaves. Because these groups had no tribes of their own and lived on small "government reservations," the Pipestone Superintendent served more as a liaison than as an "agent" to manage their land assignments, provide health care at the school hospital, and accommodate Mdewakanton youngsters at the Pipestone Indian School (which served mainly Ojibwas).
Otherwise, they, like Flandreau Santees, were treated as non-Indians. They had no individual Indian money accounts or other trappings of tribalism except at their places of enrollment in South Dakota and Nebraska. In 1884, the Minnesota Mdewakantons were unwelcome vagabonds, with no legal title to the lands they occupied except for those purchased with their own money. By 1900, most of them were established on land bought for them by the government, most of it securely held in government ownership. Their settlements shifted from areas such as the Twin Cities to more rural areas with available land.
By 1900, the Minnesota Mdewakantons were concentrated at three points: Prior Lake, Shakopee, and Prairie Island. By the turn of the century, the Minnesota Sioux were far from the self-sufficiency that Episcopal Bishop Henry Whipple of South Dakota had envisioned with active federal assistance. Perhaps they would have been better off had they remained on their reservations in Nebraska and South Dakota.
Despite this, the creation of permanent communities provided an authentic example of the survival of the Sioux in their traditional homeland. When the Dakota people were scattered across several states following the Minnesota Sioux War of 1862, Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools eventually provided a meeting place for those who were displaced but still very much tied to a shared heritage. Serving simultaneously as health centers, educational facilities, and federal bureaus, the schools acted as a common thread that ultimately bound the people together.
When Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools opened their doors in the early 1890s, their main objective was to provide education for a displaced people willing to embrace the dominant society. In reality, both schools served as centers for education, federal intervention, and healthcare. They also provided focal points for common economic ties between both native and non-Indian community elements, who were equally interested in taking part in the creation of America’s mainstream.
Following the Minnesota Uprising of 1862, many Sioux Indians who participated were imprisoned for their involvement. A great many of these tribal members died of inadequate diet, smallpox, and other diseases. Largely because of President Abraham Lincoln’s concern, federal officials released the Sioux, Chippewa, and Winnebago. Many drifted back to their old homes; others joined the Santee Agency in Nebraska, where the Santee mission school was established.
John P. Williamson and Alfred L. Riggs were instrumental in establishing and operating the Santee School. Williamson appointed Riggs as head of the school in the summer of 1869. Both men were co-founders of the Flandreau Indian School. In March 1869, twenty-five Santee Sioux and their families moved to the Flandreau area. The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 allowed these Indians to exchange tribal applications for the privilege of homesteading on public domain.
The government required each family head to travel to Yankton to renounce formal tribal membership and then to the U.S. Land Office in Vermillion, South Dakota, to enter homestead claims. Other tribal members followed until, by the end of the decade, more than 300 gathered as detribalized Flandreau Santees. The events surrounding the Dispersion of the Minnesota Sioux to the Dakotas are a complex and tragic chapter in American history, with lasting consequences for the Dakota people. Understanding this history is crucial for fostering reconciliation and promoting a more just future. The Dispersion of the Minnesota Sioux to the Dakotas marked a profound shift in the lives of the Dakota people. The Dispersion of the Minnesota Sioux to the Dakotas represents a period of significant cultural disruption and resilience.