Location
Please come to the Treaty Site History Center Thursday, January 10th at 7pm to watch the documentary film Dakota 38. This screening is free and everyone is welcome. The film is co-sponsored by the Nicollet County Historical Society, Hillstrom Museum of Art, St. Peter Community and Family Education, and Gustavus College organizations Building Bridges and History Club.
From the film’s website:
“In the spring of 2005, Jim Miller, a Native spiritual leader and Vietnam veteran, found himself in a dream riding on horseback across the great plains of South Dakota. Just before he awoke, he arrived at a riverbank in Minnesota and saw 38 of his Dakota ancestors hanged. At the time, Jim knew nothing of the largest mass execution in United States history, ordered by Abraham Lincoln on December 26, 1862….
Now, four years later, embracing the message of the dream, Jim and a group of riders retrace the 330-mile route of his dream on horseback from Lower Brule, South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota to arrive at the hanging site on the anniversary of the execution…. This is the story of their journey- the blizzards they endure, the Native and Non-Native communities that house and feed them along the way, and the dark history they are beginning to wipe away.”
The film will be shown in conjunction with the Hillstrom Museum of Art exhibition, Hena Uŋkiksuyapi: In Commemoration of the Dakota Mass Execution of 1862. The exhibit will run through February 8, 2013. Associated programs include a roundtable discussion with artists and Dakota community members at Alumni Hall on the Gustavus campus on January 20, 3:30 p.m. Very special guest Kevin Gover, Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, will speak at Alumni Hall at Gustavus on January 27th at 3:30 p.m.
Please contact the Nicollet County Historical Society at 507-934-2160 or museum@nchsmn.org for more details.
