The Crow Creek Reservation is north of Chamberlain, SD, on the east side of the Missouri River.  It’s founding happened in a very traumatic way.

The largest mass execution in US history took place on December 26, 1862, at Mankato, Minnesota.  It is often referred to as the 38 + 2, since 38 Dakota men were hung at one time and 2 more later.  This stemmed from a conflict that erupted in Minnesota when the Dakota on the reservations were starving and not getting the government rations they were promised.  Some of the men decided to get food however they could and to destroy the white settlers who had taken their land.  There were deaths on both sides.  The military tracked down the Dakota “killers” of white families and ultimately 38 of them were hung on December 26, 1862.  The State of Minnesota decided to rid itself of Natives.

The women, children, and elderly men related to those hung were kept imprisoned at Ft. Snelling in St. Paul over the winter and in the spring were loaded onto boats which took them down the Mississippi River to St. Louis, MO, where they were transferred to other boats which took them up the Missouri River and left them on the east bank of the river at what is now the Crow Creek Reservation.  They had gone from a place of fertile land and good hunting to a dry, desolate area.  Many of them died.

I give you this background information as a prelude to telling you about being invited to the reservation for a commemoration of the people being brought there.  A group of bikers were retracing the journey from Ft. Snelling to St. Louis to Crow Creek. A feast was planned for their arrival.  An elderly member of the tribe, Stella Pretty Sounding Flute, invited my supervisor, her sister and me to attend.  She told us there would be a sweat ceremony after the feast.

We arrived to find the group at the edge of the Missouri River at the old site of Ft. Thompson.  The town was relocated to higher ground when the dams were built along the Missouri River flooding most of the little fertile tribal land.  It was like a park with picnic tables and large trees.  There was a hug cooking pot over a fire with buffalo tongues being boiled in it.  They are considered to be a great delicacy by the Natives.  A buffalo hide was stretched out on the ground and pegged down while a woman and some children were scraping bits of fat and meat off the inside of it.  Bikers were going around talking to some of the tribal members.

We sat at a table and listened to Stella talk about how her grandmother and others brought to this site ate tree bark to try to survive.  Some of the men decided to gather supplies for the sweat scheduled for later.  A pickup truck left the area to bring back rocks.  They then made a second trip to get wood.  A discussion started when they realized no one there had matches or paper to start the fire.  I went to the trunk of my car and got out a spare lighter that I used for pipe ceremonies and some old lists of powwow attendance so they would have paper to light the fire.

A woman, who had a before dinner drink, went to the cooking pot and used a knife to fish out one of the tongues.  She brought it to the table where we were sitting and slammed it down onto the table with water and juice flying everywhere.  One of the taste buds landed in one eye of my supervisor. It was quite painful.  Her sister tried to wash it out with bottled water, but that didn’t work.  Our friend Belinda, Stella’s niece, said we needed to go to town for medical treatment of the eye.  First we stopped at a clinic, but they said they didn’t know how to get it out and suggested we go to the Fire Dept.  That was our next stop.  A man there took my supervisor into a back room which had a big sink.  He told her to put her head over it sideways while he flooded her eye with saline solution.  She noticed something come flying right in front of her face as he did this.  When she turned her head down into the sink after the taste bud was washed out of her eye, she saw chewing tobacco in the sink.  That was what he spit out while flooding her eye.

At that point, we decided to return to Sioux Falls in case she needed further medical treatment. It turned out she didn’t.  Her eye started feeling a lot better on our way back.

In the Native way, I was considered to be a shirttail relative of Stella and her family because my step-daughter was once married to a first cousin of Stella’s step-grandson.  Stella and I were both oblates of Blue Cloud Abbey, which is where I first met her.  She told me once I should have a feast, but that would mean I would need to hand sew some giveaway items and she didn’t think I was capable of doing that or of preparing the food for a feast.  I would flunk any test for being a good Dakota woman.  I’m not sure if she was joking or not.

Mary Montoya