Little Crow's Uprising and the Minnesota Famine of 1862

Revisiting history, events in Minnesota in 1862 and events in Israel and Gaza since October 7th have some remarkable similarities.

The world, at least those in the world paying attention, is seeing the imagery of famine emerging on their screens from the Gaza Strip.  They are seeing the images that have become familiar to all of us from other famines.  The particular kind of gauntness in the faces of the dying, the bulging eyes, and the mouths of the dead stained green from the grass they were trying to eat to dampen the pain of the hunger.

This famine is entirely engineered by an occupying army preventing food, water, medicine, or fuel from entering their walled ghetto.  An entire population is being punished, very intentionally, through mass starvation -- killed en masse by famine and disease, in the most horrifying form of collective punishment imaginable or possible.

This being the month of March, as St. Patrick's Day approached, many commentaries were written making comparisons with the famine in Ireland in the 1840's, which still seems to be remembered there as if it happened last year, and is called a holocaust by many people on the island.  The potato blight was happening throughout Europe, and led directly to the Europe-wide rebellions of 1848.  But in Ireland it led to famine, and this was a direct consequence of a change in British government policies during the course of the potato shortage.

There are many other instances of famines imposed by occupying armies.

In the wake of the October 7th uprising from within the walls of the Gaza Ghetto I've revisited many historical episodes, looking for patterns, as certain people will tend to do.  It was upon revisiting the events of 1862 in Minnesota that I found perhaps the closest historical parallel to what we're witnessing today.  While they're more similar than exact, the scope of the similarities are chilling -- or should be -- to anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of Israel/Palestine, and especially of the Occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In 1858, Minnesota was admitted into the US as the 32nd state.  As with all the other states, the territory had achieved a white settler majority, making it eligible for statehood.

As with other states, the indigenous peoples of Minnesota -- or in some cases the other indigenous peoples who had been forced west and had ended up in Minnesota -- had been relegated to small patches of land and forced to try to survive on those small patches of land.  Restricted to these areas, unable to hunt or harvest outside of these areas, life quickly became extremely difficult for most Indians in Minnesota.

To add greatly to this already terrible situation, settlers quickly began to move onto the small patches of land that had supposedly been reserved for Indians -- farming, fishing, hunting, logging, and otherwise competing with them for increasingly scarce resources.

Then, in 1861, the crops in that largely frozen landscape allotted to this collection of 7,000 people failed.

There was plenty of food from other parts of the country, and plenty owed to the Indians under the treaties they had been forced to sign, which should have kept everyone well fed.  But the Indian Agents were well-known to be completely corrupt, making themselves and other settlers rich on the money and food they should have been distributing to their supposed clients on the reservations.

As a direct consequence, famine ensued.  Thousands of people were starving.  The Indian Agent told Little Crow, one of the leaders of the collection of people forced to live together on this barren patch of Minnesota land, that he and his people "could eat grass and their own dung."

In the uprising that ensued, this particular agent was found dead, with his mouth stuffed full of grass.

Hundreds of settlers were killed by Little Crow's band of several hundred warriors, and all the thousands of settlers who had moved onto the land there by the Mississippi River fled for their lives.

Little Crow's uprising apparently represented only about 15% of the people he had hoped to recruit from the reservation.  The rest, though starving, did not support the idea, because it seemed hopeless, or for other reasons.  

Many of those who weren't involved with the uprising protected settlers from being killed.  But the fact that only a small minority of the starving Indians were involved with the uprising or that many others protected settlers during the uprising did not affect the "justice" meted out by state and federal authorities.

Troops were sent to assist the settlers in reoccupying more Indian land, as all the Indians were forced to leave the state, moved from one barren reserve to another, deprived of food and shelter.  

After so many hundreds of settlers had been killed, Indians in Minnesota were generally so widely despised by many whites that those who were kept imprisoned were guarded by troops both to keep them in, as well as to keep settlers from attacking them, while they starved, before they were sent to Nebraska.

Something like half of them died of famine and disease during the few years following Little Crow's uprising.

The biggest mass hanging to occur in a single day in the history of the US took place on December 26th, 1862, to punish those considered leaders of the uprising.  Little Crow himself had gotten out of the state, and was killed later, upon returning to Minnesota, while picking berries with his son -- shot by a settler who was richly rewarded for the scalp he handed in to the authorities.

I had encountered this history in a number of great books over the years, one of the best being Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's book, An Indigenous People's History of the United States.  I was reading about the uprising last month, and wrote a song about it then.  A full-band rendition of "Little Crow" will eventually be among the songs on the album that will come out of the recording sessions I was involved with in France for most of the month of February, title to be determined.