We are writing this letter seeking your help

In the mid-1860s, Dakotas at the Camp Kearney Indian Prison in Davenport, Iowa, and the Crow Creek Indian Reservation in Dakota Territory appropriated missionary-taught literacy so they could communicate with widely separated kin. They also wrote to the missionaries, enlisting them as allies in their fight for better living conditions and the release of prisoners. Literate Dakotas took what the missionary teachers offered and manipulated it as best as they could during a traumatic time. At the age of twenty-three, Mr. Uses a Cane was imprisoned at Camp Kearney, in Davenport, Iowa, for his alleged role in the Dakota War of 1862. At Camp Kearney, missionaries affiliated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), as well as camp elders, taught him to read and write in the Dakota language. With his newfound knowledge, he penned a letter to Stephen R. Riggs, an ABCFM missionary, on behalf of the prisoners. He wrote, “We are writing this letter seeking your help ... we want to see our relatives, and we need your help to talk for us.” 1 1 Clifford Canku and Michael Simon, The Dakota Prisoner of War Letters: Dakota Kaŝkapi Okicize Wowapi (St. Paul, 2013), 165.

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• Regards croisés d’intellectuels d/lakotas

  Open Access•Claire Anchordoqui•Leaves•2023

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