In 1862, after land-hungry invaders from the east had repeatedly violated their treaties with Native Americans, Dakota Indians rose up and “attacked and burned farms and killed settlers.” Many soldiers as well as civilians were killed, “hundreds in all,” before the Dakota and their allies were defeated. After they surrendered, thirty-eight of the Dakota were tried and condemned to death by hanging. In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer recounts one relic of those executions:
The corpses were buried in a mass grave in Mankato, Minnesota . . . , and many of the bodies were dug up and used to practice autopsies. William Mayo (one of the founders of the Mayo Clinic) acquired the body of Mahpiya Akan Na?in (Stands on Clouds), dissected it before an audience, boiled and cleaned the bones, shellacked them, and kept them on display in his office for many years afterward.
When I was a boy in the 1950s, reading scores of books about Indians and watching countless old Western movies and (especially) TV shows with my younger brother, unsavory episodes like this one were for the most part discreetly passed over. There were exceptions, of course, and plenty of scholars knew where the bodies were buried (or dug up), but the consensus version of American history prevailing in that era was too self-flattering to reckon with the truth.
