Today in History - Nov 13 - The Fort Snelling Concentration Camp

November 13 is the anniversary of the opening of The Fort Snelling Concentration Camp in 1862. Of the 1700 Dakotas imprisoned there, one in six of them didn't make it out. Most of them were women and children.

Back in August, I wrote about the Dakota War. With the war still ongoing, the US regime felt it best to imprison all the Dakota, whether they were involved in the war or not. There were four concentration camps set up for the Dakota, but Fort Snelling was the largest.

The six day march to the camp claimed the lives of dozens. The white settlers were so interested in Indian blood that one woman was reported to have ripped a baby from their mother's hands and throw it to the ground killing the baby.

The Dakota imprisoned there endured harassment, rape, physical abuse, rampant disease and hunger, and generally terrible living conditions, all under the watch of Christian missionaries eager to convert them. Even the dead weren't spared. The Dakota were forced to bury their dead inside their teepees in order to keep their graves from being defiled.

Eventually, the US solution to the "Dakota problem" was to relocate them to a small reservation in South Dakota that was apparently a "drought stricken wasteland" by contemporary reports.

Today the Dakota still re-enact the march every two years and leave stakes in the ground with the names of their ancestors who were imprisoned there. They want the camp torn down, as it is a symbol for genocide. The US made it a National Historic Landmark.