Encounter on the Great Plains : Scandinavian settlers and the dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930 / Karen V. Hansen.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-322) and index.

Introduction: illuminating the encounter -- Indians never knocked: fear frames the encounter -- The Scandinavian flood: land hunger, dislocation, and settlement -- The reservation land rush: allotment and landtracking -- Spirit Lake transformed: the nexus of schooling, language, and trade -- Marking nations, reservation boundaries, and racial-ethnic hierarchies -- Fighting the sky and working the land -- Divergent paths to racialized citizenship -- A fragile hold on the land -- Conclusion: Strangers no more -- Appendixes -- A. Historical timeline -- B. Oral history interview subjects.

Print version record.

In 1904, Scandinavian settlers began moving onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. These land-hungry first and second generation immigrants struggled with poverty nearly as severe as that of their Dakota neighbours, often becoming sharecropping tenants of Dakota landowners. Yet the homesteaders' impoverishment did not impede native dispossession: by 1929 Scandinavians owned more reservation land than did Dakotas. Although this historical encounter at Spirit Lake took place in a small corner of eastern North Dakota, it encapsulates the story of conquest and white settlement and the less publicized but equally important, story of the dispossession and survival of Native Americans.

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