In the epic collision between two fundamental American processes – European immigration and Native American land dispossession – immigrants became settler colonists. By centering her inquiry on the Northern Plains between 1890 and 1930, Hansen explores what can be learned from the Scandinavian immigrants and Dakota Indians who embodied and endured these contradictory forces, while living side-by-side on the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

Land was greatly valued by both peoples: the foundation of their livelihood and culture, it also sustained their lives. Members of each group were recent arrivals, who came to the land over wildly contrasting pathways. Dakotas came to Spirit Lake as war refugees, forcibly displaced by the US-Dakota War of 1862, and dispossessed of territory over which they once had dominion. By contrast, thousands of Scandinavian immigrants sought land to cultivate and as an escape from poverty. Enabled by the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Land Allotment Act of 1887, these women and men homesteaded land on the reservation. By 1930, some were major landholders. Hansen documents the ways Dakotas and Scandinavians co-existed on the reservation, while detailing the tensions, conflicts, and rank injustices that were common.

Deeper, more complex immigrant and indigenous narratives require new source materials as well as new interpretations. Hansen conducts oral histories, unearths family stories, and analyzes land records, newspapers, photographs, and government documents. These local, particular sources illuminate worldviews, struggles, and triumphs, informing and sometimes contradicting commonly held assumptions about the contest over land in the American west and the people who lived it.

This public keynote presentation is part of the EAAS Conference 2024.

Photo: Karen V. Hansen ©Sarah Putnam