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DL: What would you say are the contributions the Dakota people have made to Minnesota and to the country?
PH: The contribution is a lot of land, medicines.
Millions of acres. Lots of land. They’ve contributed lots of things. A lot of medicines are made from herbs. I don’t know if the United States would admit to that. I guess when they opened up the land for the Homestead Act, that was kind of like a gift from the government, not a gift from the Dakota people. So maybe they should know that it wasn’t really a gift, it was just taken from us. I don’t know, they could come and talk to us about terrorism, because our people fought terrorism for many years, over 100 years
Our people fought terrorism for a long time, and this is the United States of America, you know, this is the Dakota homeland. I showed you that map that one time of the homelands. These little Dakota communities are where we were placed to live on; 1700 acres at Lower Sioux today. It’s nothing. And a lot of it’s gravel pits. It’s not anything. We gave lots of land, you know, and settlers not thinking that it belonged to anybody. It was homelands, it was where you lived, it was where you survived, where you hunted.
