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SPIRIT CAR: JOURNEY TO A DAKOTA PAST By Diane Wilson (B.A. ’89) Borealis Books

Diane Wilson (B.A. ’89) grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in a big, happy family in the Minneapolis suburb of Golden Valley. Her father was a hard-working, practical man of Swedish heritage, her mother a hard-working, practical woman whose heritage (one-quarter Dakota) and history (something about a boarding school?) were rarely spoken of and almost entirely unknown to her five children.

As an adult, Wilson, a freelance writer who lives in Shafer, Minnesota, became curious about her mother’s past. What followed was a long, emotional trek that uncovered the tangled roots of her Dakota heritage and the vanished stories of people whose lives shaped not just Wilson and her family, but Minnesota itself. Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past is most interesting not for its history, which we have read before, nor as autobiography, for Wilson’s life is not particularly extraordinary, but for its many glimpses of people who live on the border between two cultures: the mixed-blood.

What world, for instance, was Fred LaCroix (1847–1912) most at ease in? He was the son of Wilson’s great-great-grandparents, French-Canadian trader Frederic LaCroix and full-blood Rosalie Marpiya Mase. As a teenager, his regiment of half-bloods was on its way to the Civil War when it was turned around and hustled back to Minnesota to defend white settlers and their mixed-blood families under siege in the 1862 Dakota uprising. The Dakota attackers he fired on in that fight included many relatives. What must that have been like for him?

In an old document, Wilson found the unsettling account of a young white woman’s 1857 encounter with Wilson’s great-great-grandmother, near whom she briefly lived. Rosalie and her half-blood children, the woman wrote, “were very kind . . . yet I did not get over my fear of that squaw. To me then she was the most repulsive looking woman I ever beheld.”

The generations that follow, leading to Wilson’s, are rich in stories of people living on the cultural edge, never truly accepted by either group, marrying other mixed-bloods and struggling to survive against formidable odds: war, racism, the grind of poverty, the Depression, family tragedies. With each generation, Wilson tries her hand at a little historical fiction, fashioning vignettes that surely aren’t half as interesting as what really happened. Haunting family photographs and genealogical charts go a long way in helping untangle the broader tale that unfolds through the chapters. There’s something powerful about seeing a photo from the 1800s of a person whose eyes are exactly like ours (Wilson’s, in this case), or seeing a family tree thin out into partial names and uncertain dates, headed back into the great blank of the past.

The book’s most successful depiction is that of Wilson’s mother, Lucille Dion, who died of cancer in 2004. As Wilson would discover, Dion’s life was “the single unraveled edge of something that was much larger than we could even begin to guess.” It took some doing, but Wilson got her mother and several of her aunts to open up about the years they spent at Holy Rosary Mission School, a boarding school for Indian children on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. What she learned offered clues not just to her mother’s soul, but to her own. Discovering her mother in a 1940 photograph on display at the Journey Museum in Rapid City, South Dakota, she realizes “that she was part of something much larger than a single family’s history.”

Wilson writes: “When trauma is finally acknowledged, the elders say that the healing works both back in time and forward into the future.” And that certainly is true for her and her mother, who talks about her life only as her death approaches.

The book’s least successful venture is its description of the 2002 Dakota Commemorative March, which Wilson and a brother participated in to remember the Dakota Indians who were forced to march 150 miles from the Lower Sioux Reservation to Fort Snelling after the 1862 war. While her emotions on that walk were deep and genuine and the company she found was warm and wonderful, none of it is as interesting as the stories of her forebears.

All in all, though, Spirit Car is a fine and unforgettable journey, a reminder of how powerfully we are shaped by the lives that preceded ours, and of how influential Native American culture, no matter how trampled and trespassed upon, has been in shaping our world.

—Pamela Miller

Mosquito

By Alex Lemon (M.F.A. ’04)
Tin House Books (2006)

“Tomorrow my head opens. If I am still / here, someone let me know what I am,” Lemon writes in “Swallowing the Scalpel.” In his debut book of poetry, the author translates into verse the fear, suffering, and discovery he experienced as a brain surgery patient.

By Odd Lovoll (Ph.D. ’73)
Minnesota Historical Society
Press (2006)

Norwegian American scholar Lovoll traces the histories of three western Minnesota towns—Benson, Madison, and Starbuck—to learn the influence Norwegian immigrants continues to have on them. His research involved census data, local newspaper articles, and interviews with descendants of immigrants.