Documentary by UW-Whitewater students slated Monday, April 21
By Tom Ganser
Correspondent
Tony Gulig, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater associate professor and history department chair person wasted no time setting the stage for his lecture at Fairhaven Monday, “Lincoln’s Darkest Hour: The Sioux Uprising of 1862.”
“There’s no happy end or positive outcome to this story no matter how you look at it… This event is a civil war event, even though it is not the American Civil War, even though this event does not deal with slavery, emancipation, states’ rights, reconstruction. It deals with native people and newcomers… It plays out amidst the crisis that the Union is going through in the fall of 1862,” Gulig said.
The uprising was an armed conflict between the United States and bands of Eastern Sioux (also known as Eastern Dakota) that began on August 17, 1862, just south of Minneapolis/St. Paul, and linked to the ending of annuity payments by Indian agents that caused severe hunger and hardship among the Sioux.
On Dec. 26, 1862, after very quick trials by an appointed tribunal, 38 Sioux were hanged in the largest one-day execution in American history.
Three hundred and eight Sioux were originally sentenced to death until Abraham Lincoln intervened, reviewed the trial transcripts and authorized the state of Minnesota to conduct the executions.
Four months later the remaining Eastern Sioux were expelled from Minnesota to Nebraska and South Dakota, and the United States Congress later abolished their reservations.
Gulig emphasized that Lincoln was characteristically very deliberate in calculating the impact of his decision to authorize the executions.
“Lincoln calculates that there has to be some retribution for what’s taken place in Minnesota. It has to be such that it satisfies the people of Minnesota but it also has to be such that it doesn’t alienate native people throughout the American west,” he said.
“I mean if there’s a person who’s caught in the middle of something, it seems that Abraham Lincoln cannot turn anywhere and not be caught in the middle of something,” he added.
The next lecture in the Fairhaven Lecture Series will be at 3 p.m. Monday, April 28 by Margo Kleinfeld, associate professor of geography and geology at UW-Whitewater. Her talk is entitled “Early American vs. Modern-Day Slavery: Debating Similarities, Differences and the Power of Moral Discourse.”
All lectures are free and open to the public and are held in Fellowship Hall of Fairhaven Retirement Community, 435 W. Starin Rd., Whitewater. Street parking is adjacent to the building.
Links to videos of lectures, including those from prior series, can be found at http://www.uww.edu/conteduc/fairhaven
A mission to honor
On Monday, April 21, at 3 p.m., five UW-Whitewater students will present “A Mission To Honor: Students Premiere Documentary on the Fairhaven Veteran’s History Project.”
In the mid-19th century, Abraham Lincoln established the first version of the National Veteran’s History Project, a nationwide project to collect veterans’ stories and memorabilia of war in order to capture their experiences for future generations.
Lincoln sought to collect journals and photographs to document the civil war in order to “honor him who have borne the battle, and to preserve his legacy for his widow, and his orphan.”
During the fall 2013 semester, UW-Whitewater students Jarred Donlon, Katelyn Klepper, Ashlee Lamers, Carolyn Larsen and Travis O’Gallagher worked on a service learning project with Fairhaven through their Cross Cultural Communication class.
As part of that project, the students interviewed World War II veterans residing at Fairhaven, making digital copies of their oral histories for the National Veteran’s History project. The students created a 15-minute documentary on the veterans’ experiences, which will be shown for the first time at this presentation.
The presentation is free and open to the public. Those with a disability requiring accommodations are asked to advise Fairhaven as early as possible. For more information contact Kari Borne at (262) 472-1003 or bornek@uww.edu.
