but also days before, when she’d come out of her fit on the island.
“Is this where you’ve been all the time?” Albert asked.
Mose shook his head and signed, Alone, thinking. And at the library.
“Library?” I said. “What for?”
Learning who I am.
Emmy said, “Who are you?”
Mose, he signed. And not Mose. Then he spelled out A-m-d-a-c-h-a. Broken to Pieces.
“Did Forrest bring you here?” I asked.
Mose nodded.
“Did he tell you about the hanged Sioux?”
Some. I learned the whole story on my own, at the library.
“What is the whole story?” Albert said.
Mose signed, Sit.
* * *
I WON’T GIVE you the full, sad, eloquently signed account that Mose delivered, but here’s what he told us in a nutshell.
By the late summer of 1862, most of the land on which the Sioux in southern Minnesota had lived for generations had been stolen from them by treaties poorly explained or blatantly ignored. Because of the greed of the white men who’d been appointed as Indian agents, the allotments of money and supplies that had been promised to the Sioux hadn’t materialized. Starving women and children finally begged one of the agents for food.
Do you know what the agent told them? Mose signed. He dropped his hands, and because of the tortured look on his face, I wasn’t sure he was going to continue. He told them to eat grass, he finally went on.
Ill-fed and ill-clothed, angry and desperate, some of the Sioux of southern Minnesota went to war. The conflict lasted only a few weeks but with hundreds dead on both sides. The soldiers rounded up almost all the Indians in that part of the state, even those who’d had nothing to do with the war, and put them into concentration camps. In the winter that followed, deaths from disease rose into the hundreds. Those who survived were dispersed among reservations and settlements as far away as Montana.
Nearly four hundred Sioux men were put on trial for their part, real or conjectured, in the bloody conflict. The trials were a sham. None of the Sioux were allowed legal representation. They had no chance to defend themselves against the charges, a great many of which were false. Some hearings lasted only minutes. In the end, more than three hundred were condemned to be executed. President Abraham Lincoln commuted the sentences of all but thirty-nine, who’d been found guilty of the most egregious acts. On December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas, Mose signed, and his bitterness was obvious—thirty-eight of those condemned men were marched to a scaffold ingeniously constructed in the shape of a square to execute them all at the same moment.
Their hands had been tied behind their backs and hoods had been placed over their heads, Mose signed. They couldn’t see one another, so they shouted out their names in order to let the others know they were all there, all together in body and in spirit. They were condemned but not broken. Amdacha was one of these men.
Mose lifted his face, tearstained, to the sky and for a moment could not go on.
Then: An enormous crowd of white people had gathered to watch. At the appointed hour, with one stroke from an ax blade, all thirty-eight men dropped to their deaths. And that crowd, that crowd of eager white spectators, cheered.
As Mose told the story, tears coursed down my cheeks, too. All this—this gross inhumanity, this unconscionable miscarriage of justice—had taken place in the area where I’d spent the last four years of my life, yet not once, in any lesson taught at the Lincoln Indian Training School, had I learned of it. To this day, I can’t tell you if I wept for those wronged people or for Mose, whose pain I could feel powerfully, or if I wept because of the guilt that weighed so heavily on my heart. I’d come from different people than Mose. My skin was the same color as that of the people who’d cheered when Amdacha died, the same color as those who’d done horrible things to a whole tribal nation, and I felt the taint of their crimes in my blood.
A cop car approached and slowed down.
“We should go,” Albert said quietly, eyeing the patrol car as it passed.
He started away, and Emmy and I came after him. But Mose lingered, his head bowed as he watered the grass around that headstone with his tears.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
AT DUSK, I headed back to Hopersville. Among the trees, charcoal-colored in the dim of approaching night, fires burned, little oases of