The Deep North: Spaces of Indigenous Confinement

In June 1894, Waŋbdí Tháŋka, also known as Jerome Big Eagle was interviewed by Return Holcombe, a journalist and historian who wrote for St. Paul newspapers and worked at the Minnesota Historical Society. The lengthy interview was published the following month in the St. Paul Pioneer Press and reprinted in Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society. It has since become an important source for historians who write about the anti-colonial war fought by eastern Dakhóta against the United States in 1862. Waŋbdí Tháŋka was Bdewákhaŋthuŋwaŋ and his life spanned the tumultuous changes in the lives and lifeways of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Oyáte. This included the beginning and end of treaty-making between Očhéthi Šakówiŋ communities and the United States, the formation of Canada as a semi-independent settler state, and the ongoing consolidation of the reservation and reserve systems as spaces of Indigenous confinement that would crucially become spaces for tribal survivance. In this paper, I connect the experiences of people like Waŋbdí Tháŋka—framed both in terms of incarceration and survivance—with the role war, deportations, and coerced land cessions played in creating the conditions for the spatial and bodily confinement of Indigenous peoples, revealing the fundamentally carceral nature of the reservation and reserve regimes in formation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Treaties sought to police tribes and diminished land bases. Reservation and reserve boundaries and individualized landholding then segued to fence and pass systems, aggressive enforcements on movement and residency, and other forms of hard confinement through schools, hospitals, and prisons. Together these established the Deep North—on both sides of the border—as a carceral space aimed at punishing, disciplining, and transforming Indigenous peoples. The paper demonstrates that in the end, carcerality functioned at its highest level as a strategy for the dispossession of Native land.