Recovery and Relation in Michel Renville’s Dakota Stories

This paper focuses on the literary contributions of Dakota writer Michel Renville (Beṡe, 1822-1899) to the bilingual Christian newsletter Iapi Oaye, and to the nascent Bureau of American Ethnology. Renville, a member of a prominent Dakota family, was a friend and student of missionary Stephen Return Riggs (1812-1883), and a contributor to Riggs’ newspaper, his BAE publications, and his posthumous Dakota Grammar. Renville’s five Dakota-language stories, which were published in translation between 1880 and 1882, merit close reading for his complex plot structures, transmission of ecological knowledge, and linguistic features. But despite Renville’s skill as a Dakota storyteller, his position as author has been negated by both settler and Native scholars, who have attributed his variations of traditional Dakota stories to Riggs alone. I read Renville’s stories as rhizomes of Dakota literature, to be unearthed from the settler milieu of their translator and re-connected to a wider network of D/N/Lakota authors. I also re-position Renville within his Dakota kinship network, through which he was related to participants on both sides of the Dakota Indian War of 1862, and the establishment of the Lake Traverse Reservation. By connecting Renville’s stories to his kin, both ancestral and descendant, I re-present him as a key figure in Dakota literary history, Christian missionary activism, and salvage anthropology—as someone who strengthened his community by working within settler systems while preserving Dakota lifeways.