BIG FISH IN A SMALL POND
By the early 1860s the Santee (Isanti or Eastern) Dakotas were a starving people living on a cramped reservation in Minnesota. Yet when disaffected tribal leaders met in council to foment what became known as the Sioux Uprising of 1862, one prominent voice spoke against waging such a futile war with the expanding United States. The elderly speaker supported himself with a cane and gazed from beneath a top hat with his remaining, albeit failing, eye. Tamahay, who’d fought with reckless courage in intertribal clashes over the past half century, advocated peace.
“I cannot see well now, but I can see with
