By Daniel Shagobince
The multifarious, extensively pervasive, unpersuasively extensive, existential influence of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community and its Mystical Lake Casino is made embarrassingly clear when you go to the Star Tribune web site to read about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Wolfchild case, a decision that does a great job of shoring up the revenues from Mystical Lake Casino for the paltry percentage of Dakota people in Minnesota who are officially enrolled members of the alleged Shakopee community. If you click on that itty bitty metaphorical buttony thing that helps you to print out the article, an ad for Mystical Lake will appear on your printed page. This mystical and transcendental, juxtapositional conflagration is made possible because the Strib has imposed a new innovative way to make money from its readers, through a logarithm aka logrolling rythm created by those humanitarians at Format Dynamics (what a stupendously, crypto-fatalistically tendentious company name!) by forcing them to print out the advertising it sells. And who can blame Mystical Lake for insisting that its ads be lined up with stories to tie into its majorly important source of income? Hey, check it out! You can get the March/ April package, even though it is already April. Mystical Lake even has time travel packages! Whoah! Can I go back to 1976? That was a great year. If I went back think of the things I could tell myself, or maybe my father or my grandfather (depending on how old I allegedly am).
Shakopee’s Mystical Lake–or maybe Mystical Lake’s Shakopee–spreads its pervasively internet-like web of influence everywhere through ads and through the liquid money it gives to tribes throughout the entire universe. They even give money to needy Klingon tribes! Shakopee is real generous, but the only tribal people who have never benefited from Mystical Lake’s money are the descendants of people who were once part of the Shakopee Band of Dakota–you know, the one that really existed, back in the day.
That’s right. There was a Dakota chief named Shakopee and he had a village, back in the day. But that was before all the Dakota people were rounded up and driven out of eastern Minnesota to the Upper Minnesota River Valley and before 1862 and before the Dakota were rounded up again and driven out of Minnesota entirely and before the U.S. government kidnapped the chiefs Shakopee and Medicine Bottle in Canada and brought them back to Fort Snelling and hanged them right outside the walls of Fort Snelling. WTF? How come they didn’t re-enact the hanging of Shakopee in 2008 when Minnesota celebrated the Ginormetennial of the state of Minnesota? That would have been something, a fabulous way to tell the true history. Jane Leonard, chair (table?) of the Ginormetennial of Minnesota was really asleep on that one!
Shakpe or Shakopee, the chief kidnapped in Canada and hauled back to Minnesota, to be hanged just outside outside the walls of Historic Fort Snelling (viewed in the background of this image from the Minnesota Historical Society website) in one of the may corrupt and stupid chapters in the sorry, disgusting history of Minnesota. Opinion Alert! Opinion Alert!
Okay. Let’s get serious about this. What most of “you people”–all you wasichoos and mokes and haoles–do not seem to get is that the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community was made up in 1968–literally made up–of many people who never had any connection to Shakopee’s village of days gone by. In other words, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community does not exist! It is an oxymoron, kind of like a Republican with compassion or a Democrat with real money. Some of Shakopee’s members, it has been said, are not even Dakotas! (Okay, maybe I can’t prove that myself and even if the Shakpemopolitans are not Dakotas, but they are probably Siouan.) Where did the “Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community” come from? That’s a complicated story for another day. Go find a historian to tell you. Believe me, it’s complicated!
Why am I telling you this? Hey, I just thought you ought to know. Why should you listen to me? I don’t know cause I’m just a mystically unlabelled sextupally elusive person of indefinably vague characteristics who thought you ought to know. But then you probably won’t believe me because you only believe what comes from reliable sources, like Fox news or the Stribune or MPR or KARE or other media outlets that carry Mystical Lake commercials. Anyway, I’m just saying. Take it for what its worth. Enough said. For now. . . .
Hey wait a minute! You’re not going to put a warning line on this at the bottom are you? That’s cold. What’s so wrong with what I said! It’s just Shakopee, c’mon. Your talking like I said something bad about the Pope or Oprah, or maybe the Popra, or even Nina Archabal. Say did you hear that lady is going to retire, OMG, I can’t believe it. You should put something about that on your site. . . . . Okay, fine, I gotta go too.
NOTICE: The opinions of Daniel Shagobince and the other commentators on this site are their own and do not represent those of www.MinnesotaHistory.net
Shakopee is the LOCATION of the tribe, and the land has been there for ever, Gov. recog. of the tribe came in 69, white rules. The Strib might not have anything to do with the ad placement? The kind of quick witty writers such as your self or the smart ass people at the paper themselves. Crap we all have to put up with.
Crap we all put up with and truth deny we will?
Someone sent me the following question:
“Was the ad for their 2 for 1 buffet?? Sent from my iPhone.”
The answer should be obvious from the picture in the article.
How attorney Kaardahl was able to tell somebody that they could get something they already have is a question nobody is asking. Wolfchild already has what they were looking for in the lawsuit, which by the way was against the United States for the same land he lives on, and just saying that something “is so” does not make it that way, Judge Lettow could not back out of his misguided rulings. The truth WAS denied, denied being heard at the Supreme. Read the lawsuit and educate.
Sanders, your last comment is enigmatic. Wolfchild may live on trust land, but the point of the lawsuit was that there are many other Mdewakanton Dakota who do not share in the land that was set aside for them in the 1880s. You may question people’s motives, but the case was made beyond any one person’s individual self-interest and it was made with a great deal of documentary information. And, obviously, when it comes to court cases, you don’t just say it, you have to present evidence. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. That’s the way it goes. In this case, it is all going back to the Court of Claims, where there may be further action. After all what was on appeal to the Supreme Court had to do with a preliminary ruling on one issue. There has yet to be a full trial in the Court of Claims. And as I said last year, the case may end but these issues will not go away.
Mr White, the Mdewakanton land set aside for the Dakota was not made available for all to share, it was set aside for the loyal who trace to a list of humans who were documented 2 decades after the uprising, a list that included many Santee who came back to Minnesota, this land was made available to individuals on a first come bases and was often given to family members but was never a criteria, all of the individuals who sudden became plaintiffs were duped by promises of money from ?, yes their lawyers. Many including Wolfchild had a stake at Shakopee but turned it down, and other claimants are where they are because family choices. As far as the Court of Claims, they need to find out what happened to gravel pit money, 60k approx, then all of the plaintiffs will have to prove decendancy, then the Federally Recognized Tribes will have to be included. Irony. The money was divided between Prairie Is., Lower Sioux, and Shakopee, the official accounting needs to be found. (Fed. Gov. of course). Ask a plaintiff that knows little about the case and motives shift to legal fees.
I am trying to get a handle on your response. You seem to be saying that the rationale for the Wolfchild case was flawed, but at the same time you suggest that there might have been a basis for legal action on different grounds. And as for people turning down a stake at Shakopee, when exactly did this happen? It seems to me that who is rich now is based on a game of musical chairs that happened in the past. The question is who was playing the music?
“It is an oxymoron, kind of like a Republican with compassion or a Democrat with real money.”
So my compassion is not real, nor is George Soros’ money? What an odd, make-believe world in which you choose to live.
Hey Juan: Nice to know you’re a Republican. I did not know that about you! Hey, do you mean George Soros has money? I keep asking him for a loan but he says he’s broke! Anyway, I’m thinking if you had any compassion, or empathy, or toothpick of understanding about how other people feel, you might have figured out that THIS IS SATIRE!