Ipso Facto, singer/guitarist Mitch Walking Elk, historian Collette Hyman and Maestre Yoji Senna, Saturday May 16th, performed and lectured at St. Paul’s Como Park Pavilion, to help raise funds and awareness for the 2009 Crow Creek Longriders Ride, a commemorative motorcycle ride to the Crow Creek South Dakota Reservation. The event raised money to support the motorcycle riders in their effort to do good work with their motorcycles by riding and raising money and help for families that, according to Wain McFarlane, “sometimes feel like they were tied to the whipping post.”Daniel McGinley and Terry Alex were guests on “Conversations with Al McFarlane” to promote the event and the work. I asked Terry Alex to talk about the events in history that the Long Riders seek to call attention to.
My name is Terry Alex. My true spiritual name in Dakota means Flying High Eagle. The name of this event, in our language, means “when the Dakota suffered.” This ride commemorates and honors people who had to suffer through an exile from Minnesota. It was the aftermath of the 1862 conflict, generally called the Sioux Uprising. In May of 1863, people were loaded up onto boats and taken downriver on the Mississippi. One boatload of people went to St. Louis. They were disembarked there, and they were put on a boat that journeyed up the Missouri River. There was a second boatload of people that took that same journey. They were taken off the boat in Hannibal, MO, and put on train cattle cars, 60 people per cattle car. The journey was two days west across Missouri to St. Joseph, MO. There, the two groups of people intersected and were taken to a place called Crow Creek, SD in 1863. At that time there was a huge reservation, south of Mankato, for the Winnebago people. They call themselves the Ho-Chunk. In our language we call them Ho-Tonka. They were also removed as part of the policies of the state of at that time. They arrived on June 24, 1863.
So four years ago, when we did our first ride, we arrived there at Crow Creek on June 24, to honor and remember the Winnebago people also.
One of the hardest things is what happened to those people and what they’ve endured to still survive even today. They are true survivors. There’s nobody else who can say they survived as much. There is a really, really bad history there. We are trying to make some awareness to it yet in today’s time. We can’t change that history. What we are doing with our ride is we’re bringing hope to these people. We work with children’s groups; raising money for the Boys and Girls club, and also Project Head Start, so that the little ones can have a little better chance.
