A Dakota woman spoke about her visit to an American fort: “‘Listen! Those people actually detest their children! You should see them – slapping their little ones’ faces and lashing their poor buttocks to make them cry! Why, almost any time of the day if you walk near the stockade you can hear the soldiers’ wives screaming at their children. Yes, they thoroughly scold them. I have never seen children treated so. . . Only if a woman is crazy might she turn on her own child, not knowing what she did.’” [i]
In her novel Waterlily, Yankton Dakota ethnologist Ella Cara Deloria recounted the reactions of mid-nineteenth century Dakota people to their new American neighbors. Although a fictionalized account of a Dakota person’s life during this pivotal period, the story is based on Deloria’s extensive research on pre-reservation Dakota lifeways. The narrative follows a child named Waterlily as she grows up, and readers learn about the beliefs and behaviors that shaped Dakota society along with her. Dakota people did not believe in the corporal punishment of children, and Deloria provides examples of how Dakota adults taught discipline, respect, and industriousness through demonstration, explanation, and praise. According to Deloria’s research and informants, Dakota people were horrified when they saw Americans beating their children. The Dakota woman listening to the speaker above felt “sick with sympathy for the unknown children” at that American post on the northern Plains. [ii] When I first saw the pictures of the lacerations and bruises on his little body, I felt “sick with sympathy” for Adrian Peterson’s young son.
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