Naming Violence in United States Colonialism

This article reexamines a highly public dispute between a powerful and well-connected Episcopal bishop and his missionary priest, men both central to the government’s campaign of war and assimilation against Indigenous Peoples in the Northern Great Plains of the nineteenth-century United States. The bishop claimed that the priest had engaged in sexual intercourse with a Dakota woman named “Scarlet House,” and used this allegation to remove the priest from his post. No historian ever challenged this claim and asked who Scarlet House was. Employing Dakota-resourced evidence, government and church records, linguistics, and onomastics, this study reveals that in actuality there was no such person as Scarlet House. Furthermore, at the time of the incident, the person in question was not a woman but a child. The church created a fictional personage to cover up what was taking place at the agency: sexual violence against children. After “naming” this violence, this article makes four key historical contributions about the history of US settler colonialism: It documents Dakota Peoples’ agency, by demonstrating how they adapted their social structures to the harrowing conditions of the US mission and agency system. It situates the experiences of two Dakota families within the larger context of settler-colonial conquest in North America, revealing the generational quality of settler-colonial violence. It shows how US governmental policies actually enabled sexual predation against children and women. And, it argues that “naming violence” means both rendering a historical account of the sexual violence experienced by children and families in the care of the US government and its agents, as well as acknowledging how this violence has rippled out through communities and across generations.