Translated Nation

How authors rendered Dakhta philosophy by literary means to encode ethical and political connectedness and sovereign life within a settler surveillance state Translated Nation examines literary works and oral histories by Dakhta intellectuals from the aftermath of the 1862 U.S.Dakota War to the present day, highlighting creative Dakhta responses to violences of the settler colonial state. Christopher Pexa argues that the assimilation era of federal U.S. law and policy was far from an idle one for the Dakhta people, but rather involved remaking the Oyte (the Oti akwi Oyte or People of the Seven Council Fires) through the encrypting of Dakhta political and relational norms in plain view of settler audiences. From Nicholas Black Elk to Charles Alexander Eastman to Ella Cara Deloria, Pexa analyzes well-known writers from a tribally centered perspective that highlights their contributions to Dakhta/Lakhta philosophy and politics. He explores how these authors, as well as oral histories from the Spirit Lake Dakhta Nation, invoke thipaye (extended family or kinship) ethics to critique U.S. legal translations of Dakhta relations and politics into liberal molds of heteronormativity, individualism, property, and citizenship. He examines how Dakhta intellectuals remained part of their social frameworks even while negotiating the possibilities and violence of settler colonial framings, ideologies, and social forms. Bringing together oral and written as well as past and present literatures, Translated Nation expands our sense of literary archives and political agency and demonstrates how Dakhta peoplehood not only emerges over time but in everyday places, activities, and stories. It provides a distinctive view of the hidden vibrancy of a historical period that is often tied only to Indigenous survival.