Lincoln’s Civil War-era Indian policy tied to Mankato executions, removals and Sand Creek massacre, lecturer tells Missoula audience

Missoula — Dave Beck, acting chair of the Native American Studies department at the University of Montana, told an audience that Abraham Lincoln’s record on relations with American Indian tribes includes decisions and events that American Indian communities remember as executions, forced removals and massacres.

Beck said the most singular act tied to Lincoln’s presidency is the hanging of Dakota prisoners after the 1862 uprising in Minnesota, and he described that episode, removals from Minnesota and elsewhere, and frontier violence including the Sand Creek massacre as central to how many American Indians view Lincoln’s legacy.

Beck opened by framing tribal-federal relations as grounded in treaties and a trust relationship: "Indian tribes are political units within The United States," he said, adding that treaties often recorded both rights retained by tribes and rights granted to them. He placed nineteenth-century policy options—assimilation, protection, removal and (he said, by some actors) extermination—in context and said those choices shaped subsequent events.

The lecture traced how corrupt Indian affairs…