The Free Press, Mankato, MN

Your View

May 5, 2012

Your View: City Council made right choice on monument

Rick Lybeck, Mankato

The Mankato City Council made the right decision by approving the monument planned for Reconciliation Park. It’s time to put an end to triumphal white commemoration and make visible that regretful event of December 26, 1862 so crucial to the shaping of our state.

It was heartwarming to see that the Council was not swayed by specious arguments for “balance.” The first commandment in the law of balance laid down by John LaBatte’s March 30 Your View letter said, “If you do events on Dakota culture, you must also do events on white culture.” This principle has never gone the other way. Curtis Dahlin’s Your View of April 7 showed the degree of self-righteous white resentment ready to burst forth at the mere suggestion. Le Sueur ought to take a step back and recognize how it’s being misled into erecting a militia monument.

Similar resentment came in LaBatte’s May 1st Your View. When faced with the notion that so-called “hostile” Indians were not born to that state, but provoked to it by the causes of the war, he says he doesn’t care. Never mind that the Indians’ “hostility” can only be interpreted that way through the lens of settler colonialism. LaBatte is living proof that an individual’s ethnic balance does not necessarily result in his or her political balance.

Long before the 1862 war, John Quincy Adams called “exterminating” Native American “among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring (it) to judgment.” I hope your Christian readers, at least, are able to see the moral failings in recent calls for balance.

Text Only | Photo Reprints
Your View