The South Dakota State Historical released three books at this week’s South Dakota Festival of Books in Brookings.
In “Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist,” author Angelica Shirley Carpenter explores Gage’s life and why she is often overlooked when her comrades, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, are regularly celebrated. Reflecting upon her 1893 arrest, Gage said, “All of the crimes which I was not guilty of rushed through my mind, but I failed to remember that I was a born criminal—a woman.” What was Gage’s crime? Registering to vote.
Author and Dakota Wesleyan University professor Sean J. Flynn’s “Without Reservation: Benjamin Reifel and American Indian Acculturation” looks at the life of the first Lakota to serve in the United States Congress. Reifel (1906–1990) was a bilingual member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota but often found his ideas challenged by American Indian activists. Throughout his life, he advocated that his people become self-reliant citizens, not by abandoning traditional values, but through education and integration.
Gary Clayton Anderson, author of “Gabriel Renville: From the Dakota War to the Creation of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Reservation, 1825–1892,” will be a featured speaker at the festival. Anderson illuminates the life and motivations of an important Sisseton-Wahpeton chief who was a man of many contrasts. Of European and Dakota descent, Renville (1825–1892) adopted Christianity yet refused to abandon the Dakota Medicine Society. He clung to traditional lifeways while also committing to the economic progress that made the Sisseton-Wahpeton reservation a prime example of what the Bureau of Indian Affairs called its “Civilization Program.” Renville is credited with the creation of the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation in 1867.
Each of these books can be ordered directly from the South Dakota Historical Society Press at sdhspress.com or by calling 605-773-6009.
