Book Review. Karen V. Hansen "Encounter on the Great Plains. Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930". Oxford University Press. Hardcover. 2013. 360 pp. 63 ill. ISBN: 9780199746811
In 1904, the first Scandinavian settlers moved onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. Immigrants struggled against poverty, often becoming the sharecropping tenants of Dakota landowners. Yet the homesteaders’ impoverishment did not impede their quest to acquire Indian land, and by 1929 Scandinavians owned more reservation acreage than their Dakota neighbors. On the basis of 15 years of archival research and 130 interviews with the descendants of the original Swedish and Norwegian immigrants, Karen V. Hansen, an American historical sociologist, explores and brings together two dominant processes in American history: the unceasing migration of newcomers to North America, and the dispossession of indigenous peoples who inhabited the continent.