Windows and Mirrors - (Ex) Termination - Florence Sprague - February 2022
“How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look wrong, and wrong look right.”
—Black Hawk, An Autobiography (quote seen on plaque embedded in the sidewalk in Iowa City)
Many LWVMN and LWV of Roseville Area events now incorporate an acknowledgement that our
communities are located on the ancestral lands of Native Americans, the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples here in
Minnesota. I did not initiate this custom, coming to it after hearing it at several events. We are all aware at
some level that the entire North American continent was totally reallocated, reorganized, and just outright
taken from indigenous peoples by European colonists due to orthogonal understandings of the concept of
property and a massive power differential. The land grants from European kings to early colonies had no
ethical foundation and treaties under which millions of acres of land were ceded in the 1800s were grossly
unfair.