Hopefully it would not happen to other people.

Dr. Canku talks about remembering the events of 1862 in a spiritual way.

Words to look for: 
Holocaust
Things to think about: 

What does Dr. Canku mean by "superman"?

Audio Chapters

DL: Have you ever been to Mankato to the execution site?

CC: Many times.

DL: What emotion do you experience when you go there?

CC: As a Dakota man, I'm not so emotional, in the sense that I have a psychic ability to be what I term a “superman”. What I mean by “superman” is that we have the physical experience of being a person, but we also have a spiritual experience that's beyond that. So when you get beyond that spiritual experience in the realm of the sacred, then you begin to have a universal sense of how things work. Parochial things that happened, like the hanging of the 38, is in the same category as the Holocaust. And so we say that, if it happened to people, it happened to us. Hopefully it would not happen to other people.

Oral History- Interview | Narrator Dr. Clifford Canku Interviewer Deborah Locke made at Minnesota History Center, St. Paul, MN | Friday, June 10, 2011

Citation: Minnesota Historical Society. U.S. - Dakota War of 1862. Hopefully it would not happen to other people. October 4, 2024. http://www.usdakotawar.org/node/1021

Viewpoints: All viewpoints expressed on this website are those of the contributors, and are not representative of the Minnesota Historical Society.