Dr. Linda Clemmons spent nearly a quarter century teaching in Illinois State University’s Department of History. Nothing brought her quite as much joy as leading a section of History 104: History of Native Americans.
“That was one of my favorites because you got to dispel those stereotypes that even today’s students grow up learning,” Clemmons said. “It was something I loved.”
History 104 is still taught at Illinois State, but not by Clemmons—Dr. Lindsay Stallones Marshall leads it now—but Clemmons brought a passion for Native American history with her when she moved across Main Street in 2022 to become director of Illinois State’s Honors Program.
Clemmons has authored three books on the Dakota of Minnesota. Her latest is Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville and the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876. Published last fall by South Dakota Historical Society Press, it was a finalist this year for the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Western Biography.
Unrepentant Dakota Woman tells the true story of Renville, a Dakota woman legally adopted by Protestant missionaries Stephen and Mary Riggs when she was 6 years old despite her biological mother being alive and well. The Riggses, according to Clemmons, attempted to “Christianize and civilize” Renville and her sister. “They wanted to erase her cultural identity as a Dakota,” Clemmons said. “They wanted her to only speak English. They wanted to erase her oral tradition.
“They wanted to erase everything about her Dakota identity.”
Unrepentant Dakota Woman is a story of oppression but also one of resistance and survival. Forced to learn English, sent to a female seminary school in Ohio, and left no other option than to serve as an unpaid servant, Renville eventually made her way to Dakota Territory where she lived the remainder of her life in the culture to which she was born.
“Angelique Renville made her own path,” Clemmons said. “After living with the missionaries for over a decade, she renounced them and went on to reclaim her Dakota identity.”
Clemmons became aware of Renville’s story when she discovered handwritten letters penned by Renville as she researched her first two books: Conflicted Mission: Faith, Disputes, and Deception on the Dakota Frontier (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014) and Dakota in Exile: The Untold Stories of Captives in the Aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War (University of Iowa Press, 2019).
Clemmons knew that such firsthand Native American accounts from the mid-19th century were rare. She made a mental note to return to them later. The COVID-19 pandemic afforded her time to dig deeper.
“Angelique Renville made her own path. After living with the missionaries for over a decade, she renounced them and went on to reclaim her Dakota identity.”
—Dr. Linda Clemmons
“I was drawn to (Renville) by those letters but as I started researching, I found her life intersected with major events in United States history, Minnesota history, and, most importantly, Dakota history,” Clemmons said. “The more I found about her, the more excited I was to tell her story using it as a window into looking at those larger historic issues and historic moments.”
Those included Protestant missionaries’ first contact with the Dakota in the mid-1830s, the Dakota War of 1862, and forced assimilation. Renville’s time with the Riggs family attending the mission church and school was a harbinger of what would come years later with the proliferation of government-funded American Indian boarding schools, including several in Dakota Territory. President Joe Biden formally apologized in October 2024 for the country’s role in the boarding school system.
“Native children were forced to attend these schools, which had the same goals of erasing Native culture, language, religion,” Clemmons said. “By the late 19th century, about 20,000-30,000 Native children had been taken from their families and forced to attend these boarding schools.”
The education forced upon Renville, ironically, aided in her emancipation from the Riggses. After much pleading, she convinced them to fund her return from Ohio—under the guise that she would become their head housekeeper—only to flee to her Dakota relatives hours after her return to the missionaries’ home. While the Riggs family attempted to get her to return to Minnesota, she remained in Dakota Territory with her husband and family for the rest of her life.
Renville later hired a lawyer to sue the Riggses to get back the land they had sold out from under her as her guardians. Clemmons learned of Renville’s attempts to hire a lawyer in her letters and searched doggedly for court records of the case. On a research trip to the Minnesota Historical Society, she found records of it just in the nick of time.
“It was 3:15, the library closed at 4, I was leaving that day, and I finally found it,” Clemmons said, smiling widely. “It was amazing. It was the coolest piece of information I found.”
Renville lost the case, but Clemmons saw victory in the action.
“She used what the missionaries had taught her against them,” Clemmons said.
November is Native American Heritage Month. That’s important to Clemmons. She’s passionate about documenting history in words, but also in traditions and ways of life. On a recent trip to Minneapolis to visit her son, she visited Owamni, an Indigenous restaurant that uses only pre-contact ingredients and cooking methods. She dined on buffalo and elk.
“I used to teach a section on the Indigenous food movement in History 104, and there’s a lot of these restaurants now. It’s a culinary movement,” Clemmons said. “This is off-topic from Dakota Woman but not really because it’s born from some of those same themes of resistance and survival.”
