Abstract
In 1904, Scandinavian settlers began moving onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. These land-hungry first and second generation immigrants struggled with poverty nearly as severe as that of their Dakota neighbours, often becoming sharecropping tenants of Dakota landowners. Yet the homesteaders' impoverishment did not impede native dispossession: by 1929 Scandinavians owned more reservation land than did Dakotas. Although this historical encounter at Spirit Lake took place in a small corner of eastern North Dakota, it encapsulates the story of conquest and white settlement and the less publicized but equally important, story of the dispossession and survival of Native Americans.
