History Revealed: Daybreak Woman

Daybreak Woman with Jane Lamm Carroll
History Revealed Series
Program Date: Thursday, July 14, 2022
Video on YouTube

In partnership with the East Side Freedom Library & Roseville Library

A remarkable woman’s life spans nearly a century of peace, invasion, war, exile, return, and astonishing change.

Historian Jane Lamm Carroll shares her extraordinary work, Daybreak Woman. Daybreak Woman, also known as Jane Anderson Robertson, was born at a trading post on the Minnesota River in 1810 and lived for ninety-two years in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Canada, and South Dakota. The daughter of an Anglo-Canadian trader and a Scots-Dakota woman, she witnessed seismic changes.

For her first five decades, Daybreak Woman was nurtured and respected in the multi-ethnic society that thrived for generations in the region. But in the last forty years of the nineteenth century, this way of life was swamped and nearly annihilated as the result of Euro-American colonization and the forced exile of most Dakota and Euro-Dakota people from Minnesota after the US–Dakota War of 1862. Dakota and Euro-Dakota people struggled to reestablish their communities in the face of racial violence, injustice, calls for their mass extermination, abject poverty, disease, starvation, and death. Daybreak Woman and her children survived these cataclysmic events and endured to rebuild their lives as Anglo- Dakota people in an anti-Indian world.

In this extraordinary biography, historian Jane Lamm Carroll uses the life of one mixed-heritage woman and her family as a window into American society, honoring the past’s complexity and providing insights into the present.

Making Minnesota: Natives, Settlers, Migrants, and Immigrants
The Ramsey County Historical Society, in partnership with the East Side Freedom Library, the Ramsey County Roseville Library and other community organizations,  presented a series of programs and events that will center on the experiences of indigenous people, African Americans, and immigrants in Ramsey County from the 1800s through the current day. programs which focus on the too often lost, erased, forgotten or misrepresented histories and stories of Ramsey County and the state of Minnesota. We expect these presentations to enrich and complicate our understanding of the development of the county and the state that we call home.

Past History Revealed Programs
More videos of some of our past History Revealed programs are available on the RCHS YouTube channel.
Ramsey County Historical Society Youtube Channel

To purchase titles from the History Revealed series, or other books of interest, see our partner, Subtext Books at https://subtextbooks.com/