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I immediately agreed to take José in. Neither of us slept that first night, but we were out the door by 9:00 a.m. It was a bleak morning in early April, and we drove the labyrinth of one-way streets in downtown Saint Paul, a pair of zombies looking for the Ramsey County Vital Records office.

José’s grandmother had charged him with filing a series of documents enjoining their Mahpiya Zi (Yellow Cloud) clan to a lawsuit related to the US-Dakota War of 1862. There were casino fortunes at stake for Dakota people who could prove their ancestors’ loyalty to the United States during the war. And so a century and a half after the Dakota were rounded up by Colonel Henry Sibley’s army, imprisoned at Fort Snelling, loaded onto Mississippi steamboats in Saint Paul, and forcibly exiled from Minnesota, José had until midnight to register a claim.

Contrary to the gist of the documents, however, José’s great-grandfather could hardly be called a loyalist. In fact, he was among the 38 Dakota men hanged along the banks of the Minnesota River for defending his people. José knew his family’s claim to loyalty was fraudulent and he was disgusted by it. But he also understood their desire for reparations. After all, the Dakota had been treated unjustly for generations.