So the last couple years there was this thing in minnesota where SJWs and native activists, mostly the SJWs, went about attacking places named after Alexander Ramsey and denouncing stuff related to the Fort Snelling hangings of 38 dakota after the 1862 war. In one particularly silly instance, they dismantled an art exhibit which was made by a fellow hipster social issue artsy fartsy, which was a piece denouncing capital punishment and one structure was a recreation of the gallows where the 38 injuns were hung. The entire point being to be against capital punishment and say the hangings were wrong. But the activists called it disrespectful anyway, and the artist voluntarily let it be destroyed by chainsaw wielding native american activists who then ritually burned it. Yeah. Then they went on the whole eponym crusade, renaming Ramsey Middle School to Alan Page Middle School after a black supreme court justice in order to virtue signal a bit more. Alexander Ramsey, an important state historical figure, was controversial because he had said "The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state."
Now rewind to the context of the actual conflict. Back in 1862, while the civil war was ongoing in the rest of the country, the federal government fell behind and missed annuities it owed the sioux (dakota) bands of indians who had sold their lands in treaties and lived in reservations under shit conditions. Up until the civil war the dakota had lived in relatively friendly peace with the minnesotans. The government was pressed for resources with the civil war, and without the money they were owed, the dakota were unable to buy food on credit from the state. The young dakota men banded together and assembled war parties of hundreds and began raiding up and down the countryside, massacring every white settler they came across. Somewhere around ~800 white citizens were butchered in the genocidal campaign by the dakota, with a particularly notable amount of brutality and torture, besides the normal scalping and gangrapes of women, the indians were noted for cutting babies out of the wombs of women and nailing them to posts, all the men, women and children alike being murdered. So eventually some civil war battalions returned to the state and swept through- with the help requested by governor Alexander Ramsey, and then they fought an easy war and surrounded the dakota and took 500 or so prisoners from the war parties after a battle where 150 indians were killed, holding them at fort snelling where they were given trials one by one- 498 trials were held with 303 being convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to death. Abraham Lincoln then intervened, saying he would not allow such a mass hanging to take place, and commuted the sentences of 264 of them, allowing only 39 hangings to proceed (1 was later reprieved). We can't really know how many of those captured were involved in the bloodshed, but 'almost all of them' was probably a reasonable guess. The remaining were interned for a year, 1/3 dying in the camp that winter, the rest set free.
So back to the original part: The SJWs and native activists in minnesota have made the hangings of the 38 dakota into some terrible crime against humanity that must be denounced and everyone associated with it have their memory damned. Even though the dakota were literally committing genocide against the white settlers in the most barbaric ways possible when Ramsey said we need to drive them from the land, even though the dakota massacred 800 civilians and only 38 were hung for it, they dindu nuffin