More than 30 riders rode nearly 480km from the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska to southern Minnesota to mark one of the most sinister episodes in US history - the hangings in Mankato of 38 Dakota warriors at the end of the US-Dakota war.

Jim Hallum, who grew up on the reservation, was one of the organisers of the Dakota Exiles ride, a journey through frozen fields and open country covered in snow on horseback.

The group rode in 2020. This week, they met with another group of riders to commemorate the December 26, 1862 hangings ordered by President Abraham Lincoln that led to a mass exile of Native people from Minnesota.

It was the largest single-day mass execution in American history.

Mr Hallum told Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) the ride honours those hanged in Mankato along with two others later executed; and also honors the thousands of people later forced from their homelands. Riders also want to preserve this painful history of the Dakota in the hope of helping heal the intergenerational trauma it created, he said.

The Dakota, having originally approached the colonialists in good faith, were forced to fight to defend their land and their lives as the so-called "settlers" ignored treaty conditions and stole Dakota land with extreme violence.

The US-Dakota war was characterised by brutal crimes by colonialist forces, including the deliberate targeting of Dakota civilians.

After the war, US Congress abrogated treaties between the United States and the Dakota and embarked on a brutal campaign of what would now be called ethnic cleansing. Three months after the war's end thousands of Dakota were loaded onto steamboats and sent to Crow Creek in what is now South Dakota.

Mr Hallum told MPR the Dakota Exiles rode not only for the "38 plus two" executed by US forces, but also "for our grandmothers in Crow Creek".

Many women and children died of starvation and disease after the exile, concentrated in several areas outside of their homelands in Santee, Nebraska, Sisseton, South Dakota, and Devils Lake, North Dakota, as well as Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada.

Across the US, Native American nations were forced on to lands with the least animals for hunting, the worst soil for farming, and the most scarce water supplies as part of a deliberate campaign of genocide. "Settlers" also shot bison dead en masse, sometimes taking their heads as trophies, sometimes just leaving their whole bodies to rot, in order to deny First Nations a vital source of food.

The Exiles Ride met up with riders from the Mankatoh Reconciliation and Healing Horse Ride. The ride closely followed the original route of the Dakota 38 + 2 Memorial Ride, which ended in 2022. That journey was started by Dakota Spiritual leader Jim Miller in 2008, who had a dream about the Dakota returning to Minnesota. Mr Miller died from cancer in 2023.