Image description: Portion of photo showing two women and a man standing outside a tall house made of wood. They are wearing Western style clothing, but one woman and the man are also wearing (possibly traditional?) headdresses or hats.
Transcription:
Lac du Flambeau Agency, Wisconsin.
Ga gi ga bi tung (Jack Doud) G.A.R. Veteran/
Photo
Allotment No. 682
Age 78
Degree Full
Status Comp.
Family Wife
Flambeau Lake…. 2 room house..5 windows, 2 doors.
Log barn 20'x14’, small shed, summer tepee.
Bob sleigh, light bob, canoe.
5 acres cleared. Large garden, 2 apple trees.
1844 Husband Is active for his age. Cuts wood.
1887 Wife Is always busy and dirty. Makes snowshoes, reed mats, braided rag rugs, plants garden and cultivates it. Waits on her husband - is devoted to him.
Squalid home but very happy. Receive a Civil War pension. Wife had a fatty tumor removed and made a good recovery.
To all to who these Presents shall come, GREETING ;
Whereas, There has been deposited in the General Land Office of the United States a
schedule of allotments of land, dated March 30, 1892, from the Commissioner
of Indian Affairs, approved by the Secretary of the Interior June 1, 1892,
whereby it appears that under the provisions of the Act of Congress approved February 8, 1887,
(24 Stats., 388,) as amended by the Act of Congress of March 3, 1891, (26 Slal 989)
Timber Woman, an Indian of
the Cheyenne or Arapahoe tribe or band, has been allotted the
following described land, viz:
The South East quarter or section twenty eight in Township sixteen North of Range eight West of Indian Meridian, Oklahoma Territory, Containing one hundred and sixty acres
Now, Know Ye, That the United States of America, in consideration of the premises and in accordance with the provisions or the fifth section of said Act of Congress of the 8th February, 1887, HEREBY DECLARES that it does and will hold the land thus allotted (subject to all the restrictions and conditions contained in said fifth section) for the period of twenty-five years, in trust for the sole use and benefit of the said Timber Woman, or in case of her decease, for the sole use of her heirs, according to the laws of the State or Territory where such land is located, and that at the expiration of said period the United States will convey the same by patent to said Indian, or her heirs, as aforesaid, in fee, discharged of said trust and free of all charge or incumbrance whatsoever: Provided, That the President of the United States may, in his discretion, extend the said period.
In Testimony Whereof, I, Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States of America, have caused these letters to be made Patent and the seal of the General Land Office to be hereunto affixed.
[circular red seal]
Given under my hand at the City of Washington, this sixth day of May, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and Ninety-two, and of the Independence of the United States the one hundred and sixteenth
I seriously hate Christians, they’re all so out of touch and racist. Imagine knowing that your ancestors were responsible for killing off 90% of a population and destroying their religion and culture, but then you try to make their ancestors OK with said genocide by making churches and religious iconography just to pander to what’s left of their community.
So, seriously, I don’t want Christian angels that look like racist depictions of natives wearing peacock feathers and crosses, which were never part of any native culture. I want Christians to help rebuild the schools, restore the communities, and revive the native religions that they took from us. Until that happens, all Christians are just racist, thieving, dirty, genocidal douchebags to me.
Christians or other groups that are pro-genocide and racist, don’t interact. And if you disagree with this, you should educate yourself and see the reality of things before you say anything defending your cult/hate group to someone who actually lives with the consequences. Only racists argue they’re not racist when presented with these kinds of scenarios.
Also a reminder that religion (unlike sexual orientation, race, gender, skin color, disability, pretty much everything else that Christians hate being unlike their own) can be changed. If you’re in a racist, bigoted religion that has committed genocide, you can either convert out or admit you’re just as bad as the people who believe that.
There are NO GOOD CHRISTIANS. If you are a good person, you’re not Christian. Convert or act like every other bigot. Stop lying to yourselves that good Christians exist. It’s like saying you’re a good nazi. You’re not.
I love stuff like this. Didn’t a tribe in Africa send America some cows after 9/11? Like this is holy and the most valuable thing we have. We hear your suffering and want to do anything in our power to help
It was not a potato famine. The famine didn’t happen because of the potato yeald failing. Ireland was actually producing more than enough food. However it was almost all land owned by Brittish landowners, who took all of the food out of the country to sell in UK. Potato was what the Irish farmers ate, because it was cheep and could be produced in worst parts of the land, where more profitable food couldn’t be grown. When there were no longer potatos, the decision for the farmers was to either starve and sent the food as rent to the landlords or loose their homes and then starve.
The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.
This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.
Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.
This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.
In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.
As a proud indigenous woman, I want to remind everyone that with Thanksgiving coming up, to stay educated on the history of what actually happened. And don’t forget to honor and stay educated on the hundreds of diverse native american nations
Amado Garcia of the Acoma Pueblo, pictured here on May 17 1919, enlisted in the US Army on June 3, 1918 in Lamar, Colorado. In the First World War, Garcia was cited for bravery with the following:
“Advanced with two men three hundred yards in front of the lines through wire entanglements in order to attack an enemy machine gun.
In spite of strong resistance he succeeded in capturing the guns and returning to our lines.”
Garcia was rewarded with the Croix de Guerre with Gilt Star for his bravery.
A member of the Blackfoot tribe, Spotted Wolf spent her childhood working on her father’s ranch in Heart Butte, Montana, where she cut fence posts, drove trucks and broke horses. She first expressed an interest in joining the army when she was aged 18, shortly after the US entered into World War 2 at the end of 1941. However she was initially discouraged by a recruitment officer who told her that the war was ‘not for women’.
Spotted Wolf was eventually accepted into the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve in July 1943, making her the first Native American female Marine. She almost did not accept the post as her father was dying from a horse riding accident, however her mother and sister strongly encouraged her to pursue her ambitions. She underwent rigorous boot camp training at Camp Lejeune, during which she gained 15 pounds of weight from the diet and rigorous exercise. She later described the training as “hard, but not too hard” given her background on the ranch.
On completion of her training Spotted Wolf went on to serve 4 years in the Marines in California and Hawaii. She drove trucks loaded with heavy equipment, a job normally reserved for men, and also sometimes worked as a jeep driver for visiting generals. Spotted Wolf’s career quickly gathered media attention and she was featured in numerous news stories, and even her own comic book, to promote the war effort.
Following her discharge in 1947, Spotted Wolf returned to Montana where she married a farmer named Robert England with whom she had four children. She attended college to qualify as a teacher and spent the next 29 years teaching in reservation schools. She died in 1988 aged 65 and was buried in her military uniform.
The Daughter of Dawn, an 80-minute feature film, was shot in July of 1920 in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, southwest Oklahoma. It was unique in the annals of silent film (or talkies, for that matter) for having a cast of 300 Comanches and Kiowas who brought their own clothes, horses, tipis, everyday props and who told their story without a single reference to the United States Cavalry. It was a love story, a four-person star-crossed romance that ends with the two main characters together happily ever after. There are two buffalo hunt sequences with actual herds of buffalo being chased down by hunters on bareback just as they had done on the Plains 50 years earlier.
The male lead was played by White Parker; another featured female role was played by Wanada Parker. They were the son and daughter of the powerful Comanche chief Quanah Parker, the last of the free Plains Quahadi Comanche warriors. He never lost a battle to United States forces, but, his people sick and starving, he surrendered at Fort Sill in 1875. Quanah was the son of Comanche chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, the daughter of Euro-American settlers who had grown up in the tribe after she was kidnapped as a child by the Comanches who killed her parents. She was the model for Stands With a Fist in Dances with Wolves.
Here is an interesting array of Late Prehistoric arrowheads, some with multiple notches, from the Chan-ya-ta site (13BV1) in Buena Vista County. Chan-ya-ta was a fortified Mill Creek village site dating to just after A.D. 1000.
As a proud indigenous woman, I want to remind everyone that with Thanksgiving coming up, to stay educated on the history of what actually happened. And don’t forget to honor and stay educated on the hundreds of diverse native american nations
I have for a year watched as my comments and tags have filled (despite all the wonderful comments) with non-native people discussing skin color, blood quantum, and debating the validity of lighter skin toned native americans
So let’s clear some things up
First, gene variants, even in north america skin tone variants exist. People always assume lighter skin tones must mean a mixture of native american and european genetics. But that is not that case. There have been discovered gene variants (like the one on MFSD12) for lighter skin tones only found within native american populations MEANING lighter skin tones can reflect native american ancestory only. These variants have existed even before Europeans arrived.
Second, let’s take a look at a map, and look at where the equator is located, individuals and societies who are farther from the equator have evolved overtime to have lighter skin tones to produce vitamin D more efficiently. That is the same case in North America, just like on the continent of Europe. Native Nations that are located in more northern latitudes have historically had lighter skin tones even before Europeans arrived
Third, There are more than 500 federally recognized nations within the boundaries of the United States. The idea that Native Americans as a whole are monolithic and must all have dark skin and look the same comes from stereotypes. Many non-natives have limited contact with Native Americans, instead their ideas come from appropriated images and caricatures used as mascots and offensive labels that are racial slurs like “Redskins” that serve to make non-natives believe that color is a defining aspect of being Indigenous
Then you have those Native Americans who are mixed, black and indigenous, white and indigenous. The idea that blood quantum, your percentage of “native blood” is what actually matters is an idea that has been spread by those who benefit from the statistical elimination of Native Americans and, by association, all responsibilities of the federal government to Native Americans
Skin tone is unfairly being tied to who is an “insider” and who is an “outsider” Skin color should never be used as a marker of legitimacy. I have seen light skinned Native Americans over and over again get harassed and mocked by non-natives. Online and in everyday life. The entitlement of some non-natives to think they have any say in determining who is “native enough” is extremely frustrating and hurtful
If you are basing your criteria on whether or not someone is Native American based on how likely or harshly they are going to be discriminated against by white people, then you are centering white people, when they have never and should never have anything to do with whether or not someone is Native American
For any other Native Americans reading this post, please remember that as Indigenous people, we retain the right to define ourselves and this includes a right to disentangle our sense of self from colonial ideals and definitions
On This Day in Herstory, November 9th 1764, Mary Campbell, a ‘captive’ of the Lenape tribe during the French and Indian War, was turned over to British troops.
Mary Campbell was born c. 1747, and her family was Scotch-Irish immigrants to the American colonies. On May 21st 1758, when she was 10, Campbell was abducted from her town of Penn’s Creek, Pennsylvania. Her captors were a group of Lenape, a Native American tribe also known as the Delaware. During her captivity she stayed in the household of the principal chief of the Lenape.
During the French and Indian War, and other conflicts that arose between the colonists and the Native Americans some Native American tribes, specifically those living in the Midwest, would raid white settlements with some frequency. The Native people were looking to defend themselves against the violent Anglo-American encroachment of their land; and occasionally the result of raiding these colonial settlements was the taking of captives. Some of these captives were killed, but many of them were adopted into the tribe; it is now thought that the Native Americans may have done this to supplement their dwindling numbers. For decades the Natives Americans faced epidemics spread by the Europeans, and constant war with the colonists themselves, all of this culminated in a struggling population. Women and children were the most likely to be adopted into the tribe, because they were thought to be easier to assimilate to the traditional customs and lifestyles of the Native American; routinely, after several years in the tribe, they allowed their adoptive members to remain with the tribe, or return to their previous culture.
In 1764 British military pressure of the Native Americans in Ohio forced them to turn over their white captives. On November 9th 1764, Campbell was handed over to the troops, and she was one of 60 former captives who were handed over to the British, she would have been about 17 years old at the time having spent over 6 years with the Lenape. She was initially deeply distraught about being separated from her Native American family, and it is estimated that of the 60 people returned to the British at least half of them (probably including Campbell) tried to escape and return to the captors; this behaviour deeply confused and troubled the British troops.
After her return to Pennsylvania, in 1770 Campbell married Joseph Willford, and together they had seven children: five sons and two daughter. Mary Campbell died in 1801.
“On this day in 1886, Apache chief Geronimo surrenders to U.S. government troops. For 30 years, the mighty Native American warrior had battled to protect his tribe’s homeland; however, by 1886 the Apaches were exhausted and hopelessly outnumbered. General Nelson Miles accepted Geronimo’s surrender, making him the last Indian warrior to formally give in to U.S. forces and signaling the end of the Indian Wars in the Southwest.
Geronimo was born in 1829 and grew up in what is present-day Arizona and Mexico. His tribe, the Chiricahua Apaches, clashed with non-Indian settlers trying to take their land. In 1858, Geronimo’s family was murdered by Mexicans. Seeking revenge, he later led raids against Mexican and American settlers. In 1874, the U.S. government moved Geronimo and his people from their land to a reservation in east-central Arizona. Conditions on the reservation were restrictive and harsh and Geronimo and some of his followers escaped. Over the next decade, they battled federal troops and launched raids on white settlements. During this time, Geronimo and his supporters were forced back onto the reservation several times. In May 1885, Geronimo and approximately 150 followers fled one last time. They were pursued into Mexico by 5,000 U.S. troops. In March 1886, General George Crook (1829–90) forced Geronimo to surrender; however, Geronimo quickly escaped and continued his raids. General Nelson Miles (1839–1925) then took over the pursuit of Geronimo, eventually forcing him to surrender that September near Fort Bowie along the Arizona-New Mexico border. Geronimo and a band of Apaches were sent to Florida and then Alabama, eventually ending up at the Comanche and Kiowa reservation near Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory. There, Geronimo became a successful farmer and converted to Christianity. He participated in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905. The Apache chief dictated his autobiography, published in 1906 as Geronimo’s Story of His Life. He died at Fort Sill on February 17, 1909.”
This week in History: September 1, 1985 - Wreck of the Titanic found September 2, 1789 - Congress founds U.S. Treasury September 3, 1939 - Britain and France declare war on Germany September 4, 1951 - President Truman makes first transcontinental broadcast September 5, 1836 - Sam Houston elected President of Texas September 6, 1522 - Magellan’s expedition circumnavigates globe September 7, 1776 - World’s first submarine attack
Indian Summer is noted as the “largest Native American gathering of its kind in the country” (https://www.indiansummer.org/). In our prior post, we noted that Milwaukee had its inaugural festival in September 1987. The pictured posters are from subsequent years of the festival and are included in the publicity materials within the collection (UWM Mss 250) along with materials that reference Education Day and the annual Winter Pow Wow at the Wisconsin State Fair Park.
Milwaukee’s Indian Summer Festival is on-going and continues to be an event that is significant in educating and engaging the public with the history and culture of Milwaukee’s indigenous communities. As always, we acknowledge in Milwaukee that we are on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee homeland along the southwest shores of Michigami, North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida and Mohican nations remain present.
Irene Mack: A look inside the UWM Women Artists Archive
The images in this post represent items found in the archive regarding the life and accomplishments of Irene Mack, a Menominee woman artist and Wisconsin native. These photos are taken from a recent addition to the UWM Women Artists Archive (UWM Mss 003, Box 2) which contains detailed oral histories of women artists and performers around the state of Wisconsin.
In her oral histories, Mack details her experiences growing up in northern Wisconsin, her time attending a residential school, and her adventures traveling across the U.S with the Mack Brother’s Show as a snake handler.
Mack was also an avid activist for the rights of indigenous people in the state of Wisconsin, and worked for UW-Milwaukee as a recruiter for indigenous students.
These photographs were found in a recent accession to the Roberto Hernandez Center Records (UWM Archival Collection 116, Accession 2019-018, Box 1).
Per the captions on the back of the first two photographs, they depict Vernon Bellecourt and Russell Means, leaders of the American Indian Movement, during their visit to UW-Milwaukee. The photographs are undated, but a search through the UWM Post reflects that both Means and Bellecourt were featured speakers during UWM’s 1981 Native American Week. Bellecourt conducted a seminar on “Racism and the American Indian,” and Means spoke about “The American Prison System.”
Information about the individual and the event in the last photograph of this series is unknown.
