Announcing my book: Proud and Determined

As you may know, Algonkian Church History has been an advertising-free, not-for-profit blog for five full years (with more than 300 posts).

But changes may be coming. I'm working on getting a different kind of blog because I have something to sell: a book!

Click on the image to enlarge.

 

I'm the author of Proud and Determined: A History of the Stockbridge Mohicans, 1734-2014.

 

But the cover that you see above was a team effort. When you need help with something, you find out who your true friends are. So I'd like to publicly thank the people involved with "my" book cover: Bart Putzer, Vicki Bowman Stevens, Doug Rand, and John Martin.

 

John's father created the Many Trails symbol and he gave me permission to use a photo of it. The photographer is Doug Rand, a friend of John's. And Vicki, the "cover model," is John Martin's step-daughter (if you want to be technical about it, but I don't think John and Vicki use the "step" word).

 

Finally, Bart Putzer put it all together and designed the cover. Hard to believe he had never designed a book cover before!

 

 

Jeanette "Granny" Gardner: A Living Bridge

The 1930's was a pivital time for the Stockbridge Mohicans.  In the political sphere, the Indian New Deal gave them a chance to regain federal recognition, purchase land that was once theirs, and have a piece of it proclaimed a reservation again.

But the 1930's were just as important to the Stockbridges from a cultural point of view.

On the downside, William Dick, the last speaker of the Mohican language, died and the Stockbridge Bible was sold in a transaction that many of today's tribal members regard as illegal.  (That is a moot point, however, since the Bible was returned to the tribe in 1991.)

Anyway, on the positive side, Granny Gardner was 100 years old in 1930 and she survived for six more years.  I have seen some literature put out by the Lutheran Church which boasted that, at age 98, "'Granny' Gardner" was "the oldest Lutheran Indian in America."  It also said that she was still making splint baskets with no tools other than a jacknife and her own hands.

Jeanette (her given name) was an Oneida by birth.  When she was nine years old her grandmother sent her off to Wisconsin Territory, where the New York Indians were a somewhat closeknit community.  Our heroine became part of the Stockbridge community when she married Jeremiah Gardner. 

The thing about Granny Gardner that is so important is that she was a medicine woman.  And not just a medicine woman, but the oldest known link in a thread of knowledge that continues to this day.  The Stockbridge Mohicans have worked really hard at reviving their language and other cultural ways.  But herbal medicine seems to be the one field of knowledge that was never really "lost," forcing tribal leaders to get help from other tribes to bring it back. 

Granny Gardner taught the Native medicine to her granddaughters, Ella (Bowman) Besaw and Mary (Bowman) Burr.  Ella Besaw passed the knowledge on to her son, Dave Besaw.  Dave had been the administrator of the tribe's clinic until arthritis forced him to retire early.  He stayed actvie in retirement and passed on his knoweldge to Misty (Davids) Cook.  While speaking before a sizable audience at the 2011 tribal history conference, Besaw announced that his apprentice was ready to practice traditional healing.  The torch was passed.  About six weeks later Dave Besaw died.

Postscript: Misty (Davids) Cook has written and published a book about traditional medicine. She ignored a request from this reporter to be interviewed.  However, if you want to purchase the book, I have the following information to share, thanks to the August 15, 2013 issue of Mohican News "According to Cook, the book will be available for $35 via contacting her at 715-851-2848 or via email at niconishkawah[at]yahoo.com.

 

Carlisle Fools Harvard: The Hidden Ball Trick

Pictured above is Jim Thorpe, known as the greatest athlete of all time.  He played football for the Carlisle Indians before going on to professional football.  However, most of Carlisle's players were not as big and powerful as Thorpe.  The average weight of the players on Glen "Pop" Warner's teams was about 170 pounds.  They were smaller than the college teams they played against.  And they made up for it with speed, deception, and tricky plays, the most famous of which was the "hunchback" or "hidden ball play."

A number of years before Jim Thorpe came to Carlisle, the team's quarterback was an All-American named Jimmie Johnson.  Johnson was a Stockbridge Mohican.  Under Johnson's leadership, Carlisle pulled off one of the most remarkable trick plays in all of sport.  And it happened during a game against the arrogant Harvard Crimson.  It was a home game for Harvard but the Carlisle Indians duped the Harvard players so badly that the fans were laughing at the home team's obliviousness.

The game and the play that I'm talking about is featured in Sally Jenkins' book, The Real All-Americans.  Fortunately for us, the chapter is already online, thanks to NPR books. 

After Carlisle, Jimmie Johnson continued his education and became a dentist.  He also continued playing football at Northwestern University.  (They didn't have strict eligibility rules back then in college sports.)  A special tribute to Jimmie Johnson was created by an unoffical website of Northwestern Football.

Louis Leroy - One of the "Real All Americans"

Admittedly the reputation of Lance Armstrong has suffered; not only from his cheating, but also from the fact that he lied about it.  Nevertheless, the 2001 biography Its Not About the Bike was a bestseller and is still favorably regarded on Amazon.  Armstrong's co-author, Sally Jenkins, came out with another popular book in 2007, this one was about the football teams at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. The Real All Americans is a good read.

This blog is often about the Stockbridge Mohicans and one young man from the tribe, Samuel Miller, is said to have played for Carlisle under the famous coach Glen "Pop" Warner.  Miller didn't make it into Jenkins' book, but another Stockbridge Indian, Louis Leroy, did.

We pick up the action in 1901.  Warner's teams were struggling because they "played against teams that were invariably bigger, wealthier, better educated and more privileged"(page 190).  On page 191, Jenkins introduces Leroy.

One of Warner's recruits was a twenty-year-old Stockbridge from Gresham, Wisconsin, named Louis Leroy.  But Leroy was only a halfhearted teammate - he really aspired to baseball's big leagues.  Leroy would stroke his arm and tell the other players "Now this here is a ten thousand dollar arm."

According to to Jenkins, Louis Leroy had run away from Carlisle before the 1901 football season, was followed by the coach, brought back to Carlisle and "tossed" into a "guardhouse."  And here's what happened next:

Leroy responded by attacking the guard who brought him his meal.  Leroy hit him with the heel of his shoe, broke out of the cell and tried to hide in a haystack.  He spent the rest of the summer in a dank cell, and was finally released in September, just in time for football practice. 

And sure enough, Louis Leroy stuck around to play some football.  In that 1901 season, Louis Leroy was a "steady performer" at halfback for Carlisle until they traveled to Detroit to play Michigan in November.  At that point Leroy took off again, and he took the team's other halfback, Edward DeMarr (another Wisconsin Indian), with him.  Without their speedy backfield, Carlisle lost to Michigan 22-0.

Louis Leroy really did make it in major league baseball, pitching for the New York Highlanders in 1905 and 1906.

A Different Perspective on St. Joseph's Industrial School from Elaine Doxtator Raddatz

It is now taught in K-12 scoial studies classes that Native American boarding schools were "tools of enforced assimilation."  And they were.  I don't intend for this blogpost to be meant as an argument against that sad reality.  Forced assimilation was a very bad thing.

Students (residents) of Carlisle Indian School, Carlisle, PA.

Nevertheless, if you've been reading this blog, you know that, as a tribe, the Stockbridge Mohicans accepted a Christian mission voluntarily in 1734.  As a result, by the time some of the Stockbridges became students at St. Joseph's Industrial School on the neighboring Menominee Reservation, they were speaking better English than the white people who ran the place.  At least that is what Elaine Doxtator Raddatz's mother told her about her expeience there.

Elaine Doxtator Raddatz, a longtime resident of Chilton and Calumet County, Wisconsin, and co-author of The Stockbridge Story walked on to the next world last year.  Before she died she completed a book of family recollections, which was produced for her family members and not for sale.  However, a copy of Ms. Raddatz's book, Touching Leaves, is available at the Arvid E. Miller Library-Museum on the Stockbridge Reservation.

As Doxtator Raddatz recalls her mother telling it, St. Joseph's Industrial School was, at first, kind of scary because everybody lived in "a big, strange house."  But, at the same time, her mother said that she "loved it there," and that the "priests, brothers, and nuns helped the children with schoolwork, homemaking, gardening, and other trades. They were like a huge family."

In regards to language, here is how Doxtator Raddatz quoted her mother:

The nuns spoke German and French and the brothers and priests spoke German and Polish.  The Indian children could speak in the Menominee language and French but I couldn't speak in any of those languages.  I spoke English!

Another intriguing recollection of St. Joseph's in Touching Leaves has us witnessing how Elaine Doxtator Raddatz's mother became a good enough organist that she was asked to teach the younger girls how to play that instrument.  One of her students was a "gentle little girl named Evelyn Frechette."  Lilttle Evelyn later took on the nickname Billie and, when grown up she became the girlfriend of one of America's most notorious bank-robbers, John Dillinger.


See these other possts about the St. Josph's Industrial School:

Sarah Shillinger's Case Study: An Oral History of St. Joseph's
and
Menominee Confessions to Sister Mary Ignace

The Many Trails Symbol and a pdf about the "Folk Art" of Wisconsin Indians

Richard March of the Wisconsin Arts Board (now retired) developed an apprenticeship progran in the mid-1980's that facitated the process of passing along traditional skills also known as folk art.

March and Janet Gilmore proceeded to develop what might be called a pamphlet, now accessible online as a pdf.  The full title is

WOODLAND WAYS: Folk Arts Apprenticeships Among Wisconsin Indians 1983-1993


This blog tends to focus on the Stockbridge Mohicans and the creator of that tribe's "Many Trails" symbol, Edwin Martin, is one of the featured artists.

If you're a Stockbridge Mohican, you already know that the Many Trails symbol has been reproduced in pendants, rings and earrings. (In my web searches for a good pic of the Many Trails symbol I've also seen it as a large tattoo on a woman's back.)  These were depicted in Woodland Ways:

Here's Martin's description of the symbol that he created:

The design symbolizes the endurance, strength, and hope of a long-suffering, proud, and determined people.  The curved shape represents the arms of a man raised in prayer.  the circles represent many campfires.  The lines represent the many trails taken from the time the Indians left their ancestral homes.

There are also a lot of other good artists featured in the Woodland Ways pdf:

 

Mohican News Features the Latest Pow-Wow

The Mohican News has a new reporter.  Mark Shaw was the grandson of Virgil Murphy, a former tribal chairman.  Mark told me that he took about a thousand photos at the 36th Mohican Veterans Pow-Wow that was held August 10-12.  Only the best of those photos made it into the paper. 

The Pow-Wow took place at the Pow-Wow grounds, of course.  North of Lutheran Church of the Wilderness on Muhheconnuck Road (on the Stockbridge-Munsee reservation, Shawano County, Wisconsin).

LaKeisha Williams was Miss Moheconneew.

As he has for the last few years, Bear Man made an appearance.




See these and many other photos on the Mohican News website!

Brothertown Drum Returns to Annual Fond du Lac Event

I haven't kept in touch with any of my Brothertown contacts. The last I'd heard was that they were denied recognition by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs. Although I'm sure they are dissappointed, the setback hasn't stopped them from doing their thing.

A case in point was last weekend's Celebrate CommUNITY event at the County Expo Center in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.




According to the Fond du Lac Reporter, the "Gordon Williams Gii Tass'se Brothertown Drummers" participated in an opening flag ceremony that heralded "a multi-cultural parade of people dressed in traditional clothing."



A number of photos - including the one above - were taken of Jeff Huebel. Although the newspaper said that Jeff is from the town of Stockbridge, it actually should have said that he is a Stockbridge Indian helping out the Brothertown people.

The Name of the Stockbridge Mohicans

The photo below was taken at The Great Mohican Pow-Wow in Ohio. I include it here once again to underscore that many of the "original" Mohicans migrated to the Ohio River Valley long before the Stockbridge Mohicans came together in Massachusetts.



I've already written two posts on this subject. Those posts received more comments than I usually get and all they really covered was the confusion surrounding the name of the tribe known in this blog as the Stockbridge Mohicans.

In The Mohicans and the Stockbridge Mohicans I argued that a historical change in the makeup of the "Mohican" people makes it confusing to use the same name across all historical periods. Then in The Mohicans and the Mahicans I argued that there really isn't an accepted distinction between those two different forms of the word "Mohican." Recently I've given the Mohican/Mahican issue further thought, and decided that those two different spellings which are the same except for a single vowel, should not, in my opinion, represent different meanings because the difference in pronounciation is so small. It seems to me that the difference in pronounciation between "Mohican" and "Mahican" is smaller than the variations in pronouncing practically any single word by two people with different regional accents. So not only is the Mohican/Mahican distinction not well known or observed, but, in my opinion, it wouldn't end the confusion even if it was known and observed by many people.

Like I've said before, a group of people can call themselves whatever they want. Nevertheless, after taking the time to point out problems with the status quo, I figure I might as well offer what I think is the best solution. Let the tribe and everybody else ignore this post if they want, but I might as well put it out there.



If it comes down to one word, most of the tribe likes to call themselves "Mohicans." One exception was a man who posted a comment to the Mohican Seven forum saying he prefers "Stockbridge" because it is more historically accurate. I use "Stockbridge Mohicans" as the name of the tribe because the people identify with the word "Mohican" and the word "Stockbridge" makes it clear which Mohicans they are.

So there you have it, the tribe from about 1740 to the present should - in my opinion - be called the Stockbridge Mohicans.



A reader of my Mohican/Mahican post said he thought the original Algonkian languages can tell us a lot about what name or names a tribe should take for itself. If he was onto something, then we might want to call the pre-Stockbridge Mohicans the "Muhheconnew" people and call their land or their old nation the "Muhhecunnuck." There are other possible names to use for the pre-Stockbridge Mohicans, one would be the "Aboriginal Mohicans."

Anyway, I'm content to think that I've said enough about this topic.

The Mohicans and the Mahicans

The beautiful scene below was "borrowed" from the official website of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community (they are usually referred to here as the Stockbridge Mohicans).

In July, my post "The Mohicans and the Stockbridge Mohicans" was intended to raise the issue of how current and historical tribal names have brought about a lot of confusion. Or, to be more precise, names by themselves don't necessarily generate confusion, but a tribe that is made up of remnants of various tribes may want to be careful in what they choose to be called.

Comments that were posted to that post have raised a possible solution. In particular, a tribal elder - she uses "Maaliish" as her screen name - used the words "Mohican" and Mahican" in different ways - without explaining the difference. Well, I think the difference for that tribal elder is based on something that James Oberly (2005, page 5) wrote:

Anthropologists say that the term "Mohican" characterized the seventeenth century union of three groups of Indian villages in what is now the Hudson River Valley of New York State: the "Mahicans," the Wappingers, and the Housatonics.

From that passage it may seem that the term "Mahicans" is now only used for the original 'full-bloods' as it were, while the word "Mohicans" is only used to describe the modern tribe that includes the descendants of "Wappingers" and "Housatonics."

But I don't take Oberly literally there. I mean, do you really think that "anthropologists" went to the trouble of defining a distinction between "Mahican" and "Mohican"? Even if anthropologists came to an agreement on the proper use of those words, do you believe that a critical mass of ordinary people (like you and I and members of the tribe) have changed their speech to properly reflect the pronounciations and meanings that were coined by those anthropologists?



I give James Oberly a lot of credit for addressing the issue that I raised in "The Mohicans and the Stockbridge Mohicans" and I don't blame him for making it seem like it was already addressed by anthropologists. He needed to address it but didn't have the time to bother writing whole paragraphs on it like I did.

Furthermore, I give Maaliish a lot of credit for using Oberly's distinction. But that is exactly my point: Except for a few people who remember what Oberly wrote on page five, I'm afraid to say the distinction doesn't exist.

I have promoted James Oberly's book here in the past and I really don't see what I'm saying now as negative. In my experience, something that is mentioned once in a book seldom changes our language.

But if the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians really wants to stop the confusion, it can be done. It can be done (partly) by addressing the issue in the tribe's newspaper. It can be done (partly) by addressing it at the tribe's museum. And it can done (partly) by addressing the name issue legally the next time a new tribal constitution is written. Since I haven't been keeping tabs on the tribe lately, maybe this kind of thing is already being done. If so, I'd like to hear about it.

And maybe I'm just a raving lunatic. I mean, I like things to be clear. A lot of other people - on this issue and other issues - don't seem to mind if the waters are muddied. What do you think?

The Mohicans and the Stockbridge Mohicans

The word "Mohican" in the names of this park and other places in Ohio, reflects the fact that Mohicans were leaving their homeland and moving into the Ohio River Valley as early as the late 1600's.



By 1740 most Mohicans had disappeared from the Hudson River Valley. In fact, many of them had been living in the Ohio River Valley for generations. Over time, these "western" Mohicans intermarried with tribes like the Miami, the Delaware, or possibly with frontier whites. Ultimately, they did not maintain their Mohican identity.


Meanwhile, back in their homeland, the once-mighty Mohican nation was struggling to survive as a result of the changes brought about by over one hundred years of white contact. The fur trade brought about a dependence on white goods, problems with alcohol, an increased competition with other Native nations for resources, bloodier warfare, and, of course, devastating European-imported diseases like smallpox.


So by the 1740's, changes in both the natural environment and the surviving population resulted in the once-mighty Mohican nation being spread out in small, scattered communities.


The history of the Stockbridge Mohicans began when two Mohican villages along the Housatonic River in what is now Massachusetts, decided to accept a Christian mission. The residents of those two villages got more than they bargained for: instead of just teaching a new religion and teaching the children to read, the Indians' British neighbors imposed the structure of white culture upon them. Most notably, the two villages were soon gathered into one town which the British called Stockbridge.


The popularity of Stockbridge, Massachusetts - for both religious and non-religious reasons - made it the Council Fire - in other words, the capital city - of what was left of the Mohican Nation. However, it bears noting that many of the Indians that joined the Stockbridge community were Wappingers or other non-Mohican Indians.

Or were they?

The way some people now use the term "Mohican," anybody who is descended from the Stockbridge Indians is a Mohican, so it doesn't then matter if your ancestors were Naragansetts or some mix of Algonkian-speaking refugees: As long as you are descended from the Indians of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, New Stockbridge, New York, and/or Stockbridge, Wisconsin, you can call yourself a "Mohican."

And why not?

My point is not to prevent a group of people from calling themselves whatever they want, but rather to end the confusion and the talking past one another that often results from cases like this where one word means two different things.


Or do I have it completely wrong?


You tell me.







Sources:


Dunn, Shirley. (2000) The Mohican World, 1680-1750


Frazier, Patrick. (1992) The Mohicans of Stockbridge


Sultzman, Lee. Mahican History
.
.
.

New York Land Claim Finally Settled

The State of New York finally came to an agreement with the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians. The dispute was over 23,000 acres that the tribe had left behind in the 1820's when they migrated to what is now Wisconsin.

Having succeeded in running a casino on their Shawano County, Wisconsin reservation, the Stockbridge-Munsee are now making plans to build another casino in New York State. For a full account of the historic settlement please see the article on page 1, of Mohican News, "A Ray of Hope."

See Also the Tribal history on page 10

1900 Census: Menominee and Shawano Counties (Wisconsin)

The German Lutheran Church, Rev. Nickel's (inset) congregation before his ministry to the Stockbridge Indians. This photo and others can be found on the Shawano County Genealogy website.

A local group of genealogists created Shawano County Genealogy a while back. Last month they added a "1900 Menominee/Stockbridge Census" page.

Jean Barkow and Cathe Ziereis transcribed a listing of people - Indian and non-Indian - who lived in Indian Country in Shawano and Menominee Counties who were counted in the 1900 federal census. I'm calling your attention to the list, partly because you may want to use it, but also because of how Cathe introduces the list:

I personally feel like we killed these names in transcribing them as they were written.

On the plus side, you may be able to provide Cathe with the correct spellings.

Also available on the site are lists of Stockbridge Indians buried at The Old Stockbridge Cemetery and the Red Springs Cemetery. This article is at the bottom of the Red Springs Cemetery page:

Bill Miller and Janice-Marie Johnson: The Stockbridge Mohicans' Grammy Winners

My thanks to Wenona Gardner for posting a Shawano Leader article to her Mohican 7 e-mail list. The article, Bill Miller Wins Third Grammy is a good read.














A lot of Bill's music has been posted on YouTube.
Since this blog is about church history, I decided to embed a song of his called "I Believe."





Possibly even more famous than Bill Miller is Janice-Marie Johnson, a member of "A Taste of Honey" the group that won their Grammy for Best New Artist in 1979. Their number 1 song was called "Boogie Oogie Oogie." You could actually sing those kinds of words in the 1970's and become rich and famous doing it. Or, maybe not just anybody could, but Janice-Marie did.

A Taste of Honey's big hit "Boogie Oogie Oogie" can be viewed on YouTube.



Read the Wikipedia article about A Taste of Honey.





No doubt about it, Janice-Marie can still rock.

Death of the Tribal Church: Keeping the Faith

Conclusion of the Death of the Tribal Church Series
A series of posts about the church history of the Stockbridge Mohicans

I. Introduction
II. Summary of Tribal Church History, 1734 - 1844
III. A "Riot" with "no Fighting"
IV. Was Jeremiah Slingerland "a Man of too much Consequence"?
V. Was Jeremiah Slingerland a Big Spender?
VI. The ABCFM Pulls out of Stockbridge
VII. The Citizen Party Makes a Request
VII. Jeremiah Slingerland Keeps on Preaching

Today's post: Keeping the Faith




This 1878 map shows the Stockbridge Reservation shrunk to 1/4 its original size. Contrary to what some say, the shrinking of this reservation cannot entirely be blamed on the Congressman/Lumber Barron Philetus Sawyer. The Indian party leaders who made closed-room deals with Sawyer (Jeremiah Slingerland as much as anybody) are also responsible.


Reverend Slingerland's death appears to have devastated his Presbyterian congregation. The three Presbyterian ministers sent to serve the tribe between 1884 and 1907 stayed for an average of only about a year. But even before Slingerland's death, the era of a unified tribal church for the Stockbridge Mohicans had already passed. Led by Stephen Gardner, some of Slingerland's political opponents (citizen party families) already had a preference for Roman Catholicism. While their neighbors, the Menominees had a long association with the Catholics, many of the Stockbridges would insist on remaining Protestant. Among them were leaders like William C. Davids and Ed Sprague who sought out Lutheran ministers in the area in 1892, giving rise not only to Immanuel Mohican Lutheran Church, but also to a Lutheran boarding school. Nevertheless, for better or for worse, there was no going back to having one church for all of the Stockbridge Mohicans.

One hundred and twenty-five years after Jeremiah Slingerland's death, there is still a Presbyterian church on the reservation. While Presbyterianism has survived, Christianity as a whole has done better. Now over one hundred and sixty years after the ABCFM withdrew its support of the Stockbridge Mohicans' mission, my estimate is that church attendance on the reservation is comparable to national averages.


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This is the last of a series of seven posts.

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Some serious issues have been covered in this series of posts.
One is the issue of white mission societies being unwilling to promote or encourage independence from Indian churches.

I made it a point to stick to the facts:
But in this case much of what we know is "He said, she said" material. Many of the facts we have are rather subjective statements, the perceptions of Cutting Marsh and Jeremiah Slingerland. I don't think either was dishonest. What Marsh saw as a "riot," Slingerland saw as an event where "excitement prevailed" but there was "no fighting, save one."

Race, religion, culture, politics, personal ownership and thrift... these are just some of the controversial issues that this series of posts has touched on. Your comments are appreciated.

The Stockbridge Bible is Returned and Comes Home

My series of posts on the Stockbridge Bible is coming to an end.

Before we come to the final chapter, here's a brief summary of the series so far:

Introduction to the Stockbridge Bible

From Generation to Generation: Fundraising for the Massachusetts mission by a retired British sea captain, results in the gift of a two-volume Bible from the Prince of Wales' personal chaplain.

A Summary of 50 Years at the Massachusetts Mission Town

The Stockbridge Bible and the Lost Tribes Theory

Calvin Colton Reports on the Stockbridge Bible: Colton, a former minister from the east, visits the Stockbridge Mohicans in 1830 and reports on their acceptance of Christianity and white "civilization," and their "reverence" for their sacred Bible.

Jamison Quinney and the Stockbridge Bible: More than any other Indian, Jamison "Sote" Quinney is associated with the Stockbridge Bible. Read this post to find out why.

The Stockbridge Bible and the John Sergeant Memorial Presbyterian Church

The JSM Church, Fred Westfall, and My Research: This post offers a rare inside look at my research.

The Westfall - Choate Correspondence: Who is Mabel Choate and what do the letters between her and Rev. Westfall tell us about the Stockbridge Bible?

Photographic Evidence in the Story of the Stockbridge Bible: When was the Stockbridge Bible kept in the Sergeant Memorial Church?


Collectors and the Stockbridge Bible


Making an Offer for the Stockbridge Bible: How did the two volumes get from Wisconsin to Massachusetts?


How the Stockbridge Bible Made News in the 1920's: What do area whites say about Sote Quinney and the Stockbridge Bible?


The Stockbridge Bible is Sent Back to Massachusetts: This is a controversial topic, so I wanted certain things to be made clear.


Samuel Miller: Chief Uhm-Pa-Tuth: A Lutheran Indian visits Stockbridge, Massachusetts and sees the Stockbridge Bible, within months of the time it left Shawano County, Wisconsin.


Gone but not Forgotten: The Stockbridge Bible, 1931-1975



Miller to the Trustees: You Have Our Bible



The Stockbridge Bible: The Fight is On



Kim Vele's Priorities as Tribal Attorney in the 1980's



Fight for the Stockbridge Bible: The Long Standoff: This post features a powerful letter from an anthropologist, explaining why the Bible should be returned to the Indians.



What Will it Take to get the Stockbridge Bible Back?



....And now we finally come to the point where The Trustees of Reservations take the necessary steps to return the Bible. Here is how I told it in the spring, 2007 issue of The Book Collector:

On December 19th, 1990, a judge in Massachusetts signed a document authorizing the Trustees of Reservations to return the Stockbridge Bible to the tribe. The judgement quoted Captain Thomas Coram's inscription: 'to the use of the Congregation of Indians... and is to remain to the use of the Successors of those Indians from Generation to Generation.'

Finally, in March of 1991, on a bright, chilly day, in a quiet but moving ceremony, the Stockbridge Bible was taken out of the museum established by Mabel Choate and handed over to ten tribal delegates.

[After they had been driving for a couple days and were almost home, the delegates] informed other Stockbridges of their arrival and were told to stop at a parking lot at the edge of Shawano. When the delegates arrived at the parking lot they found over fifty people waiting for them, including members of a confirmation class that had made huge, colorful banners to celebrate the return of the Stockbridge Bible. The impromptu celebration also included handshakes, hugs, hymns, and a big circle prayer. There was now a large convoy that headed to the reservation, passing what had been the John Sergeant Memorial Presbyterian Church and finally stopping at the Arvid E. Miller Memorial Library-Museum where the Stockbridge Bible is still kept today.

Kim Vele's Priorities as Tribal Attorney in the 1980s

The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians' Tribal Council, 2009:
Front row L to R: Greg Miller, Robert Chicks, Terrie Terrio
Back Row L to R: Doug Huck, Kimberly Vele, Jolene Bowman, Joe Miller



When Konkapot descendant, Kimberly Vele graduated from law school in 1984 it was almost unheard of for recent graduates to return to the reservation, but she and a few others set out to reverse that trend. "Indian Law was for hippies" back then, Vele told me. As tribal attorney in the mid 1980's she tried to make the return of the Stockbridge Bible a priority. In researching the case, Vele found The Trustees of Reservations to be aloof. "I wanted questions to specific answers and it seemed they hoped we would just go away" she recollected.

Ultimately Kim Vele was forced to put the return of the Stockbridge Bible on the back burner in order to deal with other issues. The Wolf River Batholith, a landform that encompasses the Stockbridge reservation, was one of twelve possible sites chosen by the National Nuclear Waste Repository Program when Vele was the tribal attorney. Batholiths were considered to be the safest landforms in regard to nuclear waste, and since many Indian reservations are located on batholiths, seven of the twelve sites that the federal government was looking at were located in Indian Country.

Until she left the tribal attorney job in 1987, Kim Vele focused her efforts on preventing the Wolf River Batholith from being selected as a nuclear waste repository site. One day she testified in Washington, D.C. before the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Power, explaining that if the Wolf River Batholith was chosen as a nuclear waste site, it would make the Stockbridge Mohicans' reservation useless, except possibly for grazing. While watching the news on television that night in her hotel room, Vele learned that "Chernobyl had blown up." A few weeks later, the tribe received a letter announcing there would be no more grant funds to study environmental impacts due to the fact that the entire Nuclear Waste Repository Program was being suspended indefinitely.

Kim Vele's efforts to bring the Stockbridge Bible back to the reservation in Shawano County, Wisconsin resulted only in a terse 1986 letter from The Trustees of Reservations, saying that their position hadn't changed.


Sources: Telephone interviews with Kim Vele (6/2004 and 4/14/2006), and a photocopy of a letter from the Trustees of Reservations to Kim Vele.

Miller to the Trustees: You Have Our Bible

This photo of the first volume of the Stockbridge Bible was taken by Jeff Siemers with permission of the staff of the Arvid E. Miller Memorial Library-Museum in the fall of 2003.
After Mabel Choate died, the Mission House Museum and its contents became the legal responsibility of The Trustees of Reservations. As you'll remember from my previous post, some of the tribe's young people, after seeing the Stockbridge Bible, decided that the tribe should try to get it back. Tribal Council Chairman Leonard Miller took that idea seriously and on August 27, 1975, wrote a letter to The Trustees of Reservations. Miller wrote:

The Stockbridge-Munsee Tribe has knowledge of your possession of our Tribal Bibles presented to us by the Prince of Wales to be forever in our possession.

Miller also asserted that the two volumes had been obtained in an "illegal" transaction and asked that the request for them be considered "at the earliest convenience."

By the time that letter was written, however, the request to get the Stockbridge Bible returned to the tribe had already been made informally. In fact, the issue had already been discussed by the Trustees of Reservations in Massachusetts. The local newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, printed an article about it on the day before Miller wrote his letter. The paper quoted Andrew Mack, the chairman of the Local Committee of the Trustees:

It is appropriate to have the Bible in the Mission House where Mr. Sergeant received the Indians.... As far as we know, over the years, as long as we've had the Bible, the Indians were satisfied.

Maybe he didn't realize that John Sergeant's wife Abigail had the Mission House designed so that the Indians could be required to use the back door when they wanted to visit with their missionary. In light of that fact, and in light of how the important the Bible had been to the tribe for so many years, I think Mr. Mack's comments were both ignorant and insensitive.

Gone But Not Forgotten: The Stockbridge Bible 1931-1975

In recent years, the Stockbridge Mohicans have made a historical trip out east almost annually. During one of the tribe's earliest organized trips back to Stockbridge, Massachusetts (I believe it was in 1975), tribal members were invited to a party at the home of Norman Rockwell and his third wife, Molly. At that time the artist happened to be working on a painting of Rev. John Sergeant and Captain John Konkapot. Rockwell died in 1978 and the painting you see below was never finished.



Not many of the Stockbridge Mohicans knew what happened to their tribal Bible. When one small congregation - made up mostly of Indians, but also some whites - decided to sell the two volumes to a museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, they didn't bother to ask the rest of the tribe permission. Why should they? As they saw it, the Stockbridge Bible was the property of their church.

Since the Presbyterians felt no shame in selling what they believed was their own property, they had no reason to keep the sale a secret. Nevertheless, it seems that only a few non-Presbyterian Indians (such as Samuel Miller) knew that the Bible was back in Massachusetts. There was some protesting, or at least complaining, of what had happened, but by that time the relics were already gone.

The first well-known historical trip to Massachusetts by a family of Stockbridge Indians was in 1951. That year James Davids (an uncle of Clarence Chicks) brought his family east to see the sights of the town that their ancestors came from. Thelma Davids Putnam (a sister of James Davids) recorded that event (pages 57-58):

To their great surprise, they found the great two volume Bible was in the old Mission House in that town. In the vague rumors we heard they maybe were at the Smithsonian Institute. The Davids' were delighted to see the Bibles...

Since that time others have traveled to Massachusetts and have had the wonderful experience of seeing the land of our forefathers and have viewed our Bibles...

At that point (page 58) Thelma Davids Putnam tells of groups that went to see the Stockbridge Bible in 1968 and 1972. The next trip was made in 1975 with the following people loaded into four cars: The adults: Dorothy Davids, Ruth Gaudinas, Bernice Miller Pidgeon, Margaret Rausch, Sheila Moede, and Linda Kroening. The youth: Kay Miller, Fran Miller, Jackie Miller, Mark Davids, Renee Granquist, Vickie Bowman, Carmen Cornelius, Nikki Moede, and Leslie Kroening.

It was the young people of the 1975 trip who were the first to suggest that the tribe should try to bring the Stockbridge Bible back to the reservation in Shawano County, Wisconsin.


Acknowledgements:
*Thanks to Dorothy Davids for an e-mail in 2003 in which she responded to my question about the unfinished Norman Rockwell painting.
*Thanks to JoAnn Schedler, Interim Director of the Arvid E. Miller Memorial Museum in the fall of 2003 for letting me have a copy of the unfinished painting.

Samuel Miller: Chief Uhm-Pa-Tuth

A few years ago I was doing some research in the Arvid E. Miller Memorial Library-Museum (the Stockbridge Mohicans' museum), and John Miller, the tribe's Director of Human Resources came in and passed around an article (from the May 19, 2004 issue of The Country Today) about a deceased relative of his, Samuel Miller. Actually, the article is really about a white person's childhood memory of seeing Miller's alter ego, "Chief Uhm-Pa-Tuth," during one of his speaking tours.

Samuel Miller's speaking tours or lecture circuits were designed to accomplish two goals: 1) to raise money for Lutheran missions to Indians and 2) to dispel some stereotypes that white people had about Indians. Wearing a Sioux headress, however, may have fed into some of the stereotyping that he was crusading against.

Like most performers, Uhm-Pa-Tuth mostly spoke to rather small crowds. However, when a nationwide Lutheran body celebrated the 400th Anniversary of the Augsburg Confession, the Chief appeared in front of a packed house of 3000 people at the Strand Theater in Albany, New York. (Incidentally, his speech that night was also put on the airwaves by a local radio station.)

During that stay in Albany, Samuel Miller decided that he wanted to visit Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Berkshire County Eagle (see photocopy above) had quite a lot to say about Miller's visit, including that he took "great interest" in the Stockbridge Bible and the communion set which had been acquired by Mabel Choate only a few months earlier. In fact, Miller apparently told a reporter that he had corresponded with a "Rev. C. Williams Fisher," (maybe he actually said "Thomas Knox Fisher," a Presbyterian minister to the Stockbridge Mohicans from 1889 to 1891).

Unfortunately for us, exactly what Samuel Miller may have felt or thought about the Stockbridge Bible - and the fact that it was now in white hands - was not something that was covered by the Berkshire County Eagle.