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CHAPTER 1
Lilian Margaret St. Cyr of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska
Lilian Margaret St. Cyr was born a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. The Winnebago call themselves the "Ho-Chunk" and are a Siouan people, like the Otoe, Iowa, and Missouri, who speak a language derivative of theirs. The name translates as "big voice" (ho, "voice," and chunk, "big") and is also interpreted as "people of the parent speech." Many ethnologists believe Ho-Chunk ancestors made the second of four Siouan migrations from the southeastern United States to the western shore of Lake Michigan. Ho-Chunk oral tradition maintains that the people originated at Red Banks, located at the shore of Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they first encountered the French in 1634.
The Ho-Chunk population suffered extreme decimation in the early eighteenth century during the French and Fox Wars. As a result, the people intermarried extensively with their primarily Algonquin neighbors, like the Menominee, who called them "Winnebago," a term that refers to the stagnant water at Red Banks. The Ho-Chunk also married Pottawatomie, Ojibwe, and Ottawa from the north, Sac and Fox from the south, and Dakota from the west, as well as French Canadian fur traders, who had arrived in Wisconsin by the early eighteenth century.
According to tribal records, Lilian was "three quarters Winnebago," which typically means that one of her grandparents was white. However, blood quantum is often an arbitrary assignment that fails to reflect the rich complexity of Native American ancestry. The essentialist notion of a "full-blood" tribal member is a nineteenth-century creation that grants authenticity through "blood" while undermining and obfuscating how Natives themselves reckoned family, clan, and tribal membership. Lilian was often described as "a full-blood" throughout her film career, lending her authenticity in relation to the many white actresses who played Indian maids. Obviously, blood cannot be measured, so "blood quantum" is an imaginary distinction to describe not only one's relative "Indianness" but also one's essential difference from whites. The begging question becomes, what exactly does "full-blood" call up in the American imagination that makes it to this day a problematic descriptor for Native people? The answer is a stereotype or trope. Whether it is applied to a stoic cigar-store Indian or an ethereal Indian princess sitting by a stream pining for her lover (while illustrating an advertisement for butter, fruit, or beer), the image comes from the collective national fantasy about Indians. Lilian manipulated and made her own the mythic Indian princess stereotype in the early years of her career in order to be viewed by the public as a "real Indian." However, her family of origin is anything but stereotypical.
Lilian, also called Lily, Lillia, and Ochsegahonegah (Fifth Daughter), was born to Julia Decora and Mitchell St. Cyr on February 13, 1884. She was their last child, one of five girls and three boys. (See appendix A for Lilian's family.) Except for the eldest sibling, all the St. Cyr children were born on the Winnebago reservation, which is located at the northeastern corner of Nebraska in Thurston County. Both the St. Cyr and the Decora families belonged to the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and served as political and cultural intermediaries. Both families had French Canadian ancestors from whom their surnames derived. The Decora family line includes respected civil chiefs and peacemakers who sacrificed for their people in times of need. These leaders favored egalitarianism and strove to accommodate cultural difference while adhering to Ho-Chunk traditions. The diplomatic St. Cyrs were more patriarchal and family oriented, more French perhaps, yet still expressed an abiding loyalty to their Ho-Chunk people.
For forty years the Ho-Chunk Nation suffered unrelenting upheaval. This diaspora, known euphemistically as the "Indian removal period," involved more than one "trail of tears" for the Ho-Chunk. Today the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and the Wisconsin HoChunk Nation exemplify the fissure created by this long-drawn-out uprootedness of one people who became two. From the 1830s through the 1870s, U.S. government policies supported encroachers, land speculators, agrarian settlers, and lead miners who forced the Ho-Chunk ever to the west. Lilian's family miraculously survived this traumatic period, which took them from Wisconsin to Iowa to Minnesota to South Dakota and finally to Nebraska.
Little is known about Lilian's mother, Julia Decora St. Cyr. She was born about 1846 near Fort Atkinson, Iowa, which was built allegedly "to protect the Winnebago." The eldest daughter of Younkaw (Queen Woman) and Baptiste "Tall" Decora, Julia's Indian name was Naw jin pin win kaw (Pretty Hair Woman). Julia's father was the son of Ho-Chunk civil chief Conokaw Decorah, whose father was Chougeka (Wooden Spoon). Chougeka's parents were Wahopoeka (called by whites Glory of the Morning) and Joseph Sabrevois Decarrie, a French Canadian fur trader. "Decora" and its many spellings derive from this ancestor's name.
The Ho-Chunk people recognize Wahopoeka's marriage as the first non-Native union. It occurred shortly after 1729, when Decarrie left Canada to enter the fur trade in the Pays d'en Haut, or "Upper Country," as the Great Lakes area was known. The marriage was an important alliance, likely arranged by Wahopoeka's brothers according to the Ho-Chunk custom. Decarrie brought useful European technologies and trade items to the Ho-Chunk, and they in turn provided him with pelts, comfort, and a wife.
Wahopoeka and Decarrie had two sons and a daughter: Chougeka (Wooden Spoon), the oldest; White Breast, the second son; and Oak Woman, their only daughter. Oral tradition recalls that Decarrie took Chougeka and Oak Woman back to Canada. Eventually, Oak Woman married a fur trader, but Chougeka became terribly homesick even though his father's family treated him very well. Decarrie felt pity on his son and allowed him to return to Wisconsin and his mother's family. Chougeka's Ho-Chunk uncles immediately taught him to fast so that he could be spiritually ready to lead his people.
Wahopoeka lived out her days on a small island on Lake Winnebago. One explorer who encountered her in the late eighteenth century believed she was a queen. He particularly noticed her dignified demeanor and the respect her people afforded her. Was she a chief? It's unknown. But Wahopoeka served as a powerful role model for all of her female descendants, including Lilian. Her stature and the social status of her brothers, who were chiefs or sons of a chief, afforded her own sons membership into the Thunderbird clan, although clanship was customarily passed from father to child. The Ho-Chunk's sanction of these first métis (mixed) children initiated the acceptance and recognition of many others to come.
Lilian's great-great-grandfather Chougeka wed the daughter of Chief Carrimonie (Walking Turtle). Chougeka and his wife (or wives, since the Ho-Chunk practiced plural marriage) had six or seven sons and five daughters, including two who, like their aunt Oak Woman, married French Canadian or métis men involved in the fur trade. Chougeka's multicultural background proved a valuable asset when the Great Lakes fur trade thrived. During his lifetime he allied with the French and the British and negotiated with the Americans. All three of these colonial powers desired Ho-Chunk resources, first their furs and daughters and then their land.
Following the War of 1812, Americans flooded into the Ho-Chunk's Wisconsin and northern Illinois territory. "Choukeka, or Dekare, the Spoon," signed an "X" next to his name on the first "peace-making treaty" with the U.S. government in June 1816. Chougeka died shortly after he signed the treaty, so Conokaw (First Son) resumed his father's role. Conokaw had several names over the course of his life. "My father's name, among the French, was Zhuminaka, which I am told is from a French word having to do with wine," stated Conokaw's son Spoon. "His Winnebago name was Warrahwikoogah, or Bird Spirit. The Americans called him Grey-headed Decorah." Conokaw's "X" mark appears on the second, fifth, and sixth Winnebago treaties with the United States under his other Ho-Chunk name, White War Eagle.
Americans knew Conokaw Decorah "as a man of temperance." Conokaw spoke at least Ho-Chunk, French, English, and Chippewa, the lingua franca of the fur trade. He presented the exceptional qualities of a Ho-Chunk civil chief, having a "well-balanced temper, not easily provoked, and ... good habits." After signing the treaty of 1829, which ceded 2.5 million acres, including the Ho-Chunk's ancestral lead mines in Illinois, the elderly chief headed a large village on the Wisconsin River near Portage, Wisconsin. The U.S. military made its presence known there by constructing Fort Winnebago at the eastern edge of the one-mile fur trade "portage" in 1828. Shortly after, the government hired local métis men to construct a house near the fort for the new Winnebago agent to administer treaty stipulations. The agent and his wife came to respect Conokaw for his nobility, courage, and modest demeanor. Still, when U.S. officials leaned on him to negotiate in times of conflict, he protested that he did not have the authority they vested in him because he was "half white and half red."
In 1832 the Ho-Chunk's neighbor, Sac and Fox chief Black Hawk, banded together with several tribesmen and some disaffected Kickapoo to protest and resist land cessions from a previous treaty. The ensuing Black Hawk War cinched the fate of the Ho-Chunk. Conokaw counseled his warriors to stay neutral during the conflict, but many felt sympathy for Black Hawk's cause, and some, like the prominent Winneshiek family, who had Sac and Fox relatives, allied with their kinsmen. The United States defeated Black Hawk and removed his tribe to Iowa. However, the Winneshiek alliance bolstered the government's position to enact President Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830, which proposed to remove all Indians to west of the Mississippi.
The Ho-Chunk faced starvation in the winter of 1833 because of delayed annuities. When the agent's wife offered Conokaw enough food for his family, he refused it. If all his people "could not be relieved," he declared, his family would starve with them. Meanwhile, smallpox and starvation ravaged Ho-Chunk communities, particularly around Portage and Prairie du Chien. Whether from disease, starvation, or old age, Conokaw became seriously ill. His métis brother-in-law baptized him informally (endoyer) into the Catholic faith as he lay dying. The chief's conversion was not surprising. One of his sons later recalled that Conokaw retained warm memories of the "Black Robes" who visited his village during his childhood. When Conokaw died in 1836, all hopes for his people to retain their homeland died with him. His passing marked not only the waning of the Ho-Chunk and their métis kin's prominent role in the fur trade but also the end of the friendship between "white and red." Conokaw left his eldest son to lead in his stead, but he died within six months of his father. Next in line was Tall Decora's older brother, the more pacific Little Decora.
Little Decora's Thunderbird clan name was Mauhecooshanakzhe (One That Stands and Reaches the Skies), but he was nicknamed White French. A terrible calamity challenged this gentle leader. A fraudulent treaty coerced by government officials and signed in Washington DC in 1837 by those without authority ordered the Ho-Chunk's complete removal from their homelands. Little Decora pleaded for the relief of his people when military forces arrived in 1840 to force stragglers across the Mississippi River to Fort Atkinson, Iowa. Having been recently baptized Catholic like his father, he hoped an appeal to Christian brotherhood might soften the heart of a government official: "Father, you know our family was a large one. Since we left the Portage my mother and two brothers have died, and now I am left alone with a little brother and sister, both of whom are sick. This is not only my situation, but that of all the other chiefs. These few chiefs are all that were able to come to see you. All the rest are sick. Father, though I call myself a Winnebago, I live under the love of the Great Father above."
Little Decora's entreaty changed nothing. Hundreds of Ho-Chunk perished from harsh conditions, disease, and dysentery during this first removal to Iowa. Unfortunately, it would not be the last — many, many more deaths would follow. The 1837 treaty forced the Ho-Chunk to remove to the so-called Neutral Territory in northern Iowa, where they essentially served as a buffer between warring tribes.
Lilian's seemingly effortless "accommodation" to European American culture rested not only on her descent from the Decora "half red and white" family but also on the influence of their métis in-laws. Lilian's father, Michel St. Cyr Jr., more commonly known as Mitchell, also came to play a leadership role in the tribe. The St. Cyrs typified fur trade families inhabiting the old Northwest in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like Lilian's mother's surname, St. Cyr appears on several Winnebago treaties, but not as a signatory. Lilian's grandfather Michel St. Cyr Sr. was one among several Ho-Chunk métis to receive a section of land "hereinbefore ceded" as "a descendant of said [Winnebago] Indians" as put forth by the treaty of 1829. The 1837 treaty also assigned $1,000 to his father, Hyacinth St. Cyr, "for supplies and services to the nation."
Michel St. Cyr Sr. served as a government interpreter and go-between. He spoke Ho-Chunk, French, English, and probably Sac. Some believed he was "a white man" because he favored his father. His multiethnic makeup lost its function and context by the mid-nineteenth century. The nation's fascination with fractions of race like "Negro quadroon" or "octaroon" bled over to those with Native American parents. Protoethnographer Henry Schoolcraft, who himself had an Ojibwa wife, demonstrated this fetish with racial mixing in his "description and comparison of the hair of the North American Indians":
Michel St. Cyr, a di-mestisin — Winnebago and French — has curled hair and by his wife, a pure Winnebago, with straight black hair, has four children, one, fourteen years of age, has chestnut hair, brown complexion, and black eyes; another, aged twelve, has dark chestnut hair[,] brown complexion, and dark [eyes]; the third, a brunette, has blackish brown hair and black eyes; the fourth has blackish brown hair, brown complexion, and black eyes; while a sister of St. Cyr, married to a Pole, has one child that has blonde hair, and light eyes; and another who has light brown hair, copper complexion, and black eyes.
While Schoolcraft found Michel's attributes a veritable variation of the species, Michel's community of origin perceived his looks as common. He was born about 1811 and baptized near the juncture of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers at St. Gabriel's Catholic Church in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Prairie du Chien served as a well-traveled crossroads for the fur trade, and it was where various tribal groups and European ethnic groups intersected and married. Michel's father, Hyacinth St. Cyr, was one of Prairie du Chien's early traders. Hyacinth, a New France descendant, was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Michel's mother was called Josette. Henokaw (or Hinuga) was her birth-order name, because she was the first daughter of The Spaniard, an alleged Winnebago chief. Michel married Angelique Nausaresca in the Indian custom before 1837. St. Gabriel's Church records identify her as Sac not Ho-Chunk, unbeknownst to Schoolcraft. However, one of her parents may have been Ho-Chunk, since she spoke the language fluently. Before her marriage to Michel, Angelique had a son in 1836. Church records identify his father as "Jos. Causic." Michel adopted the boy who would become Lilian's father and had him baptized in 1839 at St. Gabriel's as "Michel St. Cyr, Jr." Three days later, eighteen-month-old "Michel," son of Michel and Angelique, was also baptized at St. Gabriel's. As was the French custom, the name "Michel" was attached to each of the son's names, but as the eldest son, Lilian's father was always known by the name of his adoptive father, which was pronounced "Mitchell" by the Ho-Chunk, as his name is often spelled. The family called the eighteen-month-old Michel "Augustus," even though he was Michel's first biological son.
Michel and his growing family resided at his trading post on Lake Mendota, one of the "Four Lakes" near present-day Madison, Wisconsin. They raised "corn, oats, potatoes, and vegetables." The isolated twelve-by-twelve-foot log cabin that Michel purchased from another Indian trader offered a dirt floor and few comforts. Even so, it sometimes served as an inn for weary travelers. Portage fur trade clerk John DeLaronde recalled fondly a visit he made to St. Cyr's post around July 4, 1837, to "trade some red deerskins." DeLaronde, married to a Decora daughter, brought along some of his in-laws. The St. Cyrs, DeLaronde's group, and several French Canadian and métis men "engaged in hunting and fishing" nearby and feasted together on venison and fish, made more festive with St. Cyr's stock of "flour, pork, tea, coffee, sugar and whisky." One of Conokaw Decora's grandsons played the fiddle. Wisconsin history declares this group the "first white men" to celebrate Independence Day in Madison, indicating the fluidity of racial identity.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Starring Red Wing!"
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Copyright © 2019 Linda M. Waggoner.
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