Walking on to the Spirit World: Clarence Chicks

I met Clarence Chicks over ten years ago, I think he was 86 then. It was unrealistic, I suppose, but, for years, I secretly hoped that I would hear about Clarence's death in time to attend his funeral. His obituary is in the latest issue of Mohican News, which I received this morning.



In addition to the usual recitation of things like a person's jobs and loved ones, Clarence's
obituary said something about his character.

Clarence Alfred Chicks, age 96, of Gresham, passed away peacefully on Saturday, June 14th, 2014 at his home surrounded by his loving family. Clarence was the oldest living member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians and one of only two surviving tribal members who served in WWII. He was a man of faith in God, a son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, friend, neighbor, and patriot who touched the lives of countless people across multiple generations and never harbored a bad thought nor spoke an ill word about anyone he ever met.

There aren't many people like that.

Goodbye my friend!

 

 

See these prior posts about Clarence Chicks:

A Clarence Chicks Portrait

Clarence Chicks at 91

 

Non-Indian Residents of Stockbridge, MA: Erik Erikson

When he was growing up in Germany, Erik Erikson was Erik Homberger. He was brought up to think that his stepfather, Theodor Homberger, was his biological father. Young Erik must have been confused at some point: since both of his parents were Jewish, how did he get a head of Scandinavian blond, hair?

When he was a young man, Erik Homberger changed his name to Erik Erikson. Symbolically, he was claiming to be his own father. Erikson was a psychoanalyst and author. He coined the term identity crisis.

Before mental health counseling was a common thing, Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis. Since scientific methods and standards still hadn't been established back then, Freud managed, for some time, to claim on one hand that psychoanalysis was a science, while, on the other hand, making it into something like a religion with himself as the high priest. Freud had more than his share of followers. Psychoanalytic practitioners for some years were all medical doctors who had undergone analysis either on Freud's own couch or the couch of one of his followers.

But Freud eventually lost his paternalistic hold over psychoanalysis and talk therapy. Starting with Carl Jung, many of his followers broke away from his quasi-religious organization. I'm speculating now, but perhaps that is why, later in his life, Freud advocated for "lay-analysts," that is, he wanted those who were not medical doctors to be allowed into training to become psychoanalysts. (Maybe Freud was hoping lay analysts would be more loyal to his system.)

Erik Erikson was teaching art when he met Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter. Erikson went on to become probably the most famous lay analyst. One of the criticisms of Freud, the master, is that he developed a "theory of psychosexual development" with five stages, without ever actually studying children or adolescents. But Anna Freud studied children and adolescents. For Anna Freud, sexuality was much less important in human development. Erik Erikson was in that same camp. He adapted Sigmund Freud's developmental stages and called them stages of "psychosocial development."

 
[caption id="attachment_7185" align="aligncenter" width="599"] The pioneering mental hospital that brought Erik Erikson to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.[/caption]

After laying out those stages in his most famous book, Childhood and Society, Erikson left Berkeley, California and moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Deborah Solomon, in her book American Mirror (2013, 288), says that Erikson was lured to Stockbridge's pioneering mental hospital, the Austen Riggs Center, with "the promise of a light clinical load and ample time to spend writing his next book."

 

Don't Let the Sun Step Over You: Stories Told by Eva Watt, an Apache

Eva Tulene Watt (1913-2009) was the first Apache to get actively involved in preserving her people's history. Prior to 2002, when her book was published, white historians tried their best to do right by the Apaches, but, as you might imagine, those accounts left a lot to be desired.

Don't Let the Sun Step Over You contains many, many stories, and they are Mrs. Watt's personal stories, stories about her family. Although each story can pretty much stand by itself, as you read more and more, you start to get a fuller picture of what it was like to be an Apache between the years 1860 and 1975.

Mrs. Watt collaborated with Keith Basso, an anthropologist and decided that the book should be printed in English because, unfortunately, not many young Apaches were fluent in their native language. However, since English was not Mrs. Watt's first language, the book is not what it could have been if we could understand Apache.

Anyway, I'm going to try to give you one of Eva Watts' stories. Here goes:

William Gashoney, I think some kind of a great uncle of Mrs. Watt (although she called him her grandpa), was a medicine man, and was once stuck by lightning. He believed that he "became a lightning myself"(page 26), which seems to have given him some power towards making it rain in Arizona. But it seems that he also had to have people with him and they had to sing a rain song (26-28). It might have taken a few nights of singing, but eventually there was a lot of rain (28).

On page 29, Mrs. Watt begins another story in this thread. She says

They had no rain for a long time. The people were worried. The rivers were drying up. The springs in the mountains were drying up too (29).

So the traders and the storekeeper got a lot of groceries and brought them out to William Gashoney. And he started to sing.

It was dry! Hot! He sang four songs. Then some people were just mean to my grandpa. "I don't think he knows what he's doing," they said. "The way he's going, I don't think it's ever going to rain." He knew right away what the people were saying about him. so after four songs, he stood up. He told the people "Nobody must talk against me. Nobody must say, 'he can't do it' or 'he's not praying right,' or anything like that. I don't want no part of that, not here. You can say it far away, if you want to, but not right here." Then he said, "I'm not doing this for myself. I'm doing it for everything - our land, our horses, our farms, our deer, our birds." He mentioned everything. Then he said, "If you don't believe, go away from here." That's what he said.

He started singing again, him and the mens [sic] that were helping him. Close to midnight, the wind started blowing. It started blowing this way real hard! There's lots and lots of dust! Pretty soon it started blowing. It started blowing backwards the other way. Then the wind stopped blowing and the dust storm went away. He stopped singing again and the fourth song he was singing is when it started dropping water. Then the thunder started, and pretty soon it started raining hard! That's when everybody got too excited. They were yelling their heads off! They were dancing in there! They were really dancing!(30-31).

That was maybe the climax, but not the end of that particular story. Maybe enough to give you an idea of what this unique book is about.

 

Bill Mason's Waterwalker: The Best Documentary Ever?

About fifteen years ago, a canoeing friend of mine introduced me to Bill Mason's extraordinary (1984) film, Waterwalker. I'm sure that Mason is best known as a canoeist, and he was a very good one, but, as the film shows, he was also a very gifted artist: he painted with knives instead of brushes.



Maybe I am pushing the envelope of my subject matter with this blogpost, but something I didn't remember until I watched Waterwalker again last night, is that Bill Mason sprinkled some religion into his films. (He quoted a passage from Job in Waterwalker.) But let me emphasize this is a documentary film, it doesn't get "preachy." All the verbal material is only fully understood in the context of the spectacular visuals of Lake Superior's coast and the rivers that feed into it (the footage includes canoeing action, the turbulence of rapids and falls, and a fair amount of wildlife).

Mason says that, at one point in his life, he glamorized the voyaguers (the French canoe fiends that transported furs and trade goods). But he stopped being a fan of the voyaguers when he realized how harmful the fur trade was to Native peoples - often known as "First Nations" in Canada.

With that said, even I, a big fan of Waterwalker, had to suspect that Bill Mason didn't quite "get" Indians. If he was aware of the issues and controversies important to the Native people of his time, it isn't in the film. In Inheriting a Canoe Paddle, Masao Dean criticizes Waterwalker and Bill Mason for a lack of awareness about the First Nations.

American Indians are not a vanished race of environmentalists. That point is well taken. Maybe it is the one flaw of what could otherwise be known as "by far the BEST documentary of its kind EVER," as one YouTube commenter put it recently.

[caption id="attachment_7162" align="aligncenter" width="607"] These pictographs from the rocky shore of Lake Superior's Agawa Bay appear in Waterwalker.[/caption]

That's right, Waterwalker can be freely viewed from your computer screen and I think you'll find it is more than worth the 86 minutes of your time.

However, since Waterwalker was co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada, you may want to use their site to access the film.

Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Trips

[caption id="attachment_7125" align="aligncenter" width="786"] This public domain image was taken from Wikipedia's Old Mission House, Stockbridge, MA page, as are the following words:
Mission House in ca. 1908 postcard (as it looked in its original location)
Old Mission House, Stockbridge, MA; from a c. 1908 postcard. It was built in 1739 by Reverend John Sergeant[/caption]

Interest in their people's history is not a new thing for descendants of the eastern seaboard Indians now living in the midwest. Our freeway system and the internet have made it easier, however, to visit historical sites and research the past. The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians now organizes historical trips for their enrolled members on a regular basis. The itineraries vary, sometimes the final destination is Stockbridge, Massachusetts and other times it is somewhere in New York State. The first trips, as you might imagine, were informal and not organized by tribal government.

The first trips made by any of the Stockbridge Mohicans from Wisconsin back to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, were more about business than historical interest. Jeremiah Slingerland made one of those trips back in 1879. There were probably other trips like that one, but we need not concern ourselves with them here because their purpose was not historical in nature.

The first recorded historical trip by a Mohican descendant was way back in 1916! William Dick (a grandson of Abraham Pye), went all the way to Stockbridge, Massachusetts with his minister and friend, Charles Kilpatrick (Milwaukee Journal, February 1, 1931).

The second recorded historical trip was something of an afterthought. Samuel Miller traveled the country dressed up in a Sioux headdress and buckskins to raise money for Lutheran missions. Miller was a featured speaker at a nationwide church convention in Albany, New York, when he got the urge to see the historical sites of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A reporter from the Berkshire Eagle followed Miller and his three companions (all Lutheran ministers) around the town, noting that he took "special interest" in the two-volume Bible and the communion set that were very recent acquisitions of a new museum in the town, called the Mission House, belonging to a wealthy heiress, Mabel Choate. This second recorded historical trip occurred in 1930 and I found it significant enough to include it in my tribal history Proud and Determined, on pages 191-192.

Those first two historical trips had, until recently, only been recorded in old newspapers, so they were forgotten about by tribal elders. When Thelma Putnam wrote Christian Religion Among the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, she wrote (57) of her brother, James Davids, and his family's trek to Stockbridge, Massachusetts as the time when the historic Stockbridge Bible was re-discovered by the tribe. (Once when I was doing research at the tribal museum I overheard a volunteer tour guide addressing the significance of that trip in the life of the old two-volume Bible.) Anyway, this third trip, made by the James Davids family in 1951, appears to have been an inspiration for future historical trips. Mrs. Grace Wilcox, the historical librarian of the New England town quickly became friends with the Davids family. When she retired after many years of service, the people of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, gave her a trip to Wisconsin. According to Thelma Putnam (58), Mrs. Wilcox was an "honored guest" on the reservation.

On page 58, Thelma Putnam describes the next trips:

1968: Dorothy "Dot" Davids "took her father, Elmer Davids, along with her aunt, Wildie Putnam, and her sister, Bernice Miller, to Massachusetts."

1972: A "group from the Reservation made the trip in cars and camped along the way..." This group included Dorothy Davids, Ruth Gudinas, Bernice Miller, Blanche Jacobs, Tina Williams, Kristy Miller, La Loni Kroening and Karolyn Raasch.

1975: A photo of those who made the 1975 trip to Massachusetts appears on page 6 of the most recent edition (June 15th, 2014) of the Mohican News. I'd not seen it before. It was a different perspective on some tribal elders that I've known and what they looked like in 1975. Also, Vicki Bowman (now Vicki Stevens), the cover model for Proud and Determined was just a kid in that picture. Those making the trip 39 years ago: Adults: Dorothy, Ruth, Bernice, Margaret Raasch, Sheila Moede, and Linda Kroening. Youth: Kay Miller, Fran Miller, Jackie Miller, Mark Davids, Renee Granquist, Vicki Bowman, Carmen Cornelius, Nikki Moede, and Leslie Kroening.

Non-Indians of Stockbridge, MA: Josiah Jones

In 1730 Jonathan Belcher, the Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, conceived the notion of an "Indian Town" where just a few white families would live. The idea was that, in addition to a minister and a teacher; tradesmen and housewives would also demonstrate "civilized" Christian living to a predominantly Native community. The previous "praying towns" of New England had not been integrated that way and as a result, those early Christian Indians were vulnerable to attacks from both whites and Indians.

Belcher's plan appears to have worked for about three years. But when Ephraim Williams moved his family to Indian Town it was the beginning of the end. At Williams' urging, "Indian Town" became incorporated as "Stockbridge" in 1739. The incorporation of the town (including the name change that went with it) was just one of many steps towards a segregated and secular town. And segregation and secular goals (also known as prosperity and/or greed) were exactly what pushed the Stockbridge Mohicans out of town after about fifty years.

I understand that Indians lost their land to whites over and over across the course of American history. But a good historian will tell you that just because something happened doesn't mean that it had to happen.

This is where Josiah Jones comes in. Jones and his wife, Anna, were two of the very first whites to settle at Indian Town and they really were the kind of pious Christians that Governor Belcher had in mind when he conceived his plan. As Electa Jones (probably not a relative) puts it in Stockbridge, Past and Present (149), Josiah Jones

learned the Indian language and was long remembered by a few of their tribe. They always spoke of him as "Good man, always kind to Indian."

He was in his early thirties when he first came to Indian Town. And we know that Josiah Jones lived into his eighties because he was still around when the poor Indians - dispossessed of their land - knew it was time to leave the town that was set up for their benefit.

[caption id="attachment_7052" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Josiah and Anna Jones had a son whose name was also Josiah, and this is the son's gravestone.[/caption]

When the tribe left Stockbridge, they presented him, as a token of their affection, the Old Conch Shell which had always been used to summon them to their place of worship, and also a beautiful belt of wampum (Jones, 149).

Josiah Jones and his family appear to have been exceptionally "good" people. But Ephraim Williams and his family seem to have been exceptionally "bad" people.  I often think of the overall failure of the mission at Stockbridge, Massachusetts as a triumph of bad over good. What do you think?

 

Non-Indians of Stockbridge, MA; African Population, Part 2: Agrippa Hull

 

By focusing on non-Indians, we're already off on a tangent, so I'll resist the temptation to go into detail about slavery in Massachusetts or how it came to an end in the 1780's.

Instead I'll stick to telling you about the non-Indians who lived among the Mohican Indians of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. My previous post featured an African American couple, Rose and Joab, who were slaves belonging to none other than the missionary, Jonathan Edwards. With Edwards death in 1758, or perhaps before it, Joab and Rose were given their freedom. In the mid-1760's, Joab brought a six-year-old boy to Stockbridge. The boy's name was Agrippa Hull. Hull had been born to free blacks. Unfortunately, his father died when he was still an infant. His mother, being too poor to support her child, apparently made arrangements for him to go with Joab.

[caption id="attachment_7007" align="aligncenter" width="640"] This painting depicts an 85-year-old Agrippa Hull. It hangs in the public library of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.[/caption]

When Agrippa Hull was eighteen years old, he enlisted in the Continental Army where he served as an orderly, first to General Patterson, and later to the Polish General Kosciuszko. Hull survived the winter of 1777-1778 at Valley Forge and when he mustered out in 1783, his discharge papers were signed by General George Washington. (His career in the military is spelled out more fully in the Black Past site.)

Hull returned to Stockbridge, went to work for Judge Sedgewick, and married Jane, who had been a slave and left her master soon after the Massachusetts courts ruled against slavery (this was more of a process than an event, see the Emancipation in Massachusetts page).  In 1785 Hull purchased a half-acre plot just across the river from Stockbridge, and over the years added to it. His farm and continued service to Judge Sedgewick made him prosperous, in fact, Blackpast.org states  "Agrippa Hull lived out [President] Jefferson’s ideal of a self-disciplined, civic-minded, and self-sustaining yeoman farmer."

Electa Jones, a contemporary of Hull, has some things to add about him (page 241). She described his character as "unique" but not "eccentric." According to Jones, whose book, Stockbridge, Past and Present was published only six years after Hull's death, "He was witty, and his presence at weddings seemed almost a necessity."

On page 242 Jones shares an anecdote which I've seen quoted or paraphrased elsewhere on the web:

Once, when servant to a man who was haughty and overbearing, both to Agrippa and his master attended the same church, to listen to a discourse from a distinguished mulatto preacher. On coming out of the house, the gentleman said to Agrippa, "Well, how do you like n[-----] preaching?" "Sir," he promptly retorted, "he was half black and half white; I liked my half, how did you like yours?"

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Non-Indian Residents of Stockbridge, Massachusetts: African Population, Part 1

[caption id="attachment_6953" align="aligncenter" width="784"] Go to Wikipedia's "Slavery in the United States" page for a series of maps like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States[/caption]

Electa Jones, the author of Stockbridge, Past and Present (alternate title: The Records of an Old Mission Station), compiled and wrote her history in the early 1850's. On the issue of slavery, she - like us today - knew it was immoral, and she also believed that even worse than simply owning slaves was the use of "bondage" to keep them in one's possession. On page 238, Jones tells us that there is no question that slaves were kept in Stockbridge, [present-day Massachusetts], and there was even reason to suspect (but no written proof) "that Africans were held in bondage." (Unless otherwise noted, my source for this entire post is page 238 of Jones' Stockbridge, Past and Present).

A person who was supposed to be setting a good example of Christian living to the Indians - the missionary, Reverend Jonathan Edwards - is the first slaveholder of the town of Stockbridge known to history. In an interview for a church history magazine several years ago, Edwards' award-winning biographer, George Marsden, referred to Edwards' keeping of slaves as a moral "blind spot."

Although I'm tempted to say that owning slaves is too nasty an offense to be written off as a "blind spot," I know that we 21st century Americans have our own blind spots. Most of us aren't thinking about the wars we're voluntarily waging, the mercury in the batteries that we toss out, the thousands of acres of rainforests cleared, etc. etc. (And even if we say we disapprove, are we doing anything to stop these atrocities?) Feel free to comment about Edwards, slavery, ethics, the environment, etc.

Let's get back to "what happens next."

As you may know, Rev. Jonathan Edwards, before coming to Stockbridge, was pastor of the church at Northampton. The Edwards family owned a slave named Rose, who was said to have been stolen from Africa as a child, when she was "getting water at a spring." Rose was married to Joab, also a slave. Joab's master was a "Mr. Hunt" of Northampton.

Edwards was something of a celebrity, but - like a lot of celebrities - he was also controversial. This resulted in his being thrown out of his congregation. As you might imagine, it isn't always easy to throw a celebrity preacher out of a congregation. I'm not quite familiar with the process of throwing Edwards out, but one of the inducements to Edwards was that Mr. Hunt "released" his slave Joab to the minister so Edwards couldn't use the breaking up of a slave marriage as an excuse to try to keep his job as the church's pastor.

The Name of Brothertown, Wisconsin

Isn't it obvious that Brothertown, Wisconsin was named after the Brothertown Indians, the first "civilized" people to settle there?

Most of us who are around now take it for granted. Nevertheless, the town had a number of names over the years.

Eeyamqittoowauconnuck was the name of Brothertown, New York in the Native language. Of course, the Brothertown Indians, being made up of a number of Algonquian-speaking tribes spoke varying dialects which resulted in a decision to make English their official language early on. By the 1830's the word Eeyamqittoowauconnuck might no longer have been used at all.

According to Orrin Meyer's booklet Se Souvenir (page 5), the Brothertown Indians originally named their settlement on the east shore of Lake Winnebago "Deansborough," after Thomas Dean, who served as both their agent and schoolmaster. (My memory is telling me that Dean was the only white person to go through Moor's Charity School as run by Eleazar Wheelock, but I haven't been able to verify that.) Anyway, the name "Deansborough" didn't get much traction. Meyer tells us (page 6) - and I've heard it said elsewhere - that the village got the name "Manchester" because it was the last name of a (pompous in my opinion) surveyor who decided to honor himself by giving it his own name. At the same time, the post office (Meyer, 6) referred to the area as "Pequot" after the Native nation that contributed a significant percentage of it's descendants to the Brothertown Indians.

Those name changes take up only about twenty or thirty years of history. Over the course of the 1850's the current name of Brothertown became recognized, and for good reason. It is the most accurate (and least confusing) name of the first "civilized" people to settle there.