Electa Quinney: Stockbridge Teacher

I frequently feature books in my blogposts, but seldom actually recommend them. However, here is a book that I am recommending: Electa Quinney: Stockbridge Teacher should be purchased by all the middle school libraries in Wisconsin. Although the focus is on Electa Quinney, the author does a good job of giving readers the context of the woman's life, which is a remarkable stage. The reality that Native nations like the Stockbridge Mohicans fought amongst themselves is not lost on the author, Karyn Saemann. At the same time, harsh realities like the Indian Removal Act are not sugar-coated. And, of much importance to historians of Native Christianity like myself, religion was not scrubbed out of this portrait. The negative stereotype of missionaries is not reinforced. (Electa Quinney's first husband, Daniel Adams, was a Native preacher.)

Frontier America in the 1800's is broken down into simple enough language for middle schoolers to be able to comprehend Electa Quinney: Stockbridge Teacher. Saemann also encourages students to form their own viewpoints of what Electa Quinney may have thought and felt. I really appreciate how the author admitted up front that history is like a puzzle and there are missing pieces. It appears that most of the letters that Electa wrote were not preserved for posterity. (The discovery of Electa's son's remarkable collection of papers in an old trunk in 1932 was rightfully featured in the book.)

The quality of the body of the book makes it worth reading not only for schoolchildren but also adults interested in American history. People like me will be disappointed that the book doesn't have notes or a bibliography that can be used to track down the sources used by the author, but remember, the book was not written for adult scholars.

Factual errors? I think that every book has a few. Let me speak to that.
On pages 10-11, the author repeats the error made by others that John W. Quinney and Austin E. Quinney were brothers. According to the tribe's current enrollment officer, the two men were cousins.
On page 10, the author acknowledges "we can't say for sure who Electa's father was." Then she guesses that Electa probably had the same father as John W. Quinney. (We already know that John W. Quinney and Electa had the same mother.) In minutes of an Indian Party meeting contained in the John C. Adams Papers, I found that John P. Quinney objected to Electa Quinney's membership in the Indian Party because, as John P. put it, "her father was not an Indian."
In a post I wrote before Saemann's book was published, I addressed the question of whether or not Electa Quinney was the first public school teacher in Wisconsin. To summarize that post, Electa Quinney - contrary to what some books say - did not teach school at Statesburg in 1828. Augustus T. Ambler, who Saemann acknowledges on page 41, did teach the Stockbridge school at Statesburg in that year and then, as Saemann notes, Electa Quinney took over for Ambler. So how is E. Quinney still the Wisconsin's first public schoolteacher? Saemann's view is that Augustus T. Ambler's school was private, while Electa Quinney's school was public. Of course, she knows it was the same students being taught in the same building. On pages 38-39 she has a section where she explains the difference between public and private schools - she says it is about where the money comes from. I suppose that is a legitimate definition, but I'm not convinced that the school that was taught by Ambler one term and by Quinney the next was funded by two different sources of money in those two terms. Saemann asserts that public schools are supported by taxes, but the 1794 Treaty of Canadaigua was supposed to support a tribal school. Without Electa Quinney being the first public schoolteacher in Wisconsin, you still have an important biography and a significant role model.

In conclusion, Electa Quinney: Stockbridge Teacher is a good read. While the focus and the intended audiences are different, the subject matter of this book may overlap as much with my own Proud and Determined, as any other book. I recommend that you read both.

Little Turtle and Austin E. Quinney: Native Dairy Pioneers Whose Cows were Killed

Little Turtle was a great war chief for the Miami Indians. After beating the rather small and unorganized armies of the United States twice in the 1790's, he became a leader of his people in peace. As a result, Little Turtle had the opportunity to do some traveling and meet some famous white Americans. In fact, George Washington took a liking to the Miami chief and invited him to stay at his house over the winter of 1796-1797. Other friends encouraged Little Turtle to move to Philadelphia permanently. However, Turtle knew he did not have a skillset that he could use to make a living in the city, so he returned to his own people.


This artist's rendering of Little Turtle is historically correct in that he wore a bear claw necklace and George Washington gave him a large medal that had his own likeness engraved on one side and Little Turtle's on the other.

But when he returned, Little Turtle wasn't the same old Indian that he'd been before. Not all the changes can be touched on here, but one thing that is important is that Little Turtle developed such a taste for milk that he brought a cow back with him to Indian Country. He even got his wife to make butter!

These kinds of anecdotes can be amusing to us in the 21st century. But serious historical analysis takes it farther.  In "Three Men from Three Rivers" (a chapter out of The Boundaries Between Us), Donald Graff writes about how frontier whites and Indians managed to slide between the two racial identities. Graff observed that cow ownership was a prime example of Little Turtle's "Americanization":

[H]is first cow, a flagrantly Euro-American symbol, was maliciously killed. Publicly, Little Turtle expressed a belief that the cow had been diseased, but the message sent by its death was as clear then as it is today.

Not all of Little Turtle's tribesmen agreed that peace was the way to go. Not all of them were proud of the fact that he had been "pal-ing around" with people like George Washington. And so they made a political statement by killing his cow. As a chief, Little Turtle knew his power was based on his approval rating, so he let it go. He wasn't going to be baited. Making a stink over what had happened could lead to other arguments that might ultimately strip him of whatever political power he still had with his own people.

Fast forward to Stockbridge, Wisconsin Territory in 1838. A similar thing happened to Austin E. Quinney's cow. This is from my own book, Proud and Determined:

When one of Austin E. Quinney's cows died, he alleged that it was killed "in a clandestine manner" by Thomas Hendrick. Witnesses were called and the case proceeded according to the new [tribal] constitution. It could not have seemed fair to Hendrick that one of the judges was the plaintiff's cousin, John W. Quinney. He and the other judge ruled in favor of Austin E. Quinney.

So the shoe was on the other foot. Not only were the "civilized" Stockbridge Mohicans in favor of adopting the agricultural practices of white Americans, but their leaders were willing and able to protect livestock with a written constitution and a court system that was similar to that of the whites. As I mentioned in my previous post, Thomas Hendrick - the one who allegedly killed Quinney's cow - was a leader of the more tradional Emigrant Party Stockbridges. They made use of the treaty of 1839 to leave the tribe and move to the Delaware Tract in present-day Kansas.

Sadly (but unavoidably, it seems) the Quinneys and other more "civilized" Indians were glad to see them go.



 
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What is the Difference between the Stockbridge and the Brothertown Indians?

What is the difference between the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians?

Admittedly, that is a complicated question, going back to a time before either of those amalgamated tribes was formed, but it seems that the biggest difference came to me in a flash while I was at the Calumet County courthouse yesterday.



Stockbridge, Wisconsin and Brothertown, Wisconsin are Calumet County villages that were once populated by the "civilized" New York Indian tribes bearing those names. Today the Stockbridges (also known as "Mohicans" or the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians), have a federally recognized tribal government and reservation in Shawano County, Wisconsin. But the Brothertowns are just doing their best to stay organized. They aren't recognized by the federal government,  but, thanks to their efforts, they have a relationship with Calumet County (see Darren Kroenke's comment below).

The Calumet County Courthouse holds two record books. One for the Brothertowns from 1839 and one for the Stockbridge Mohicans from 1843. Each record book does the same thing for its respective Native nation: it allots their reservation, that is, each record book documents the dividing up of what had been a reservation into individually-owned plots of land. With these record books, each tribe was giving up their tribal government and becoming citizens of the United States.



The two record books, of course, establish that both tribes went through the process of allotment at roughly the same time.

So what was different?

The whole time the allotment process was happening, the Stockbridges had an "Indian Party," made up of some of their leading men: John W. Quinney, Austin E. Quinney, and John Metoxen. Although the Stockbridge record book of 1843 makes no mention of any objections to what the elected commissioners (members of the Stockbridge "Citizen Party") were doing, John W. Quinney had contacts in Washington D.C. and that is where he took his fight - and won. In 1846 new legislation was enacted that re-created the Stockbridge nation and reservation.

There would be more challenges ahead for the Stockbridge Mohicans, but they dodged an awfully big bullet in the 1840's.

In my opinion, Congress' Act of 1846 - and the Stockbridge Indian Party's ability to make it happen - is, more than anything else, the big difference between the Stockbridge Indians and the Brothertown Indians.