Daughters of Two Nations

By Peggy Caravantes and Carolyn D Flores

Daughters of Two Nations tells the life stories of nine Native American women who brought change and unity to two cultures historically at odds. These short but well-researched biographies describe the hardships and triumphs of each of these courageous women as they spoke up, spoke out, and fought their way into history

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mountain Press Publishing Company
• Release date: May 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9780878426607

Book preview

DAUGHTERS OF TWO NATIONS

PEGGY CARAVANTES

ILLUSTRATED BY

CAROLYN DEE FLORES

2013

MOUNTAIN PRESS PUBLISHING COMPANY

MISSOULA, MONTANA

Text © 2013 Peggy Caravantes

Illustrations © 2013 Carolyn Dee Flores

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Caravantes, Peggy, 1935-

 Daughters of two nations / Peggy Caravantes ; illustrations by Carolyn Dee Flores.

    pages cm

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-0-87842-610-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Indian women—Biography—Juvenile literature. I. Flores, Carolyn Dee illustrator. II. Title.

 E98.W8C37 2013

 970.004′97—dc23

2013025283

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

P.O. Box 2399 • Missoula, MT 59806 • 406-728-1900

800-234-5308 • [e-mail]

www.mountain-press.com

To my children: Brian, Susan, and Jeffrey

—P.C.

For my mother, Lupe, and my Aunt Kathy, and in memory of my father, Gilbert, and my Uncle Eddie

—C.D.F.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Pronunciations

Introduction

Mary Musgrove: Empress of the Creeks

Nancy Ward: Cherokee Rose

Susette La Flesche: Omaha Bright Eyes

Emily Pauline Johnson: The Mohawk Princess

Mountain Wolf Woman: A Ho-Chunk Woman’s Story

Rosebud Yellow Robe: Lakota Sioux Storyteller

Annie Dodge Wauneka: Navajo Healer

Maria Tallchief: Osage Ballerina

Wilma Mankiller: Cherokee Chief

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their invaluable help, Peggy Caravantes acknowledges Akwiratékha Martin, Mohawk Language & Cultural Center; Theodore Fernald and Irene Silentman, Navajo Language Academy of Swarthmore College; Jack Martin, College of William & Mary; Clyde Peacock, Haskell Indian Nations University; Dr. Norma J. Neely, American Indian Institute, University of Oklahoma; Garfield Long, Tribal Linguist, New Kituwah Academy; Gwen McKenna, History Editor, Mountain Press Publishing Company.

Carolyn Dee Flores would like to thank Kathy Foshee, Rachel Canales, Lupe Ruiz-Flores, Brian S. Cook, Wendy Martin, Laura-Susan Thomas, and SCBWI for their support and guidance throughout this project. She would also like thank Felicia Barker for her help with research and J. C. Boyd for building all of her illustration equipment and for being there when she needed someone to talk to.

NOTE ON PRONUNCIATIONS

The pronunciations of Indian words and names in this book are based on the International Phonetic Alphabet, but they have been simplified for English speakers. Many sounds in the various tribal languages do not have an English equivalent. For example, in Navajo, the sound represented by the letter K is pronounced with the tongue pushed up against the back of the throat, producing a very different sound from the English K. For the sake of simplicity, however, we have transcribed such sounds using their closest English counterpart. We encourage anyone interested in tribal languages to pursue further study.

INTRODUCTION

Although the women depicted in these nine short biographies represent various tribes in different regions over a span of three centuries, they have much in common. Each faced discrimination as an Indian and as a woman. Each had to cope with the conflicting demands of two unequal and rapidly changing worlds. Each endured personal suffering and witnessed the suffering of her people. Yet all nine women pushed through these obstacles with courage and commitment, leaving their unique marks on history.

This book’s title, Daughters of Two Nations, is technically a misnomer for the women in the first two stories, Mary Musgrove and Nancy Ward. They would more accurately be called the Daughters of No Nation. In their time, America was still a collection of colonies, not yet a nation, and the idea of a nation in the Anglo sense was a foreign concept to Native Americans. Most tribes saw the world as a whole thing, a mother to all human beings, not as a collection of separate entities fighting over the ownership of pieces of land. Eventually the Indians adopted the term nation to identify themselves as sovereign peoples, living within, yet independent from, the nation called the United States.

By the late nineteenth century, the period in which Susette La Flesche and Emily Pauline Johnson lived and worked, the Anglo way dominated and Indian ways had been nearly extinguished. Practically every tribe had been removed from its ancestral home and forced onto a reservation. Left to struggle along with far fewer resources than the U.S. government had promised, many reservations became virtual prisons of poverty and near hopelessness.

The dawn of the twentieth century brought little progress. Racism against American Indians was widespread, and poverty on the reservations continued unabated. Little by little, however, as Native women and men stepped forward to confront the government, voice their concerns, and demand more respect, the mainstream American public grew more aware of the historical malice against indigenous peoples and began to recognize their ongoing suffering. Thanks to Indian activists, educators, and cultural boundary breakers such as Rosebud Yellow Robe, Annie Dodge Wauneka, Maria Tallchief, and Wilma Mankiller, the United States slowly became a place of greater understanding, appreciation, and cooperation.

This progression left many Native Americans, like the women in this book, caught somewhere in the middle. These women had to struggle to find a place in the uncomfortable, even hostile, white world without abandoning their tribal heritage. Despite the odds against them, they succeeded in addressing the needs of their people while moving forward in their own lives.

How did they do it? By combining, as best they could, the most valuable elements of both cultures. By reaching out to both sides to find common ground. By educating their own people and the dominant society and inviting both to examine issues and create solutions together. Each in her own way and using her own gifts, these fearless women brought themselves and others closer to the dream of living fully and joyfully in both worlds, both nations, both homes.

All of the nine women grew up in tribal communities, but they had varying degrees of contact with white society as children. Many were of mixed white and Indian heritage. Most were raised in poverty, though a few were quite well-off financially. Regardless of where they started, each woman ventured out into the larger world to find her own way, to break down barriers, and to make a difference.

The facts of history reveal much cruelty and injustice, but the stories of those who, like these nine women, endured painful realities yet triumphed in spite of them serve as inspirations to us all—American Indians, girls and women, and anyone who shares the hope of creating a better world for all people.

MARY MUSGROVE

EMPRESS OF THE CREEKS

(1700–1765)

SOFT WINDS FROM A NEARBY RIVER picked up the newborn baby’s cry from a small mud hut. The year was 1700, and a Creek woman of high status had just given birth to a daughter. The woman was the sister of the Creeks’ tribal leader, Brim, whom the English called Emperor Brim to reflect his prominent role in the tribe and his whole family’s status as the Creek version of royalty. The baby’s mother named the child Coosaponakesee (koe-sah-poe-nah-kih-see), meaning Coosa language bearer.

Coosaponakesee’s mother and her family lived in Coweta (near present-day Jackson), a major Creek village on the Ocmulgee (OAK mul gee) River, in territory that later became the state of Georgia. The girl’s father was Edward Griffin, an English-born trader who lived nearly three hundred miles away in Pomponne (today’s Jacksonboro), a British settlement near Charles Towne (Charleston), in the colony of South Carolina. Coosaponakesee spent her early childhood with her mother’s people, the influential Wind Clan, in Coweta. There she learned to speak Muskogee, the language of the Creek, or Muskogee, tribe.

When Coosaponakesee was about ten years old, her father, wanting his daughter to learn English ways, took her to live with his family in Pomponne. For the next five years, she stayed with her white relatives, who educated her in English and took her to a Christian church. At her baptism, she received an English name, Mary, which she used the rest of her life. Mary’s fluency in two languages was a skill that would determine her role in shaping the history of Georgia.

Mary returned to the Wind Clan when she was fifteen years old. The next year she met twenty-year-old John Musgrove, Jr. (Johnny), who, like Mary herself, was the child of a Creek woman and an Englishman living in Pomponne, South Carolina. Unlike Mary, however, Johnny had grown up in his father’s community and knew little of the Indian world. He had come to Coweta with his father to help arrange a peace treaty between the Creeks and the English that would settle a long conflict and allow the British colonists to establish farms on the Creeks’ rich southern land.

Johnny decided to stay in Coweta for a while in order to court the petite, dark-haired Mary. He succeeded in winning her heart, and when Mary was about seventeen, the two married. The couple lived with Mary’s people for about seven years, and the pair welcomed their first child, a boy, around 1724. Shortly afterward, the family moved to Johnny’s family estate in Pomponne, where they lived for several more years.

In 1732 the Musgroves moved to a Native village called Yamacraw, home of the Yamacraw tribe, a small group that had split off from the Creeks a few years before. The leader of the Yamacraws was ninety-one-year-old chief Tomochichi (tahm-uh-chee-chee), who became friendly with the Musgroves. The couple built a house on a farm on Yamacraw Bluff, which overlooked the Savannah River, and opened a trading post there called the Cowpens.

Because it was the only trading post in the area, the Cowpens enjoyed a brisk trade among the Yamacraws. The Natives purchased hoes, knives, hatchets, blankets, cloth, copper kettles, beads, bells, guns, bullets, and other items. In exchange for these goods, the Yamacraws traded mostly animal hides as well as honey, beeswax, and bear oil. Deer hides, valuable for making European-style leather, were a major trade item. More than 1,200 pounds of deerskin passed through the post each year, making the Cowpens the center of the region’s deerskin trade. The Musgroves were becoming quite wealthy.

In 1733 something happened that would change Mary’s life. Early that year, British army general James Oglethorpe led a scouting party in canoes up the Savannah River to look for a place to start a new English colony. The general had received a royal charter from King George II to establish a proprietary colony in America; it would be named Georgia after the king. Proprietary colonies were governed by a board of trustees, appointed by the king. The trustees, most of whom remained in England, were partially independent but followed British laws and