When my mother, Woesha Cloud North, a Ho-Chunk–Ojibwe, passed away, I inherited a couple of cardboard boxes filled with her archival research regarding her parents, Henry Roe Cloud, a Ho-Chunk, and Elizabeth Bender Cloud, an Ojibwe. Sadly, my mother died when I was in graduate school. I deeply mourned her loss, as she was my best friend. She was by my side during the first years of my marriage and helped raise my three children. I finally opened one of the boxes gathering dust underneath my desk and peeked inside. The first thing I saw was my precious mother’s handwriting, and I shoved the flap of the cardboard box down and sobbed uncontrollably. It was much too soon to look through these important boxes. My grief was still too fresh and tender. I didn’t examine the contents of the boxes until more than ten years later, when my painful emotions had mostly subsided and healed. Thus began this journey to write the book that my mother envisioned about her parents but died before she completed her goal. I begin this introduction writing about her, because her amazing spirit and my memory of her provided me the strength, determination, and resolve to complete an incredibly daunting task.
The idea for this family-tribal history, however, did not begin with my mother. It started with her sister Marion Cloud Hughes and their mother, Elizabeth Bender Cloud. They were the first ones in our Cloud family to start gathering materials with the goal of publishing a book about Henry, their beloved husband and father. Marion and Elizabeth collected and saved family letters, newspaper articles, government reports, and documents. Marion, unfortunately, was unable to write the book, because her career as a social worker kept her too busy. After the deaths of Marion and Elizabeth, my mother, Woesha, decided to start working on her own book about her parents. She traveled to many archives, including Yale’s Sterling Library and the Hampton Institute, collecting additional archival documents. Her cherished collection of family material became the basis for this book manuscript about her mother and father. The idea for this book and the job of gathering together family archival materials, therefore, was passed from one female relative to another. My mom’s old cardboard boxes sitting in my office were a continual reminder of my Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe ancestors wanting a family-tribal history written. With my career as an anthropology and Native studies professor at UC Santa Cruz, I had the time and resources to finish this undertaking my female ancestors started. Indeed, I traveled to many archives, the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska, and Ho-Chunk tribal territory in Wisconsin, following a similar route to the one my mom had taken. I felt her spirit with me every step of the way. Over the course of seven years, I traveled to the home of my sister Woesha Hampson; to the residences of my cousins Robin and Mark Butterfield; and to numerous archives, to conduct interviews and collect family letters, government documents, newspaper articles, pictures, and family memoirs. I wrote this family-tribal history as a tribute to my ancestors Elizabeth and Henry Cloud and to my female relatives Elizabeth, Marion, and Woesha, who ultimately started this book-making process.
This book involves the lives, activism, policy, and intellectual contributions of Henry Roe Cloud (1884–1950) and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (1887–1965). Their political activism and intellectual work spans the first half of the twentieth century, including participation in the Society of American Indians (SAI), General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), and National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). Even though Elizabeth Bender Cloud was the Indian Welfare chair of the GFWC and fought against tribal termination, only one article has been written about her.1 Surprisingly, while Henry Roe Cloud has been hailed as a very important Native policy maker of the early twentieth century, only two books and four articles have been published about him.2 Henry co-wrote the pivotal Meriam Report of 1928, which laid the foundation for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934—an act, according to available evidence, he also coauthored.3 Indeed, this is the first book-length analysis of Henry and Elizabeth that uniquely relies on Cloud family-tribal knowledge and perspectives.
Standing Up to Colonial Power is a family-tribal history that argues that the Clouds were intellectuals who combined Native warrior and modern identities as a creative strategy to challenge settler colonialism, to become full members of the U.S. nation-state, and to fight for tribal sovereignty. I use my definition of Native cultural citizenship, which is the right to be different and belong fully in the home, community, tribal nation, and nation-state to discuss the Clouds’ struggles to belong.4 I rely on Renato Rosaldo’s definition of cultural citizenship, which is to discover subordinated groups’ own notions of citizenship and belonging.5 Indeed, Natives’ senses of citizenship and belonging often revolve around dual citizenship—struggling to belong fully to the U.S. nation-state and their own tribal nations.
Scholars have written about Henry and Elizabeth Cloud, but there is no examination of how the Clouds indigenized modernity from a family-tribal perspective. The Clouds and many Natives of my grandparents’ generation were viewed as assimilationists struggling to become U.S. citizens, as opposed to traditionalists maintaining a close connection to reservations and Native tradition, culture, and identity and fighting back against the U.S. settler-colonial state. The Clouds represented the modern, who were assumed to have lost a close connection to their reservations, tradition, culture, and identity. From this perspective the Clouds—and other members of their generation who co-founded the Society of American Indians in 1911, the first pantribal Native organization—have been maligned as “sell-outs” and “apples” (red on the outside and white on the inside).6 Lucy Maddox, however, astutely argues that members of SAI were intellectuals who valiantly fought against racism and for U.S. citizenship.7 Joel Pfister, unfortunately, seems to assume that Henry Cloud’s identities as Native and modern meant he became a cog in the wheel of modernity, while integrating into the U.S. nation-state.8 The Clouds and other SAI intellectuals, however, combined their Native and modern identities, which gave them the potential to challenge the state.9 The Clouds were “good” Indians who could act like whites but were not really whites—and in this slippage was the possibility of subversion.10
I use my family-tribal history to explore broader historical and anthropological concerns and to add to Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe studies.11 Classic anthropologists, including Paul Radin and Ruth Densmore, use static notions of culture, thus supporting the “incarceration” of culture within Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe lands and the idea that Natives who move off the reservation lose their tribal culture and identity.12 Similarly, literary scholar Joel Pfister, educational scholar David Messer, and historians Jason and Lisa Tetzloff seem to assume that the move of Henry and Elizabeth away from their reservations to urban areas meant a distinct break from their tribal communities and culture.13 Some could consider the Clouds as “inauthentic,” because they were “progressive” Natives who encouraged Native Americans to become modern and Christian. But these labels are based on static notions of identity in which one cannot be modern, Christian, and Native all at the same time. These categories are stuck in binaries between progressive and traditional Indians in which progressives are defined as wanting to assimilate into American society and traditional Natives are described as maintaining a strong connection to their tribal communities and traditions. Frederick Hoxie, Peter Iverson, Cathleen Cahill, Kristina Ackley, Cristina Stanciu, Joy Porter, and David Martinez, among others, have rescued progressives from this binary that defined them as Native Americans with little relationship to their tribal communities.14 Similarly, my goal is to show how my grandparents’ life and contributions defied these binary oppositions. Indeed, this book emphasizes how the Clouds’ identity was incredibly complicated, filled with contradictions and fluidity—both modern and traditional.15
In contrast, I use the flexible and fluid notion of the hub, theorized by Laverne Roberts, a Paiute woman activist, which shows how Natives maintain their tribal culture, community, identity, gender, and belonging in urban areas both in geographic space, such as through meetings and powwows, and virtually, not based in space, such as through phone calling, writing letters, reading tribal newspapers, and storytelling. I utilize this diasporic concept to examine how the Clouds maintained connections to their tribes, tribal identity, community, and gender as well as developed Native-oriented strategies to challenge the U.S. and settler colonialism, away from their tribal homelands in Native hubs.16
Storytelling is a powerful form of Native hub making because of its portability. Nowadays stories are shared in cars, classrooms, homes, and everywhere we travel. Storytelling is an ancient intellectual tradition that occurred in the winter when families lived in lodges, sharing food and resources.17 Stories are vital to the transmission of Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe knowledge, in the past and in the present. Some stories are told only in ceremonial contexts, and others are told daily. Stories tell us our place in the universe, how we move from one location to another, and how we are connected to one another in tribal communities. They can have morals, suggesting right action and keeping us connected to our tribal homes.18 Stories are the heartbeat of tribal communities.19
A major portion of Ojibwe and Ho-Chunk narratives are called “trickster stories.”20 Paul Radin, a classic anthropologist, wrote about Wakdjunkaga, or a Ho-Chunk trickster, as translated into English.21 According to Niigonwedom James Sinclair, an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) scholar, Radin’s book, The Trickster, provides evidence of Indigenous peoples resisting colonialism by telling trickster stories.22 Radin, unfortunately, assumes that Ho-Chunk and other tribal trickster stories represent a stage of undeveloped human thought, placing Natives’ intellectual ideas low on a continuum between primitive and civilized and, therefore, linked to settler colonialism. Sam Blowsnake, a Ho-Chunk intellectual, recounted a “cycle” of Wakdjunkaga stories to Radin in 1912. Sinclair argues that Blowsnake sharing Wakdjunkaga stories is colonial resistance. During this time the Ho-Chunk suffered destructive attacks on tribal sovereignty, including reservation policies and federal boarding-school officials who kidnapped Native children, forcing them into an abusive process of assimilation, often hundreds or thousands of miles away from their homes.
When contemplated within this colonial context, stories can take on multiple meanings. How might Blowsnake’s Wakdjunkaga stories—the trickster’s wandering and building a community with other exiled creatures because the world is becoming a difficult place to live in, his finding a home where red oaks grow, his settling where the Mississippi meets the Missouri Rivers, and his transformation of parts of his penis into potatoes, turnips, artichokes, and ground beans for humans to eat—be considered within the history of migration and Ho-Chunk removals?23 The federal government forcibly removed the Ho-Chunk multiple times away from our homelands in Wisconsin (a story told more fully in chapter 1). Blowsnake’s telling of the trickster’s wandering could point to how federal officials forced Ho-Chunks to move from place to place. Therefore, Blowsnake’s retelling of Wakdjnkaga stories in 1912 points to a doubleness in his narrative, and its underlying meaning could allude to the colonial context. Rather than representing a “lower” mentality than whites, as Radin argues, I assert that trickster stories were foundational to Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe education, teaching children, young people, and adults how to resist and subvert colonialism.24
Elizabeth and Henry Cloud must have learned doubleness speech while living in a colonial environment and listening to Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe stories. This traditional tribal educational process would have taught them how to tell and understand stories with multiple meanings.25 The Clouds grew up dealing with oppressive colonial policies where doubleness of speech was absolutely essential to speak the unspeakable without the colonizer’s awareness. Thus, they must have learned how to tell stories embedded with criticism. On the surface the colonizer most likely would not notice anything subversive. Underneath the surface, however, the oppressed could communicate a critique of the colonizer. Doubleness speech generates two meanings: one appears dispassionate and agreeable; the other could express possibly subversive material or ideas.26
Places and moments where colonizers and Natives interacted were saturated with power and domination; the contact zones included federal boarding schools, Christian missions, and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agencies.27 Mary Louise Pratt, a literary theorist, asserts, “I use this term [the contact zone] to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relationships of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today.”28 In these contact zones the colonizer could not truly see or understand Henry or Elizabeth Cloud and other Natives of their generation but instead racialized them, made them an “other,” and saw them as “savages,” “primitives,” and, for Elizabeth, as “Pocahontas” or “savage drudge”—not full human beings.29 To deal with this racist and oppressive context, our Indigenous ancestors had to learn to juggle two realities, their own Native perspective and the colonizer’s. The Clouds had to master various ways of behaving and speaking in different social settings and to divergent audiences, including other Natives, white missionaries, and BIA officials, both in the private and public sphere. Their ability to speak and write in various cultural registers, including mixing dominant and Native discourses to diverse audiences, could explain how their behavior and speech could seem contradictory. In other words, the Clouds, for example, could speak using mostly dominant rhetoric with white reformers and Native-centric discourses when conversing with other Indigenous peoples. Their ability to speak, write, and act using differing cultural registers was absolutely necessary during the racist and oppressive context at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.30
To not only survive but also gain power among whites, the Clouds could learn other subversive strategies from listening to tribal trickster stories. Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe trickster abilities embrace adaptability; changing shapes and forms, including male to female; and being humorous and creative.31 Hearing trickster stories, Elizabeth and Henry could learn shape-shifting and the performance of various identities, such as a “good” Indian and a “bad” Indian, playing with multiple meanings that could hide one’s true thoughts or feelings.32 A good Indian is one who appears to be a helper of whites and assimilated, and a bad Indian challenges whites and resists assimilation.33 But underneath Elizabeth and Henry could preserve and protect their warrior identities. Indeed, Henry and Elizabeth could be simultaneously good and bad Indians.34
Shape-shifting, a trickster strategy, therefore, includes both verbal as well as nonverbal performance.35 Being oppressed must have encouraged Henry and Elizabeth Cloud to use many subversive strategies to not only survive but also excel, including masking and camouflage to protect their innermost thoughts and feelings.36 They quickly must have discovered that criticism, complaints, and unhappiness, or asserting themselves, could bring immediate punishment from the colonizer. In this dangerous colonial environment, they soon learned that tactical and careful manipulation of appearance was essential for survival.37
This book, therefore, contributes to the reclamation of Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe history.38 By incorporating tribally specific kinship, stories, writing, culture, and gender into my analysis, I bring new insight into archival letters and writings often pitched to a colonial audience.39 While new imperial histories present nuanced gendered analyses of colonialism, they fail to show how Natives rework colonialism for their own purposes. To this end, Native histories emphasize Indigenous peoples as active agents rather than passive victims of colonialism at the expense of complex treatments of colonialism.40 Thus, I combine new imperial and Native histories to discuss how the Clouds were complicit in, challenged, and reworked colonialism for their own purposes.41 But to recognize the importance of the Clouds’ intellectual work and activism, an understanding of settler colonialism is needed.
Indigenous scholars and activists challenge the eradication of Native peoples and the settler-colonial aspects of land. There are more and more scholarly efforts—called “settler colonial studies,” defined by Patrick Wolfe’s 1999 book, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology; his 2006 article, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”; and, more recently, articles in Settler Colonial Studies—which focus on Native feminisms, queer and sexuality studies, and Indigenous studies.42 Settler colonialism is theoretically divergent from other colonialisms in that it concentrates on the elimination of Indigenous peoples and relationships from and with the land.43 Wolfe argues that settler colonialism is a structure rather than an event, and it involves land as the primary motive of eliminating the Native; settlers come to stay: they take up residence, including building homes, creating businesses, and farming the land.
Not only is settler colonialism about taking over the land, but it is also linked to modernity and to the development of the modern nation-state. It is about the nation-state eliminating the Native physically, spiritually, and culturally, through federal policies of boarding schools and the Dawes Allotment Act, among others. It is related to the early development of classic anthropology, including Lewis Henry Morgan’s evaluation of Natives as at the bottom of a continuum between the primitive and the civilized.44 As part of classic anthropology, settler colonialism contributed to the dominant discourse of the vanishing Indian that was replayed over and over in Edward Curtis’s photos of Natives and Henry Hamilton Bennett’s photographs of the Ho-Chunk.45 Settler colonialism was also reenacted in celebrations of white settlers’ victories over Natives in Wild West shows and other public displays. Classic anthropology supports static notions of culture that create a binary between the traditional and the modern and roots Native culture in the land.46 Accordingly, Richard Pratt, creator of the Native federal boarding schools, likely believed kidnapping Indigenous children—and separating them from their families and Native lands—forced them to lose their culture and identity and thus to assimilate into U.S. society.
Settler colonialism not only involves an insatiable hunger for land and a continual dispossession of Indigenous peoples from our land but also is linked to Christianity and capitalism. Colonizers view the land as a menacing and scary wilderness, a place of available and untapped resources, a location to accomplish God’s work, and a site of natural, untouched magnificence. Christianity influences colonizers’ relationship and connection to land, justifying their dominion over “pagans” and encouraging their exploitation of all creatures and land for enjoyment and profit. Christianity ultimately places humans’ needs above those of nonhumans. Colonizers see Indigenous peoples as inferior beings, wild and potentially dangerous (like the land), roving without purpose, and not influenced by the power and habit of civilization. Colonizers view the world in binaries: European civilization as good, and nature, dangerous forests, wild beasts, and Natives as bad and inferior.47 Colonizers perceive the land as empty of full human presence, a commodity to be owned and farmed, meadows to be parceled and fenced. From a settler-colonial mindset, waterways must be controlled and mountains must be dug up and exploited for gold and other precious and valuable metals.48
Capitalism and colonizers’ insatiable desire for control drive tragic dam-building projects, which harness the power of water for agriculture, electricity, profit, and other human needs in exchange for the life of the land, plants, fish, and animals. Settlers work to colonize not only Indigenous peoples but all living things. They import new, domesticated animals, plants, insects, birds, and other species to colonize the land for their own profit and use.49 Settler colonialism, therefore, disrupts Natives’ long-standing relationships with the land and all life forms and interrupts our supply of food and traditional medicines, thus contributing to poverty, diseases, and other problems. Integral to dispossessing us from our land, it interferes with Natives’ relationship to the spiritual realm and our access to sacred and ceremonial sites.
Margaret Jacobs in White Mother to a Dark Race discusses how settler colonialism is used to describe how people of European descent gained dominance in nation-states, including the United States and Australia. Indeed, settler colonialism is a colonial process that can be studied worldwide, including in Palestine.50 Settlers, according to Jacobs, are often imagined in relatively innocent terms as immigrants and emigrants peacefully spreading across the land, building homes and clearing fields that they assumed were empty lands for the taking. Therefore, the purpose of settler colonialism is to challenge the ways that dominant narratives are told to keep Native perspectives of history and effects of colonialism hidden and not faced. Indeed, settler colonialism supports a consciousness that anyone can be blinded by, regardless of racial or ethnic background, and therefore is not only a problem for European descendants. Standing Up to Colonial Power is my effort to decolonize my own Native family history and be honest and face moments when my grandparents were implicated in colonialism, demonstrating that colonialism can be supported by Natives as well as non-Natives.51
Furthermore, settler colonialism includes a powerful gendered dimension. It infiltrates the most intimate places, even Indigenous peoples’ personal relationships. Through these “intimacies of empire,” Ann Stoler argues, racial classifications were created and challenged, and relations between colonizer and colonized powerfully defied or strengthened colonial power.52 Gendered settler colonialism works to destroy Indigenous kinship systems, trying to supplant them with the heteronormative and patriarchal Eurocentric kinship model of the nuclear family. It attacks Native masculinity, treating Indigenous men as nonmen, indeed as children. And it attempts to force Native women to follow white ideas of gender and submit to men’s wants and needs.
Scholars of settler-colonial studies work to transform the relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples to decolonize and create a better world for Natives, human beings overall, and all living things.53 Indigenous intellectuals, including Henry and Elizabeth Cloud, labored to reframe the conversation in support of Native sovereignty and to argue for a transformation of settler society through non-Natives learning, listening, and being changed from their involvement with Indigenous peoples.54
Understanding the settler-colonial pressures that motivated the speeches, writings, and stories of Henry and Elizabeth Cloud as Native intellectuals requires a broader discussion of the dominant discourses and federal policies they confronted, including the rhetoric of civilizing and assimilating.55 The principal assumption of the dominant discourses was the inferiority of Native American cultures, including our philosophies, languages, cultural practices, and spirituality.56 By the late nineteenth century, colonizers assumed Native peoples’ cultures were a vanishing, primitive past. And for our Indigenous ancestors to progress into the future, they were expected to replace their cultural traditions with Western civilization. The federal government enacted awful policies to attempt to force Natives to erase our tribal identities, spirituality, and cultures. These policies greatly traumatized our Native ancestors. The legacies of these policies continue today with tremendous Native language loss, increased teenage suicide, and many other issues.
In the 1880s, near the conclusion of Natives’ armed opposition, the federal government passed the Allotment Act of 1887, an act that appealed to assimilation rather than violence to fulfill settler colonialism. The act worked to abrogate Native treaty rights and other special statuses, so the U.S. state could absorb Native Americans. The government divided Indigenous land into individual allotments. Heads of household, meaning Native men, were given 160 acres, single individuals were entitled to 80 acres, and those under eighteen years old were given 40 acres. Married women were not eligible for land under the original act. As a result, the Allotment Act supported the formation of heteropatriarchal households. Four years later each adult could receive 80 acres of land, regardless of family status.57 Supporters of the Allotment Act assumed Native men would assimilate, learning white norms, becoming farmers, and submitting to whites, and Native women would assimilate, becoming farmwives and submitting to men. Then the millions of acres of “surplus” land were made available for white settlers and railroad development. In 1887 Natives owned 138 million acres, and by 1934, when the Allotment Act ended, Natives owned 54 million acres.58
Working in tandem with the Allotment Act’s new program of assimilation, whites began to educate Native children in an attempt to prepare our Native ancestors for productive roles in white society and break our attachment to our Indigenous land. If Native children assimilated and no longer wanted their Indigenous lands, then more land would become available for the colonizers’ use. Breaking Native children’s sense of attachment to Indigenous land is, therefore, an act of settler colonialism. Starting in the 1880s white reformers’ goals included child removal and placement in boarding schools. Government officials favored compulsory removal to reduce the influence of Native mothers, who were assumed to be “unfit.” Estelle Reel, a longtime superintendent of Indian schools, explained, “The Indian child must be placed in school before the habits of barbarous life become fixed and there he must be kept until contact with our life has taught him to abandon his savage ways and walk in the path of Christian civilization.”59 From 1879 to 1902 the federal government created more than 150 boarding schools, 25 of which were off-reservation. The government hired police officers to convince parents to enroll their children, promising their children would be fed, housed, and educated. Native parents were often “convinced” under great duress.60
Upon Native children’s arrival at boarding schools, government employees immediately cut our ancestors’ hair and provided settler clothing, including military-style uniforms. The children were punished for speaking Native languages or practicing their Indigenous religions and rituals. Government employees taught boys to follow white notions of gender, including sexism, and to become heads of household, instructing them to be submissive to whites and teaching them farming and the trades. Girls were taught white female-gender norms and how to become wives, be submissive to males and whites, and perform domestic duties. The purpose of whites’ education of Natives was a “social death.” Col. Richard H. Pratt, the founder and head of the Carlisle federal boarding school, gave a famous speech in 1892: “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”61
These settler-colonial worldviews of civilization and assimilation influenced the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a U.S. governmental apparatus created to control and colonize Native people, our land, and natural resources.62 The BIA, initially known as the Office of Indian Affairs, was founded in 1824 as a settler-colonial tool to both assimilate and civilize Indigenous populations by executing federal Indian policy, starting with the huge land clearances in the U.S. South.63 First the BIA was part of the War Department, then in 1849 it shifted to the recently established Department of the Interior (DOI). Since the very start the BIA worked hard to assimilate and colonize Native Americans, our land, and natural resources by making bureaucratic maps and inventories centrally positioned in Washington DC and relying on a huge network of military forts, Native agencies, and Christian missionaries throughout Indian Country. Since at least 1870, when the federal government allocated money to private corporations for railroad construction rather than to Natives, the BIA worked with white corporations.64 The railroad also had timber interests, and with the assistance of a ruthless military campaign and federal Indian policy, Natives were dispossessed of their lands and natural resources.
Colonizers assumed the discourse of civilization and assimilation was the answer to the so-called Indian problem, and this excruciating rhetoric must have been at the forefront of the minds of Elizabeth and Henry Cloud. Native intellectuals at the time also felt the need to establish that we as Native peoples were fully human. Debates about the humanity of Indigenous peoples include the famous argument between the Spaniards Bartolomé de Las Casas, who argued in support of Native virtues, and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued that in the Americas one could barely see traces of humanity in Indigenous peoples. Even by the start of the twentieth century, U.S. policies assumed Natives were human enough to be assimilated but still argued they were an underdeveloped people.65 Furthermore, racist discourses transformed Natives into an “other,” differentiated from whites of European racial stock. Thus, the Clouds and other Native intellectuals endeavored to prove Native humanity equal to white humanity. Indeed, at this historical juncture, Native intellectuals even worked to create a common humanity with whites who saw them as inferior, subhuman “savages.”
Many Society of American Indians members, including the Clouds, argued for Native Americans’ U.S. citizenship. Hazel Hertzberg and other scholars called these thinkers assimilationists, but this portrayal is inaccurate.66 The Clouds and other procitizenship Native intellectuals were not in favor of following Richard Pratt and erasing tribal identities. Instead, following Maddox’s argument, they used rhetorical strategies to be heard in the public sphere during an incredibly racist time. By mixing progressive notions, dominant discourses of racial uplift, and Native points of view, posits Maddox, these intellectuals established a speaking position that a mainstream audience could understand. Natives’ struggle for U.S. citizenship was a fight to attain the recognition, rights, and protections afforded to white citizens.67 At the same time, this battle for incorporation into the U.S. nation-state had its limitations; it could weaken the fight for tribal sovereignty.68
Despite Maddox’s argument that Native members of the SAI were intellectuals, Henry and Elizabeth Cloud have not been recognized as Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe intellectuals who used speeches, writing, and advocacy to fight for Native peoples.69 As I began working on this family-tribal history, I read notes written by my mother, Woesha Cloud North. She describes her parents’ writing as a “thicket of white ideas,” and this points to how her parents had to negotiate an extremely racist, settler-colonial context. To be heard in the public sphere, their speeches and writing had to incorporate both white and Native ideas. Woesha’s idea of a “thicket” suggests how much her parents had to cover themselves in a white-centric camouflage while working toward positive social change for Native Americans. Both Henry and Elizabeth Cloud, as well as other Native intellectuals of this period, used white reform groups to gain access to political power, support, and resources. In this context using white-centric rhetoric was certainly necessary to work for Native goals and objectives. The Clouds have likely been understudied, because they were criticized for being assimilationists despite their tribal-centric agendas, which contradicted their support of acculturation. Another possible reason is that the Clouds’ use of dominant Christian rhetoric might be challenging for contemporary audiences to the point that subversive actions and words could be missed. Furthermore, as a granddaughter of the Clouds, I grew up listening to family stories about them that are often not present in their published writing, giving me a family-tribal perspective to understand them. Along with the literatures of settler colonialism and Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe studies, this book builds on the scholarship of the Progressive Era, including the work of Philip Deloria, Frederick Hoxie, Kristina Ackley, Cristina Stanciu, Cathleen Cahill, and many others.70 The book builds on the work of Native American literary critics, such as Robert Warrior and Mishauna Goeman, who highlight the subversive potential of Native peoples’ writing.71 It relies on the emerging field of Native feminisms.72 And the book builds on these literatures by discussing a Native feminist approach, filling a gap in history, and honoring the Clouds as intellectuals who challenged and subverted colonialism.
My experience researching and writing about my grandparents has taught me some important methodological lessons about family-tribal history from an Indigenous and gendered lens.73 The first lesson I learned was archival material related to Native families can include information that’s not appropriate for public consumption. Indeed, individuals can choose to place archive material that Native family members wish were not in the public domain. For example, upon a person’s death, families can donate letters to archives without discussing their decision with other family members. Because archival information can contain sensitive material, it is essential to consult the family to determine what information can be written about. Respecting a Native family’s wishes is fundamental to protecting our right to privacy. It is a crucial ethical principle to follow and, consequently, a Native methodological concern. Indeed, rather than viewing Native peoples’ lives as data for outside researchers to use to produce theory, we as Indigenous peoples demand the incorporation of our own needs, insights, and research agendas into the development and publication of any study, including family-tribal history.74 Classic anthropologists’ ethnographic observations of Indigenous peoples allowed imperial power to scrutinize us without consent and without taking Native peoples’ analyses seriously. Likewise, archival researchers who use an imperial gaze to analyze Indigenous peoples’ letters—without consent and without taking Native analyses seriously—are using a colonial methodology. I occupy a complicated position as both an outsider and an insider, since I am an academic and the granddaughter of Elizabeth and Henry Cloud. My dual social position encourages me to weave my reflections throughout the text from both of these distinct points of view. In this way I bring ethnography and family-tribal history together.75
Anther methodological lesson I learned was the value of using intersectional analysis when analyzing primary and secondary documents. Discussing the linkage between various oppressions, such as race, class, gender, and settler colonialism, encourages us not to make the mistake of emphasizing one kind of exclusion over another. Placing these intersecting oppressions and tribal sovereignty both at the center of one’s analysis is a move toward developing a Native feminist awareness. Certainly, the first step toward decolonizing our ancestral histories is naming experiences as colonial. Because the Clouds confronted dominant discourses, I analyze the narratives they employed to be heard in the public sphere, mixing both Native and white rhetoric, which is a further Native feminist approach.
Finally, I learned the significance of highlighting our Native ancestors’ agency, perspectives, and positions. I use long quotes from the Clouds’ writings and speeches to highlight their intellectual prowess and points of view. Their Indigenous perspectives of the past can help us reconstruct a Native-centric history as well as empower us as a people. Together all of these methodological concerns explain why I choose to categorize this family-tribal history of my grandparents as a Native feminist approach.
As part of my effort to decolonize, I choose to call my grandparents the Clouds and not the Roe Clouds. Henry dropped his middle name “Clarence,” which was given to him in the federal boarding school Genoa, and replaced it with the name “Roe,” because the Roes, a white missionary couple, informally adopted him as a young Ho-Chunk man in his twenties. Henry relied on this relationship with Walter and Mary Roe to help him with educational loans, support him while he was attending Yale, and provide him with white upper-middle-class resources. The resources he gained through his relationship with the Roes helped Henry found the American Indian Institute (AII), a college-preparatory Christian high school for Native boys (the Clouds wished the school could include girls, but it wasn’t possible at the time). But, as chapter 1 discusses, this informal adoption was ultimately a colonial relationship. Thus, I generally choose to drop “Roe” when referring to my grandparents, Henry and Elizabeth.
The Clouds fought stereotypes against Native people to create a world where we, as Native Americans, could become full members of U.S. society and Native communities. Their recent public acknowledgment can be attributed to a new trend in historical and Native studies literature (see for example, Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places and Scott Lyon’s X-Marks) that places Natives as central to discussions of modernity, rather than outside of modernity, and even outside of history itself.76 This book is my attempt to contribute to this new trend by discussing Henry and Elizabeth Cloud’s intellectual work and activism, using a Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe family point of view, and relying on the notions of the hub, settler colonialism, and Native feminisms.
Chapter 1 argues that Henry Cloud, in his autobiographical narrative, relied on doubleness to assert a Native position, while writing for a missionary journal. As a Native and a Christian, he mixed white and Native rhetoric in his writing and speeches. As a modern Ho-Chunk man and warrior, he appropriated the white notion of the self-made man to increase his power in white society. Cloud’s use of Ho-Chunk trickster strategies, including doubleness, shape-shifting, storytelling, humor, and creativity, helped him thrive in white schools. He argued for Natives to attend college, challenging racist ideas that Natives were not smart enough. He created a modern Ho-Chunk warrior identity by adding white concepts to his Ho-Chunk self. He created Ho-Chunk–centric hubs to help him survive, excel, and maintain his Ho-Chunk identity while a Yale University student and become the first “full-blood” Native to graduate with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.
Chapter 2 investigates Henry Cloud’s involvement in the SAI and his successful activist and intellectual work to free Geronimo, an Apache, and assist the Apaches, who chose to remain in Oklahoma and struggle against the federal government. It argues Henry Cloud, as a Ho-Chunk intellectual, combined his Yale education and his warrior training to fight for the Apaches. It also discusses Elizabeth Cloud’s childhood on the White Earth Reservation, her white schooling, her involvement in the SAI, her marriage to Henry, and her partnership with him to run the American Indian Institute. In this chapter I assert that Elizabeth and Henry ran the AII, a Native hub, following complementary gender roles, and the school encouraged young men to become educated warriors for their tribes while challenging settler colonialism. It argues Elizabeth used doubleness, using both Native and white rhetoric, while combining Ojibwe and white notions of gender in her writing.
Chapter 3 examines Henry Cloud’s coauthorship of the Meriam Report of 1928 and Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, arguing he was more centrally involved than is usually understood. He critiqued the colonial aspect of IRA’s tribal constitution-writing process and the deleterious effects of the Allotment Act, thus challenging settler colonialism. It asserts that his involvement in writing reports that exposed the abuse rampant in federal boarding schools contested settler colonialism and reveal his potency as a modern Ho-Chunk warrior, intellectual, and activist. It argues that racism prevented Cloud from being taken seriously as a candidate for the commissioner of Indian Affairs. As a Ho-Chunk intellectual and activist, he used his settler-colonial position as superintendent of Haskell, a federal boarding school, to close the jail. All the while he supported Native history, culture, and cultural citizenship, and, as a member of his tribal council, he worked on Ho-Chunk land issues and other concerns.
Chapter 4 investigates the work of Henry and Elizabeth Cloud on the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon. It argues that the Indian Service transferred Henry to be an Indian agent as a punishment for his criticism of the Indian Service. His new position meant a big drop in pay and an attempt to get him to quit. He transformed his settler-colonial position from an Indigenous lens, supporting tribal sovereignty by arguing for Native hunting and fishing rights, challenging racism, and trying to change the settler-colonial Happy Canyon and Wild West Show performances, while being more flexible and open to listening to Natives’ concerns in comparison to the prior white Indian agent Omar L. Babcock. Cloud’s Ho-Chunk intellectual work was pathbreaking and foundational to Ho-Chunk and Native studies. He used treaties to support his argument regarding tribes’ hunting and fishing rights, and he discussed Native notions of conservation, Indigenous history, and settler colonialism. Elizabeth founded the Oregon Trail Women’s Club, a Native hub for Indigenous women on the Umatilla Reservation, which supported women’s empowerment and leadership while developing their tribal and modern identities.
Chapter 5 examines Elizabeth Cloud’s efforts as a member of NCAI and her intellectual work on the national stage—she was named American Mother of the Year and Indian Welfare chair of the GFWC. While initially she seemed to view termination as inevitable, later, as the field secretary of NCAI and Indian welfare chair of GFWC, she fought against tribal termination. With her title as Mother of the Year, she relied on storytelling, doubleness, and shape-shifting in her struggle for tribal sovereignty and Native cultural citizenship. And as the assistant director of the American Indian Development (AID) project for NCAI, she organized community workshops and pantribal hubs while supporting the development of tribal self-determination and sovereignty. This chapter argues that Cloud, even in her capacity as a “good” Christian woman, was subversive. She wore professional dresses and great hats as camouflage, while underneath she was a powerful Ojibwe warrior woman, fighting in support of tribal sovereignty and struggling for Native cultural citizenship. She was complicated, a shape-shifter, citizen, warrior, and Christian. She was simultaneously a “good” and “bad” Indian. Elizabeth Cloud, as an Ojibwe intellectual, warrior woman, and member of NCAI, backed women’s right to be on tribal councils and supported gender and tribal sovereignty and even later discussions of Native feminisms.