1 Henry Cloud’s Childhood and Young Adulthood

In this chapter I discuss Henry Cloud’s early years, his youth on the Winnebago Reservation with his beloved family, his Ho-Chunk education, and his training in white schools, including Yale University. In his published autobiographical narrative for a missionary journal, a doubleness is present that revolves around his Christian conversion. Even while writing for a white Christian audience, he remains true to his Native position. As a child, he refused to forget his Ho-Chunk language and identity, resisting the federal government’s settler-colonial attempt to assimilate him in the federal boarding schools and challenging the conservative Christian doctrine that pagan identities must be forgotten. As a Native and Christian, he had access to white ideas, which he strategically used for Native goals and objectives. As an orator and writer, he was able to perform in various cultural registers, using both Eurocentric and Indigenous concepts to sway his audience. As a Ho-Chunk modern man and warrior, he appropriated the popular rhetoric of white masculinity of the “self-made man” to increase his power in white society, ultimately challenging attempts of settler-colonial forces to take away his masculine power and turn him into a “non-man.”

Later in his life, during a speech to a graduating class of Alaska Native students, Cloud articulated a strong Ho-Chunk position. Indeed, Cloud had a tremendous sense of humor and was a great teller of tales. He attributed his storytelling ability to his precious Ho-Chunk grandmother, who would tell him stories only in the winter.1 Cloud used Ho-Chunk trickster strategies to help him survive and excel in the midst of colonialism, including doubleness, shape-shifting, humor, and creativity. Cloud was a Ho-Chunk intellectual, who argued that Natives should attend college, thus challenging settler-colonial and racist assumptions that Natives were not smart enough. He developed a modern Ho-Chunk warrior identity by adding white concepts to his core Ho-Chunk philosophy and educational training. His additive, flexible, and fluid cultural and intellectual methodology disputes the subtractive and static approach of federal boarding schools and classic anthropology—both of which are linked to settler colonialism. He created Ho-Chunk–centric hubs to support his Ho-Chunk identity and culture while living away from his tribe.

Ho-Chunk, “People of the Big Voice,” and Removals

Some historical background regarding the Ho-Chunk will help to set the scene for Cloud’s childhood and his later life. The Ho-Chunk, or the “People of the Big Voice,” lived for centuries in our homelands in present-day Wisconsin. In 1634 the Ho-Chunks encountered the French settler Jean Nicolet when he landed at Red Banks, Wisconsin. The French called our Ho-Chunk people the Winnebago. (Even though I am an enrolled member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, I will be using the name Ho-Chunk: an act of decolonization, as this is the name we gave ourselves.) Due to colonization Ho-Chunks are now divided into two distinct tribal nations. These two tribal nations are the Ho-Chunk Nation, whose members live on our traditional homelands in Wisconsin, and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, whose members live on the reservation in Nebraska created by the federal government. The Ho-Chunk Nation reclaimed their original tribal name in 1994.2

As soon as the colonizer arrived, our people began experiencing settler colonialism. Colonizers made treaties with our Ho-Chunk ancestors to dispossess us of our precious and cherished land. As part of the Treaty of 1825, our tribal territory extended from Green Bay, beyond Lake Winnebago, to the Wisconsin River and the Rock River in Illinois, including 8.5 million acres. Once colonization started, our story as Ho-Chunks is one of much suffering and incredible hardships. Much of our misery began in the late 1820s, when miners began to pour into southwestern Wisconsin. Treaty commissioners promised they would punish whites who entered Ho-Chunk lands. But the lure of mineral-rich, lush farmlands proved too strong, and the colonizer sincerely believed that Indigenous lands were available for the taking. Within ten years the federal government reversed its position and forced the Ho-Chunk to sell our land at a meager percentage of its value. Federal officials then forcibly removed our Ho-Chunk ancestors from Wisconsin.

After the signing of the 1832 treaty, the Ho-Chunk were first removed to land in Iowa, called the “Neutral Ground”; it was supposed to act as a buffer between the Sac and Fox and Dakota Nations. We were then removed to a wooded region of northeastern Minnesota in 1846, to act as a barrier between the Ojibwe and the Lakota. Consequently, the Ho-Chunk suffered from the raids of both tribes. After the signing of the 1855 treaty, the federal officials removed the Ho-Chunk to land near the Blue Earth River in southern Minnesota. As soon as we arrived, white settlers demanded our removal yet again. In 1863 our people were forcibly removed to the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota, and more than 550 people died on our horrific journey. The Ho-Chunk requested that the federal government exchange their South Dakota reservation for lands near the friendly Omahas in 1865. The Omahas’ reservation was situated in northeastern Nebraska, next to the Missouri River and close to present-day South Sioux City, Iowa.3

The memories of our Ho-Chunk ancestors include stories about being rounded up at gunpoint, loaded into boxcars, and shipped to our reservation in Nebraska. My mother told me that there were many Ho-Chunk casualties as a result of these multiple removals. Being forcibly removed away from our homelands is a psychic wound that we, as the descendants, carry within our hearts, spirits, and minds. My grandfather’s parents were likely born in the 1860s, suffered through this very difficult history, and lived on our newly created reservation in Nebraska next to the Missouri River. After these removals many Ho-Chunks returned to their ancestral homelands in Wisconsin and eventually created the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin.

Cloud and Ho-Chunk Naming

Henry Cloud’s Ho-Chunk name was Wo-Na-Xi-Lay-Hunka, meaning “War Chief.” Cloud describes it in a letter in a metaphorical rather than literal way as the “Chief of the Place of Fear.”4 Ho-Chunk naming provides the clan and the family a mechanism to emphasize the child’s place in a support system, and this network, or Ho-Chunk hub, serves the child throughout life. Remembering the circumstances of naming and the crucial role it plays is fundamental to Ho-Chunk education. Naming ceremonies are tribal educational structures that introduce one’s place in the tribe and the universe. Children were often named at tribal feasts.5

Cloud was a member of the Thunderbird Clan—the clan, he explained, that “obstructed and permitted war.”6 Cloud’s father, Chayskagah (White Buffalo), told a significant prophecy about his son. During a winter when food became very scarce, his son did not eat for ten days. Then his father found a frozen beaver hut, killed the animals, traded some of their skins for corn, boiled the beaver meat, and prepared a feast. During the feast his father discussed his prophecy. He told his son, “Eat, War Chief, for I am hungry but will not eat until you have tasted food. I am old and it makes no difference if I starve, but you are young. The future of the Winnebagos [Ho-Chunks] lies within you.”7 White Buffalo told War Chief this important prophecy, which, according to my mother, encouraged her dad throughout his life to fight as a Ho-Chunk warrior for the survival and in defense of his people. This story also shares a core value of a Ho-Chunk warrior identity: put the survival of the young before one’s own continued existence. Cloud’s telling and retelling this powerful story created a Ho-Chunk–centric, gendered hub—not based in geographic space but carried in his heart and mind even as he lived away from his Ho-Chunk people.

Cloud’s name and clan membership were central to his identities as a Ho-Chunk man, leader, and modern-day warrior. From a Ho-Chunk perspective a warrior not only fought in war for the survival of his people but also was a servant to his people, placing the needs of others first. My mother, Woesha, taught me that learning strength and self-discipline is central to a Ho-Chunk warrior identity. The traditional practice of fasting taught this value at an early age. Going without food and water for four days is not an easy task but rather a practice that helped Ho-Chunk boys and girls become strong, self-disciplined, and close to Ma-un-a (Ho-Chunk for Earth Maker or Creator). Indeed, fasting is a crucial Ho-Chunk educational experience. It is through fasting that a child learns self-control, beginning with short-lived fasting experiences that gradually become of longer duration, while connecting to the spiritual world.8

Cloud was born in a traditional Ho-Chunk bark home next to the Missouri River on the Winnebago Reservation, surrounded by his family and tribe. Cloud and his family felt closely connected to the seasons and natural surroundings, including the powerful Missouri River. His father, Chayskagah (White Buffalo) and his mother, Hard to See, picked wild plants to eat and reeds from the water to craft mats for sleeping.9 His beloved grandmother’s name was Mashunpeewingah (or Good Feather Woman), the same name I was given as a child at our Ho-Chunk naming ceremony in Winnebago, Nebraska.10 Ho-Chunk names incorporate the “-gah” suffix when one is talking about the person and in direct address drop the suffix.

Our family story is that Hard to See married often because flu epidemics and diseases caused the deaths of many Ho-Chunks, including Hard to See’s husbands. My Ho-Chunk relatives Francis Cassiman and Alice Mallory Porter, with the assistance of our cousin Robin Butterfield, prepared our genealogy. Hard to See was married to James Noble and together had their daughter, Hahmpgoomahnee’inga, or Susan Noble Ewing; to another Ho-Chunk whose name is no longer remembered and birthed a son, Anson Brown; to Charlie Rice and had a son, Fred Rice (whom I gratefully met, as he was present at our family’s Ho-Chunk naming); to Yellow Cloud; and to Chayskagah (White Buffalo). Many years later, when Cloud’s children wanted to celebrate his birthday, he chose December 28, 1884, but the actual date could have been one year earlier.11

Cloud’s autobiography, “From Wigwam to Pulpit: A Red Man’s Own Story of His Progress from Darkness to Light,” is a tale of his conversion to Christianity.12 He describes stark contrasts within his traditional Ho-Chunk upbringing. He discusses the inviting smells of meat roasting over the fire in his one-room, circular wigwam, where he, his brother, mother, father, and sometimes his grandmother lived. He describes the lean times he experienced when he went to bed without supper, and he recalls the kindness of being woken up and fed first when food was brought home in the middle of the night. (As already discussed, feeding the young first is central to a Ho-Chunk warrior identity.) He recounts the harshness of his uncle’s disciplinary measures, which were generally a result of Cloud disobeying his grandmother, refusing fasting, fighting other Indian boys, or crying without sufficient reason. This fear of discipline usually kept him and his brother from disobedience.

Even though his life story is a Christian conversion tale, there are many suggestive details about his upbringing. His Ho-Chunk education regarding culture and tradition particularly signal the importance of his Ho-Chunk identity, thus creating a Ho-Chunk–centric virtual hub and showing the doubleness of the narrative. He describes how his grandfather taught him to dodge the arrows of his enemies, and his uncle showed him to worship and pray. He recounts how his father took him to the nearby Missouri River, built a fire, and taught him songs to sing to the fire and river while throwing offerings of tobacco, red feathers, and oak twigs. He tells how his family trapped beaver and otter for their skins, teaching him their use for ceremony and trade. Early on he learned to shoot bows and arrows, and his mother taught him traditional Ho-Chunk stories. For example, when he lost an arrow, his mother told him, that Wakdjunkaga (Jester) one of the sons of Ma-un-a had hidden it, and he must cry aloud to Wakdjunkaga to bring the arrow back. During winter he especially enjoyed hearing his grandmother’s stories. Her stories were of mighty deeds of heroes, war, spirits, nature, and her childhood. His grandmother’s stories, including those of Wakdjunkaga (the Don Quixote of Ho-Chunk lore), he explains, made the winter “one long laugh” for him. Later in life he told these traditional Ho-Chunk stories to his children.

In 1949, during the speech he gave to Alaska Natives graduating from Mount Edgecumbe federal boarding school, he recalled his grandmother telling him Ho-Chunk stories, creating a Ho-Chunk–centric hub:

In winter times, our grandmother . . . would say, “If you grandchildren want any stories, you must first get the wood.” And so we went into the woods and gathered all the dry wood and sticks that we could find because we lived in the woods. . . . And grandmother was very wise indeed to reserve her stories for the winter season when fifty degrees below zero was experienced and the ice-coated limbs were creaking above our heads above the wigwam. So we carried in the wood and we supplied all that she needed and we were warm in the wigwam as we listened to the stories. She used to tell us about these four great spirits. We called it cosmology and the world became a world full of spirits to me. . . . She often said that no child should eat the marrow of the bone because if he did he would loose his teeth. I later discovered that she had no teeth and could eat nothing but the marrow of the bone. She used to say that no child should eat a long ear of corn for . . . the long ear would be too long for the width of his stomach here. The long-eared corn would stick too far out and give him a pain in the side. . . . So we had nothing but short ears and grandmother and all the old people got all the long ears of corn.13

Cloud’s narrative portrays a sense of warmth and comfort, sitting together with his cherished and much-loved grandmother and family in their wigwam, protected from the frigid Nebraska winters, challenging the colonial representations of traditional Indigenous homes as primitive, dirty, and disorganized.14 Cloud emphasizes his grandmother’s wisdom and how she taught him about Ho-Chunk spirituality, cosmology, and important values, including contributing to the well-being of the community by bringing firewood. His grandmother also taught Ho-Chunk children to put the needs of elders first so they would have enough nutritious food to eat. By telling these stories, he shows the significance of Ho-Chunk humor, encouraging his audience of young Alaska Natives to laugh about his grandmother outwitting him while she protected the elders’ food supply. He also accentuates how central his grandmother and her storytelling were to his spiritual and intellectual development as a Ho-Chunk person.

Ho-Chunk storytelling is foundational to Ho-Chunk education. Waikun stories are about Ma-un-a, creations overall, or realms of the sacred. These Waikun tales can be shared only in winter, when snakes are below the ground and when Ho-Chunk children are focusing their minds. Although there is no sharp distinction between one kind of story or the other, Worak stories are about daily life. Waikun and Worak stories share elements, but the tales end differently. The Worak stories end tragically in death or a comparison of the incompleteness of the characters to life’s negative experiences.15

The aspects of the sacred and everyday life in Waikun and Worak tales can relate to cultural heroes who have both divine and human characteristics. The “clown” cultural heroes (that Paul Radin and others call tricksters) have both Waikun and Worak importance, and their stories are not to be told during the summer. According to Minnie Littlebear, a Ho-Chunk intellectual and elder, children could be told “clown stories.” Littlebear gives examples of Keh-chung-geh-ga (Turtle) and Wax-chung-gay-ga (Hare) stories.16 These clown stories could be humorous, and in fact humor is central to our Ho-Chunk culture.

Various kinds of stories, according to Felix White Sr., Ho-Chunk elder and intellectual, were told at various stages of a Ho-Chunk child’s development, depending on the child’s maturity. White emphasizes that Ho-Chunk children heard stories, and that stories were a sort of developmental psychology. Stories taught children suitable behavior from aunts, uncles, elders, and other family members.17 Thus, Cloud’s grandmother and parents were pivotal and powerful Ho-Chunk educators for him as a young boy.

When Cloud discusses his traditional Ho-Chunk spiritual knowledge in a missionary journal, he shows his uncertainty of specific aspects by using quotation marks. He thus proves himself to be a good Christian, telling a story the colonizer would find appropriate and showing the doubleness of the narrative. He learned how to fast, seek visions, and ask for spiritual guidance from Ma-un-a. The purpose of these fasts is to receive compassion and blessing from the spirits. While giving these gifts, the spirits reveal themselves. These mighty spirits impart powers and secrets to Natives that can be used for war, the hunt, and medicine. Fasting helps prepare Indians for hard times in war and during sickness. When Cloud discusses the importance of fasting, he places quotation marks around certain words to show his skepticism of these spiritual practices. He writes, “Any one who has such a ‘dream’ is considered blessed beyond his fellows.” Later he told his children that fasting was a helpful practice, which taught self-discipline and inner strength, a central component of a Ho-Chunk warrior identity. Showing a change in perspective later in life, he even said he believed people could receive blessings from the Creator through this practice. He also writes, “I have heard many Indians call upon the ‘Spirit’ whom they claim to have seen and heard.” By inserting the word “claim” and placing quotation marks around the word “Spirit,” he questions whether the Indian actually sees the Spirit. Indeed, he emphasizes that he never had a dream himself.18

In the same speech to graduating Alaska Native students in 1949, Cloud carves out another Ho-Chunk–centric hub and describes the crucial role of fasting, connecting to Ho-Chunk spirituality, and including one’s guardian spirit, the Great Spirit, and the four Great Spirits from the four directions. In this venue Cloud could be open. He appears not to cover himself in as much camouflage in comparison to his writing in the missionary journal. Cloud’s examination of Ho-Chunk spirituality underscores the significance of fasting as a regimen and an institution that acts as a conduit to communicate to the spiritual world. His use of the words “institution” and “regime” underscores Ho-Chunk spirituality as a philosophy to be taken seriously rather than automatically discounted as pagan, and thus lower on the socioevolutionary scale between civilized and primitive. He explains,

I was taught there were four great spirits in [the] universe, commanding the four corners of the universe and under them there were a hierarchy of spirits innumerable and certain definite authorities and responsibilities were given these spirits to govern their section of the universe, and under these spirits there were other spirits who could communicate with human beings on the face of this earth and to those the Great Spirit intended that the Red men of America should approach and become acquainted with and have fellowship with in due time. And the institution that was set up for this communion and fellowship was fasting periods, eating nothing four days and nights. So I passed through that regime and after the fourth day hunger seized my brother and me and thirst. And father and mother promised that we would have something to eat at the end of the fourth day’s fasting. In the meantime, we went into the deep woods on the banks of the Missouri River to pray to these spirits that some (one) of them might take pity and speak out of the eternal heavens and to our souls. . . . We were encouraged not to be common men but to become uncommon men that the common man of this world, without supernatural assistance, did not amount to anything and success is prohibited at this time. . . . There must be in your soul a guardian spirit to assist you and that was what we were seeking and trying to achieve.19

Cloud’s arduous Ho-Chunk warrior training, which included fasting and learning to rely on spirituality, enabled him to weather many difficult challenges during this time, including going without food, as it was often scarce. Cloud alludes to how his parents used fasting and connection to one’s Creator and guardian spirit as a training for him to become an “uncommon” man. Ho-Chunk boys and girls were expected to fast, and adults were not considered a fully grown man or woman unless they tried fasting.20 However, since as a teenager Cloud converted to Christianity, it is surprising that Cloud emphasizes that his Ho-Chunk training encouraged him to become an uncommon man. His discussion of fasting at sixty-five years old is much more Ho-Chunk–centric than his writing in a missionary journal in 1915, which highlights, in a skeptical tone, that he never did have a fasting vision.21

These differing viewpoints point to his Ho-Chunk trickster ability of doubleness. He wrote in a way that the colonizer would not find objectionable in a missionary journal. These divergent perspectives could also allude to a relaxing of his strict Christian position one year before his death as compared to his younger days or not feeling comfortable to be totally honest when writing in a missionary journal. His sharing of Ho-Chunk knowledge also reflects his respect for his tribal philosophy, encouraging young Alaska Natives to value their Indigenous knowledge. Furthermore, his discussion points to his development of a strong Ho-Chunk spiritual foundation, on which he later added his Christian training. In other words, rather than totally reject his Ho-Chunk educational and spiritual training, he greatly relied on various aspects.

When Cloud discusses his brother being forcibly taken to Genoa, a federal Indian boarding school, he switches the tone of his speech from humorous to somber. The purpose of these federal boarding schools was to assimilate Natives into American society, punishing Native students for speaking our Indigenous languages and teaching subservience to whites, not leadership of our own people.22 In 1879 Richard H. Pratt, a military man, founded Carlisle, the first federal boarding school (see introduction). At Carlisle and other boarding schools, policemen kidnapped Native children and forced our ancestors to attend these horrific settler-colonial environments far away from our loving families. They were unsafe, unhealthy, and abusive places, so our people suffered tremendously.23 Cloud discusses the schools:

One day a policeman came to our lodge in the wigwam in the deep woods and seized my older brother. They were taking him to [a federal boarding] school. . . . I was only five years of age. He was my only playmate. I cried a great deal in losing him so my mother agreed that I would go along with him. He [the policeman] took me to a government institution called Genoa, Nebraska and I stayed there for awhile and then came back to the reservation boarding school where we played all manner of games and learned to speak English and [later] they took me to Santee Mission School in Northeastern Nebraska and there I was taught to learn a trade.24

Cloud’s emphasis of his tremendous suffering and grief, regarding losing his brother, is an example of the sorrow Native children and our families experienced because of the federal-government schools that separated small children from their parents. Because a policeman forcibly took Cloud’s brother, and his mother allowed Cloud to accompany him, their parents became separated from two sons rather than only one. This separation must have caused enormous sadness for the entire family. Cloud recounts his brother being taken by force, using the word “seized,” to a federal boarding school, Genoa. And he speaks more positively about attending a school on the Winnebago Reservation, probably because he was close to his extended family and tribe, saying, “we played all manner of games.” The words “taken” and “seized” speak volumes regarding the lack of control, distress, and anguish Cloud experienced. Indeed, his difficult and painful federal boarding-school experience encouraged him to struggle to end this policy and coauthor the Meriam Report of 1928, which documented the abuses of the federal boarding schools. The fact that Cloud’s discussion of federal boarding-school policy was more open with Alaska Natives than in a missionary journal shows that he took off his mask when he wasn’t speaking to the colonizer.

In contrast, while discussing his boarding-school experiences in his autobiography published in white missionary journal, he holds back. To satisfy his white Christian audience, he does not openly discuss his traumatic experiences. At the same time, he remains true to his own Native position by mentioning that a Native classmate died there, showing the doubleness of the narrative. When he was a little boy, a policeman came to his home to take his brother “to see some writing,” in other words, to attend a government boarding school. Here Cloud discusses the dubious and nefarious tactics policemen used to trick Native children to accompany them to a federal boarding school. This instance represents another moment of subversion and critique of this settler-colonial policy, thus emphasizing his Native position. He remembers crying because he wished to be with his brother. He writes about how after two years he had forgotten his own Ho-Chunk language. He was there with Sioux, Omahas, Apaches, Potawatomis, Otoes, Arapahos, and Cheyennes. He forgot his language, he explains, because many Native children from other tribes surrounded him. He fails to mention that he was punished for speaking his tribal language, which was a very common practice in the boarding schools. His desire to not upset his white Christian audience, who would likely cringe when hearing boarding-school abuses, may explain this omission.

Cloud recounts other everyday events, such as fighting his classmate John Hunter (another Ho-Chunk and a very close friend), herding sheep, stealing grapes and cherries in the summer, going to the hospital with a splinter in his foot, and Fred Hensley dying at that school. His recounting the death of his Native classmate greatly shocked and disturbed me, as his granddaughter. It rings out as a moment in his Christian conversion narrative that is subversive, encouraging me to imagine the many Native children who suffered death and countless abuses in government boarding schools. In contrast, decades later, speaking to a Native audience, he was much more honest and open about his boarding-school experiences. While he was superintendent of the Umatilla Agency in 1941, during his address to other Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, he said, “Everything Indian was to be destroyed [in the boarding schools]. How well do I remember marching with a dozen other Indian lads half a day round and round in a room in the government school because we were talking our Native language.”25

After two years in this school, his family came to take him home. He rode on the back of a horse behind his dad, without saying a word. He could not understand his dad, and his dad could not understand him, since he could not longer speak in Ho-Chunk. He emphasizes in his Christian-conversion story that in three weeks’ time he remembered his Ho-Chunk language, and he never lost it for the rest of his life. By highlighting this very important fact in his story, he demonstrates his resistance to the federal government’s goal to assimilate him. He also shows his opposition to the aspect of Christian doctrine that teaches Indian converts that their Native identity is pagan and thus not commensurate with a civilized, Christian standard. Soon after this, he went to the Winnebago Industrial School in Macy, Nebraska.26

Conversion to Christianity

While attending the Winnebago Industrial School, he converted to Christianity. Every Cross Day or Sunday, he would march with others to a white building with a cross on it. He liked marching there because he was a member of the school band. He even got to march at the head of the procession, playing his cornet. At these meetings (Sunday school), the teachers gave them cards with pictures on them and would tell them about God, the Great Spirit. One dark night, when he was thirteen, long after midnight, an officer of the school woke him up and told him to go downstairs, because a man wanted to see him. The man waiting for him was Rev. William T. Findley, a Presbyterian minister. The same man led the Sunday school meetings and used to visit his family at their log cabin and wigwam in the woods near the river. The previous Cross Day, he explains, the lesson had been about “Christ before Pilate,” when Pilate was asked what he would do with Jesus. His teacher, Mrs. Findley, asked each of the Indian boys what they would do with Jesus. Cloud’s answer was that he would like to be his friend, and this response encouraged Mr. Findley to call for him that memorable night. I find it odd that Cloud describes his Christian conversion as occurring in the middle of the night. Maybe he decided to set his conversion tale to occur late at night to add a dramatic flair. Otherwise, it seems suspicious and strange for Mr. Findley to call a small Native boy out of bed. Indigenous children most likely would have felt scared, wondering if something dreadful was going to happen to them, especially in the context of an Indian mission school where children were routinely physically punished.

Findley and my grandfather sat together. Findley told him that Jesus Christ had a “real claim” on his friendship. My grandfather reveals that a Native idea of friendship encouraged him to accept Christianity. Friendship making, explains my grandfather, is a “meaningful and very formal act among Indians.” He learned that night that he would stand by Jesus, and Jesus would stand by him for the rest of his life. Thus, he accepted Christianity while relying on a Native belief about friendship. In other words, rather than rejecting Native ideas to accept Christianity, Ho-Chunk ideas were integral to his Christian conversion. This suggests that he accommodated Christianity while maintaining his Ho-Chunk core identity intact.27 By the end of the night, he became what the others Indians at the school called a “preaching listener,” a Native who accepted Christianity. In this way he combined an element of modernity, Christianity, with his Native identity.

His conversion to Christianity was not without challenges, however. He discusses how his family teased him and how his friends questioned his decision. Because of this conversion, he no longer played marbles for keeps. He joined a short-lived society called the Band of Mercy, which urged its members not to kill animals, causing more ridicule from the other Native children. His grandmother even warned him about the difficulties of becoming a Christian. She told him a story about a Christian Native who found out after his death that he was not accepted in either the white or Indian afterlife. Even though Cloud faced many challenges to his Christian beliefs, he kept his faith strong.28

Shortly before my grandfather’s conversion to Christianity, his mother, father, and grandmother all died in less than twelve months. I can only imagine how horribly difficult and traumatizing it must have been to become an orphan and lose three members of his very close family, one right after the other. My mother always told me that his family died from a flu epidemic that swept through the reservation during that time. Hearing how so many of my ancestors died around the same time shocked me as a young child. I remember picturing in my mind a horrific sight of my relatives getting ill and eventually dying after much suffering. It certainly makes sense that my grandfather would decide to convert to Christianity after the loss of so many members of his family. The notion of connecting to another friend, Jesus, must have felt comforting to a lonely, grief-stricken Ho-Chunk boy. After he lost his parents and grandparents, his beloved aunt, Alice Mallory, looked after him, and the local agency superintendent appointed John Nunn to be his guardian. The Mallory family, including the LaRose family, are our closest relatives, whom we always visit when we travel to Winnebago. And the “Mallory Song” is sung when we participate in honoring ceremonies on our reservation.

Santee Indian Mission School

Around 1898 or 1899 Cloud, along with seven other Winnebago boys, went to Santee Indian Mission School, a Presbyterian Indian boarding school, in northeastern Nebraska among the Sioux, one hundred miles away from home. After one week six of the Ho-Chunk boys ran way, and a week later the seventh boy told him that he was so homesick he could no longer stand being there. My grandfather struggled within himself about whether he should stay or go. Something greater than human power was at work in him, and he decided to stay.29 At the same time, Cloud’s discussion of how the other boys defied settler colonization and ran away is another place in his narrative that reflects his Native position.

In 1870 two Presbyterian missionaries, Thomas Williamson and Stephen Riggs, founded the Santee Indian Mission School. Their goal was to convert the Santee Sioux. By 1885 the school had eighteen buildings and more than 150 students. The school was unusual, since it differed from government boarding schools. Rather than teaching only vocational education, the school provided a general high-school curriculum. It offered courses in literature, history, music, and drawing.30 Also, teachers at the school taught in Dakota, not just in English. This was a radical departure from government boarding schools where Indigenous children were punished for speaking their Native language. Riggs ignored government regulations requiring classroom instruction in English. Cloud credited the school for teaching him in Dakota, a Native language, which he learned quickly as a student there. The school newspaper, Word Carrier, or Iapi Oave, was published in English and Dakota. Cloud, who worked in the print shop, argued that he could set type faster in Dakota than in English.31 As soon as he started school, he always dressed in a suit and a clean shirt unless he was working. He also read constantly. His white guardian, Nellie Nunn, used to say that he would lose his mind because he studied and read too much, and that he was five years ahead of his time.32

Santee Indian Mission School was in session from November through May. Back home in Winnebago, during the summers, there was work to be done for white farmers who had leased reservation land. Whites leasing Ho-Chunk land made it difficult for our people to survive, since it meant that most of the profits went to the white farmers. Cloud dug potatoes, threshed wheat, and shucked corn. Many years later he would tell his children that he was the best corn-husker in Nebraska. He also played baseball.33

Self-Help and Self-Support

The Santee mission school, according to Cloud, was where he read Samuel Smiles’s book Self-Help, which, he wrote, changed his life. Samuel Smiles filled his book with biographies, not of the great heroes of the rich but of achievers who worked hard and never gave up on their ambitions. Smiles hoped to encourage the ordinary man to better himself. The book sold around twenty thousand copies in the first year of publication, fifty-five thousand copies after five years, and about one quarter million by the end of the century.34 It is very likely that the vast majority of readers were men rather than women, especially since the biographies are all about men. It is, therefore, to men that Smiles delivers his message of hard work, self-denial, self-reliance, perseverance in the face of adversity, and a will to excel in business, industry, engineering, and the arts. Indeed, the primary purpose of the self-help ideal was to help the ordinary man become a self-made man. Smiles discusses the spirit of self-help as the root of all genuine growth in the individual. He also argues that the value placed on legislation as an agent for human advancement was overestimated and that, instead, the function of government is negative and restrictive rather than positive and active. After reading the book, Cloud discusses his resolution never to attend a government institution, to be self-supporting, and to earn his way through school.

In 1907 John M. Oskison, a Cherokee novelist and journalist who was an active member of the Society of American Indians, wrote that the public needed to recognize the emergence of a new Indian. This new Indian, he wrote, was capable of being self-supporting and could live off the reservation. Oskison emphasizes that there is a difference between the “modern Indian” and the “dirty beggar” who was formed by old conditions, such as the reservation system.35 Cloud’s use of the popular rhetoric of self-help was a creative strategy to align his Native identity with a positive image, the new Indian, who was not a dirty beggar but who was self-supporting, demonstrating his engagement with popular narratives of progress and modernity.

At Santee Indian Mission School, E. Jean Kennedy, a matron at the school, told Cloud about Mount Herman, a college-preparatory school for teenage boys. Kennedy had met Rev. Dwight L. Moody, who founded Mount Herman. It was a work-study school. Its mission was to help disadvantaged youth get ready for college. It had a strong Christian focus. Kennedy urged him to go, because Mount Herman could offer him a better education than Santee ever could. At this time sons of wealthy families, along with disadvantaged youth, who needed extra preparation to attend college, also attended the school.36

Northfield Mount Herman School

On May 28, 1901, Henry Clarence Cloud filled out his application to the college-preparatory Northfield Mount Herman School. He answered questions about his goal in life (“Gospel missionary”) and kind of education (under “Geography,” he jotted down, “very little”). His medical certificate in his application packet said he was nineteen years old, five feet eight and one-quarter inches tall, 142 pounds, with no medical problems.37

Riggs from Santee wrote in support of his application, but in a condescending tone, commenting on his race. “Henry C. Cloud is an exceptionally bright and reliable Indian boy. He is an earnest and consistent Christian. He has made good progress in his studies and in the industrial classes. You would not expect in him the grade of advancement of a white boy of the best advantages, but I can say that he is much better than the average Indian.”38

Findley also wrote in support of his application. “We have never seen anything amiss in him—he has stood the test of home life among his people, and that is a big thing to say. He is an intelligent young Christian of fine comprehension and splendid spirit. He is an Indian, but it is my opinion that few white boys of eighteen years surpass him in traits of character such as we most esteem. His ability is good as far as he has had opportunity to show development. Presumably everyone has a limit to ability and Indians sometimes show a limit sooner than the white race, but Dr. Riggs’s judgment in that line is much better than mine as the lad has been under his instruction for three years.”39

These two letters signal the racial and settler-colonial climate Cloud was living in. Native Americans were assumed to be inherently inferior to whites, lower on the social evolutionary ladder. Lewis Henry Morgan discusses notions of racial difference extensively in his 1877 influential book, Ancient Society. Morgan argues that all groups moved through two stages, savagery and barbarism, on their progress toward civilization, but they proceeded at very different rates. Relying on his universal theory of human evolution, Morgan argues that studying Native Americans could help one understand all of human history, because Indians’ relatively slow rate of progress as compared to whites made them a living museum of human development.40 Findley and Riggs seemed to share a racist assumption influenced by Morgan’s social evolutionary theory, which Findley expresses directly. Indians show a limit to their ability sooner than whites. Whites surrounded Cloud. Whites believed in these racist discourses, which are linked to settler colonialism. Placing Natives lower on a social-evolutionary scale provided white settlers an excuse to take over Indigenous land, forcibly place us in Native boarding schools, and eliminate us culturally.41 Cloud had to use his Ho-Chunk trickster strategies of camouflage and doubleness to not only survive but thrive.

Cloud left for Mount Hermon in 1902 before graduating from Santee Indian Mission School, with one hundred dollars sewn in his undershirt to guard against the dangers of traveling among white people. He feared that white people would steal his money.42 Here is another place in his autobiographical narrative where he asserts his Native perspective and position, again showing the doubleness of his writing in a missionary journal.

Cloud’s entrance examination demonstrated that he had some weaknesses. He passed the sections of the exam on the Bible, geography, penmanship, and spelling but failed English, grammar, arithmetic, and history. These difficulties were an indication of his schooling at Santee rather than his own personal lacking. His grade reports in his first year showed he had challenges, but his grades quickly improved, and he performed very well at this college-preparatory school. Math was always a tough field of study for him, but he did well in his Bible, history, and English classes. He took Greek, Latin, German, ancient history, European history, and physics. These kinds of classes were not taught at any school for Natives during this time.43

While at Mount Herman, Cloud could not return home for the holidays. He must have felt terribly lonely. During his first Christmas vacation, he was put to work. Mount Herman required all students to perform daily manual labor. He was told to dig a ditch fifteen feet deep for a water pipe. Cloud recounts,

I was digging that ditch with pickaxe and shovel, and I felt sorry for myself. They put me in here to dig this ditch because I had no home to go to and I had to stay there. I had that spirit in my heart when one day a young lad was placed beside me by the name of James McConaughy. [In 1946 McConaughy would became governor of Connecticut.] He lived on the campus; he did not need to go away to school; his father was one of the great teachers of the institution and they set him with me to dig the ditch. He didn’t have to work in that ditch, and I began to revise my feeling. Perhaps they put this young fellow in with me to dig this ditch because there is a water pipe that we are laying here that will be a source of great joy to the whole community. It’ll bring about contentment, health, and satisfaction to thousands of people in this neighborhood. . . . I wasn’t placed in that ditch because I was an orphan lad, but because of the great blessing my job would result for an entire community. . . . He and I discovered the great secret of life in that ditch, the dignity of labor and its quality to bless all mankind, even though the job itself may be despised by the uncritical.44

Cloud told this story to those graduating Alaska Native students in 1949. His words give us an insight into how he saw the world. One lesson he taught these Native students was that one should view the world as half-full rather than half-empty. In other words, it is important to see the positives in one’s experience rather than the difficulties. He also taught them the dignity of labor and its ability to teach people, whatever one’s class status. In this story, however, his discussions of labor were not so much about individual self-improvement, a white idea, but rather about contributing to the overall community, which is a Native-oriented concept. Thus, he refashioned a Eurocentric notion about the importance of individual labor into a Native idea about the significance of work to contribute to the group as a whole. Indeed, contributing to Native community well-being is fundamental to a Ho-Chunk warrior identity. Thus, my grandfather combined a white concept about individual labor with his Ho-Chunk warrior identity, supporting the creation of a Native male modern identity.

This self-supporting theme continues. He discusses how he had to leave Mount Herman for one year to make enough money to pay his way. So far he had paid for his school with lease money from his reservation allotment; some assistance from his guardian, John Nunn; and some gifts from alumni from Mount Herman whom he had impressed.45 He worked for an entire year on a farm in New Jersey to earn money. He learned to pay for what he received and came to understand the value of the dollar, the meaning of hard work, and the worth of time. These are all values that he discusses to prove he was closer to the “modern” Indian ideal than the “dirty beggar.” They were a good camouflage for portraying himself as a “good” Indian, not a “bad,” “dirty,” “primitive,” “lazy” Indian. As my grandfather followed a mule team all day long on this Jersey farm, he practiced his Greek conjugations. He wrote them on cards that he attached to his plow.

Self-Support and Self-Made Man

Being self-supporting is also inextricably linked to Cloud’s assertion of his masculine power—a self-made man who rose from humble beginnings. In the middle of the market revolution of the early to mid-nineteenth century, the “self-made” man embodied economic success and personal achievement and was a new type of heroic, white American man. Benjamin Franklin and Horatio Alger Jr. were self-made men. This new archetype incorporated an individualistic spirit of self-interest. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African American male leaders were also considered as examples of heroic masculinity. Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois were viewed as heroic fighters for racial equality. Their heroism originated not only from their ability to rise above an impoverished childhood, but, even more important, from their public commitment to their racially defined communities.46

Similarly, by emphasizing his humble beginnings and hardworking nature, Cloud appropriated the rhetoric of the self-made man. Cloud’s use of the self-made man could possibly act as another Ho-Chunk trickster strategy—a protective mask and a modern identity that could make him acceptable for the colonizer, a good Indian, despite his dealing with horrible racism. At the same time, he could hide any Ho-Chunk warrior subversive thoughts or actions. He was also incorporating aspects of a modern identity that could give him power in the public sphere. In this way he asserted a Native heroic masculinity during a time when the U.S. Western novel had greatly reduced Native male power. This masculine power was encapsulated by two extremes: those who remain standing and those who fall down. The prone were portrayed as nonmen, a category that included generally Natives, Mexicans, small children, and women. Even though Natives defeated George Armstrong Custer, for example, he is always portrayed as dying on his feet, emphasizing his white male masculinity.47 Cloud’s assertion of his self-made masculine character was a creative and smart strategy to increase his masculine power so that he would not be viewed as a Native nonman.

Cloud lived during a time when the white idea of masculinity was changing. Industrialization had transformed the labor force from a mostly agricultural and domestic industry to an economy where men departed their households daily to work jobs created by others. New masculine qualities, such as strength of character and competitiveness, were needed together with more old-fashioned personal characteristics, such as sobriety, honesty, politeness, industry, and diligence. As white-collar, corporate labor entailed less and less of the old-fashioned qualities, men spent time in the gym to build muscles, turned to sports, and joined fraternal organizations, all of which encouraged more physical, adventurous notions of masculinity than those needed by their workplace.48

Cloud’s story of finishing his education against great odds and his transformation from “savage” to “civilized” meant that he was a self-made man. His “exotic” past as a member of a tribe and a warrior pointed to his inherently masculine character. White men during this time romanticized the frontier and wanted to be physically strong outdoorsmen. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, changed his rather effeminate appearance to look more like an adventurous frontiersman. Thus, Cloud could fit within these popular notions of masculinity better than most. His Native American features could remind whites that even though he dressed in white man’s clothing, he was also a “savage” and a “warrior” with physical and spiritual capacities.49

At Mount Herman Cloud excelled not only in academics but also in sports. He was on the football team in 1905. Unfortunately, he became injured. He hurt his shoulder and broke his arm and nose. Even so, he was also on the baseball team in 1905 and 1906. He finished second in the hundred-yard dash during Mount Herman’s track-and-field day on August 7, 1905.50 Cloud’s involvement in athletics in an all-white college-preparatory school was another strategy to be viewed as a real man instead of a Native nonman. At the turn of the century, white masculinity relied not only on the image of the frontiersman but also on stereotypical notions of Native masculinity. White men embraced an ideal that stressed physical prowess, including stereotypical notions of Native warrior identity, while creating a linkage between white supremacy and male dominance. Custer, for example, embodied masculine notions of a warrior and a masculine drive to conquer and succeed.51 Cloud’s involvement in sports could fit into the popular Native male stereotype of a man with innate physical prowess. At the same time, his athleticism could be viewed as his attempt to reappropriate the male prowess imagery stolen from stereotypical Native notions of masculinity—and in the process increase his own masculine power.

Cloud’s participation in sports was also a way for him to create a Ho-Chunk–centric hub and connect to his Ho-Chunk identity while being away from his tribe in Winnebago, Nebraska. Even though he lived away from our people, every time he played sports it could stimulate memories of playing baseball back home on the Winnebago Reservation. Cloud’s involvement in athletics at a white school was in fact a continuation of his reservation athletic activities and therefore a strategy for him to feel a connection to his Ho-Chunk tribe and his people. Being involved in sports was also a traditional Ho-Chunk activity. Native Americans have been involved in physical activity and games since before colonization. Lacrosse, for example, is a game that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and other northeast tribes, as well as the Ho-Chunk, played. The Ho-Chunk also used bows and arrows to compete against one another, a game now named archery. They played the game “Chunkey,” in which a circular “chunkey stone” was rolled over the ground or ice. Many players flung spears to try to establish where the stone would stop. The nearest player, whose spear did not strike the stone, won the game. These games were important for the Ho-Chunk because they improved dexterity, hand-eye coordination, and perseverance, all talents that were essential for hunting and battle.52

While at Mount Herman, Cloud occupied the dormitory officer position of Crossley Hall in 1904. He had to ensure that his fellow students completed their studies. He performed well as a leader of his dorm, and his peers respected him. His position as a leader of his white peers points to his unusual ability as a Native young man to assert his masculine power in a white environment. Cloud also participated in the Young Men’s Christian Association Orchestra and served as YMCA district worker for three years. He was interested in politics, joining the Good Government Club and many service organizations.53 His involvement in sports, studious nature, outgoing personality, excellent Ho-Chunk oratory skills, and identities as a Christian and Ho-Chunk warrior—which taught him to contribute to the well-being of the community—were all aspects of his character that might have contributed to his development as a leader in an all-male, white school. Cloud’s sense of identity was complicated and complex—Christian, athlete, Ho-Chunk, warrior, self-made man, and a good student.

When he graduated from Mount Herman in 1906, he was the president of his class and gave the commencement address. In this speech he discusses the importance of work “as essential to the development of character, whether that work is digging in the ditch, working in the field or in the shop.” He ends his address, “We believe that the purpose for which this school was founded was that every young man who comes within its walls should learn to make education and culture, however important they may be in themselves, subservient to the one purpose of uplifting our fellow man.”54 In this way Cloud engages in popular white rhetoric about work and uplift, emphasizing the importance of labor to build character and showing his use of dominant discourses to increase his power as a Native young man. Cloud’s position as president of his graduating class is remarkable in itself, especially since during this time the public was not certain whether Native Americans were smart enough to be college material. As already mentioned, whites viewed Indians as childlike, less intelligent, and lower on the social evolutionary ladder than whites. Cloud’s statement as graduating class president weighed in on an important debate of his day. He too, as a member of the Native race and alongside his white classmates, deserved to be fully educated and to be involved in the United States’ changing civic culture. He was also asserting Natives’ right to be educated and belong in the public sphere, his right to cultural citizenship.

Yale University

After Cloud graduated from Northfield Mount Herman School, Yale University accepted him, and he entered as a freshman in 1906. He studied English, German, Greek, history, and mathematics. When he first arrived on campus, he was invited to the Yale president’s house for a freshmen reception. Even though he had attended Mount Herman, he had never attended a white-oriented activity at an elite university in the home of the president. Because he wanted to show his respect, he rented a tuxedo, but to his dismay he was the only one so dressed up. When he met the president, he bowed very low to show his respect to such an important person. The president, seeing that my grandfather felt awkward, told a group of freshmen that they too should have worn a tuxedo. During another dinner at the president’s house, his fellow freshmen did wear tuxedos, while he wore a suit. It was very difficult for him, explained my aunt Marion Hughes, because even though he had gone to Mount Herman, he was not accustomed to Yale’s white upper-middle-class social customs.55

Cloud told our family other stories about his Yale experiences. He was a great teller of tales and had a wonderful sense of humor. Indeed, his children were not always certain whether he was telling the truth, because he loved to mix fact and fiction. He attributed his storytelling ability to his grandmother, because in the winter she told them all of the traditional Ho-Chunk stories, as already mentioned. His children used to ask him to tell these Ho-Chunk stories, and he would never tell them until after they told him a story first. This was perfect training for them, according to my Aunt Marion, so they could develop their ability to remember the stories, understand underlying meanings, and tell them to others. He learned this approach from his grandmother and passed it down to them.56 His telling Ho-Chunk tales to his children demonstrates that he maintained his Ho-Chunk identity. Even though he worked hard to learn white culture, he, according to the Cloud family, never forgot his Ho-Chunk culture and its values. Every time he told Ho-Chunk stories to his children, he created a Ho-Chunk–centric virtual hub—not one based in a geographic location but a hub that could be transported anywhere Cloud traveled. And, ultimately, this transportability challenged settler colonialism’s attempts to root Native culture and identity to a distinct geographic location.

Another story he told was set in the woods in New Haven, where Yale University is located. While he was walking, he heard a faint voice, so he kept trying to get nearer to it. He finally came upon a fallen log. It was open at the ends, and the voice was coming out from that log. He spoke up and said, “What seems to be the matter?” The voice responded, “Well, I crawled into this log, and I got stuck, and I can’t get out.” It continued, “This is no place for a Harvard man.” And Cloud said, “Well, it’s too bad. I’m not a Harvard man, but I’m a Yale man, and I’d be glad to try to help you.” And the voice responded, “You don’t have to help me.” When he heard I was a Yale man, he somehow shrank [his body] and crawled out [from the log].”57 There was a sense of rivalry between Yale and Harvard men, and Cloud’s story pokes fun at Harvard men. His story also shows his ability to place his Yale experiences into a Ho-Chunk storytelling tradition, emphasizing how the Harvard student shrank his body, an example of shape-shifting. Thus, rather than erasing his Ho-Chunk identity while he learned Eurocentric culture, he accommodated Eurocentric experiences into a Ho-Chunk framework. Further, his Ho-Chunk humorous, trickster storytelling abilities helped him survive and be successful. Cloud could share funny stories with others and get them to laugh and connect with him in Yale’s alien competitive, white environment.

Cloud recounted yet another story that included his train trip to New York City with his Yale roommate, Duncan [surname unknown]. On their way back, they were in the smoking car, because Duncan smoked a pipe. This woman was in the same car and reached over and grabbed Duncan’s pipe out of his mouth and proceeded to throw it out the window. She had a little dog, so Duncan grabbed her dog and threw it out the window. They stopped at the next station, got out, looked back down the railroad track, and there was the dog, running toward them with Duncan’s pipe in his mouth!58 Cloud’s traditional Ho-Chunk upbringing taught him how to tell humorous stories and jokes, mixing fact and fiction.

In the speech to graduating Alaska Native Mount Edgecumbe students in 1949, Cloud discussed his experience at Yale University, where he became the first “full-blood” Native American to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in 1910 and a master’s degree in 1914. He recounted,

As I entered [Yale] I began to work my way through the institution. I didn’t have any money. I entered it with only 60 dollars in my pocket and they required in those days something over 1000 dollars a year. I had the confidence that laboring with my hands, doing all sorts of jobs, waiting on tables, doing jobs for the rich people, selling Navajo rugs, selling all kinds of articles to the student body, [and] selling tickets at the great university games that I could somehow make ends meet. When I graduated I was still 60 dollars in debt, but having paid all the other expenses from my own labors . . . I went into all kinds of athletics. . . . I gained confidence because I could compete in athletics. I gained confidence because I could compete in oratory and debate. And one of my competitors was the president William Taft’s son [Robert]. . . . When I stood up against him, debated against him and won prizes on the same platform with a man whose father had been President of the United States before, I began to feel a welling up of confidence in myself. Why I began to realize that I can do things just as this man can and somehow my spirit became ready for the battle or any sort of a battle that might come my way.59

Cloud describes himself as a hard worker and self-supporting, challenging dominant ideas that Natives were lazy. He discusses selling Native cultural objects to support himself financially. Native Americans selling cherished cultural objects, unfortunately, was a common practice, especially when they were poor.60 He quickly learned how precious Native artifacts were to curious whites, and he used it to help support himself.61 Even so, it was difficult for me, as his granddaughter, to learn that he decided to sell these precious Ho-Chunk cultural objects to pay for his expenses as a college student. This self-supporting theme is inextricably linked to Cloud’s proclamation of his masculine influence as a self-made man of importance who came from humble beginnings.62

Similarly, Cloud indigenized the idea of the self-made man, becoming a heroic fighter for Natives and helping him increase his power in the public sphere during a time when white society viewed Native men as nonmen.63 The passage quoted earlier also emphasizes Cloud’s prowess as an orator and a debater, which was grounded in his Ho-Chunk grandmother’s storytelling and oratory training. He carried his Ho-Chunk oratory skills from his grandmother’s training all the way to Yale. And he honed them by rehearsing speeches and creating arguments. His public-speaking competition with the president’s son improved his confidence and prepared him for “battle,” highlighting his Native masculinity and warrior identity. He used the word battle to defeat his rich, white male adversaries, demonstrating his verbal and intellectual abilities and defying dominant racist notions that Natives were inarticulate, stupid, and slow. He emphasized his poverty as compared to Yale’s rich white community, while asserting that his lower economic status did not interfere with his attendance or success at an elite, white college. In this way he attempts to motivate Alaska Native students, who were likely poor, to attend college, even when college must have seemed out of reach.

Mary Roe, a Colonial Mother

During his freshman year he met Mary Roe, a white missionary who addressed the Yale student body regarding the subject of American Indians. She spoke of thousands of Native Christians in Oklahoma. This excited Cloud, because he had not met many Native Christians in his life. She invited him to travel to Oklahoma so he could see these Christian Indians for himself. There he met her husband, Walter. Because this couple had a son who died in infancy and, had he lived, would have been about Cloud’s age, they decided informally to adopt him. He took on their last name as his middle name.64 Dr. Roe had a goal to establish an interdenominational Christian school for the purpose of training Christian Native leaders from the different tribes, but he died before realizing this goal. Cloud decided to work to complete his objective and proceeded to found an early college-preparatory Christian high school for Native young men and boys.

Mary Roe, unfortunately, used settler-colonial tactics to begin her relationship with him during his first year at Yale University. These maneuvers involved flattery and sympathy to attempt to cause a psychological barrier between him and the memory of his Ho-Chunk grandmother. She also took advantage of his loneliness and intense sadness caused by living among whites and away from his extended Ho-Chunk family and tribe.65 In this way Mary Roe, as a representative of settler colonialism, attempted to extinguish Cloud’s sense of his Ho-Chunk kinship system.

Mary Roe illustrates her maternal role in a 1909 letter to Cloud. Colonialism is apparent:

Oh, Henry, if I had you here this very minute I believe I could make you see the strength and power of that marvelous other love which has been born in my soul and is gathering up all the repressed motherhood and instinct which have always been part of my nature but have never been given outlet. . . . I know I am a changed woman with a love for all little children, a yearning that is almost pain over unmothered boys, all because the picture of my beloved little son [Cloud] running barefoot ragged and neglected possibly around and around a stump crying with natural fright as the arrows whizzed by that dear little head amidst the laughter of drunken revelry. Darling, I will make up to you and for your sake to every unhappy child for all those children’s sorrows.66

Mary Roe details all the repressed “mother-love” within her, which, she argues, requires an outlet. She then discusses her role as a mother to Cloud, a Ho-Chunk and an orphan. She describes Cloud as “ragged and neglected.” She presumes Ho-Chunks are “drunken,” violent, and careless. She assumes that Cloud was “neglected” by his people. In this way she privileges her own competence as a white woman to protect and nurture Native children over the Ho-Chunk peoples’ ability. Indeed, she assumes that Ho-Chunks are not only neglectful but also indifferent of our children’s welfare. Her depiction arises from her white imagination, since Cloud had a deeply loving and affectionate Ho-Chunk family. This colonial, “maternal” assumption must have been trying and agonizing for Cloud, who cherished and valued his Ho-Chunk people. According to Margaret Jacobs, white women used these kinds of gendered settler-colonial assumptions when they forcibly removed Native children and put them in federal boarding schools.67 These kinds of colonial assumptions are also inextricably linked to the white adoption of Native children.

As I sat next to my son, Gilbert, in Yale’s archive, reading Mary Roe’s letters to my grandfather, I felt that I was witnessing the negative impact of a very intimate, gendered aspect of settler colonialism on a close family member. The impact occurred not in the past but in the present, and I had no power to stop it. Even though I knew that I could not change what had happened in my family’s history, I hoped that writing about it could help my family and others understand the challenges our ancestor faced. I also remembered that my beloved mother, Woesha, sat in the very same archive and read through hundreds of distressing colonial letters. She would call me after spending a long day in the archive, crying and telling me how horribly difficult it was to read the letters. While listening to her, I had no idea that I would follow in her footsteps and travel to the same archives she visited. As I sat in the hard wooden chair in the Sterling Library, I felt my mom’s spiritual presence. It was helpful to have frequent phone calls with my Ho-Chunk colleague, Amy Lonetree, who understood my pain, and with my sister, Mary, who supported my son traveling with me.

Furthermore, Mary Roe shared romantic advice with Cloud related to race, class, and gender—adding another layer of settler colonialism for Cloud to deal with. She treated him as an exotic Native man. She wrote that Bessie, his white “cousin,” Mary Roe’s niece, was angry with him because he had answered her correspondence by wrongly dispatching a telegram rather than a letter.68 In contrast, “well-taught” white girls, she explained, knew how men should relate to them, while the girls he was used to, “Indian girls” and “half-educated [white] girls,” did not comprehend how to act properly. Mary Roe put Cloud higher on the social evolutionary ladder than both “Indian girls” and “half-educated [white] girls.” She pushed him to locate “appropriate” companions who appreciated proper social graces. By inspiring him to find a suitable white, upper-class woman for friendship and possibly marriage, she again tried to cut his ties to a Ho-Chunk sense of kinship. She cautioned that Vassar girls were attracted to him only because of his race, not recognizing his intelligence, good-looking features, and captivating nature. Instead, she emphasized only his “exotism” as an Indigenous young man. She urged him to rely on his “exotic” characteristics to further his Christian mission. Rather than deciding to abide by Mary’s romantic recommendations, which did not acknowledge the possibility of a well-educated Native woman, in 1916 Cloud married my Ojibwe grandmother, Elizabeth Bender Cloud, reinforcing his Native kinship ties.69

While Cloud became friends with the Roes, he also confronted power dynamics in his relationship with them. The Roes were upper-middle-class, white, Christian missionaries. He was a Ho-Chunk man born in poverty on the Winnebago Reservation. His decision to become an “adopted” member of a white missionary family put him immediately into a position of subservience. Mary Roe, for example, treated him as a boy, not as a man, even though he was in his midtwenties. She wrote to Cloud, “My own, my very own, dear boy—a man but to Mother still a boy.”70 She felt it was her role to train him to be a proper Christian man, including telling him to control his inherent “animal nature” to master his sex drive—a nature that was distinctly Native and lower on the social evolutionary scale as compared to whites. Using guilt and continual discussions of her love in her letters, she interfered with his relationships with other women and encouraged him to be emotionally dependent on her.71 For example, when Cloud discussed his affection for Ethel Hyde, a white woman, and her liking of him, Mary wrote him, saying she “would give much to take your black head right [in] my arms and talk it all over.” Her racial comment places Cloud in a subservient role and asserts her power in their relationship. She also wrote “who [what white woman] will sacrifice for your people, will take them with you, as their own,” implying that she was the only white woman who ever would.72 She also recounted a discussion she had with another woman about Ethel. According to Mary Roe, that woman described Ethel as not “charitable” or “loving,” as well as “undeveloped, unsettled, even superficial.”73 Mary Roe’s controlling behavior and paternalism allude to her belief that she was higher on the social evolutionary ladder and, thus, had the right to cross proper boundaries and interfere in the adult Cloud’s romantic and emotional life.

At the same time, Cloud emphasized his masculinity and sense of strength to Mary Roe. For example, he described his attendance at a Thanksgiving alumni celebration at Mount Herman in a letter to her. The principal asked him to speak for all the alumni. While introducing him as a typical Mount Herman young man, the principal stressed Cloud’s birth on a reservation, without any advantages. In his retelling of his experience to Mary Roe, Cloud asserts himself as a self-made man of importance, challenging Mary Roe’s emasculation of him, treating him as a child, not as a proud Ho-Chunk man.74

The Roes’ Christian socialization involved time management, piety, guilt, and the superiority of Christianity over other religions, such as the Ho-Chunk Medicine Lodge and the peyote religion. Cloud’s antagonism with the Ho-Chunk Medicine Lodge and the peyote religion contributed to his feelings of loneliness. He had arguments with his Ho-Chunk uncle Arthur Cassiman, a follower of peyote, while he was working as a missionary on the Winnebago Reservation.75 Because there were so few Christians living on the Winnebago Reservation when he started as a missionary there, he had few supporters. As his granddaughter, I was saddened to learn that he viewed Christianity as the only true religion, a colonial belief that followed his white, Christian training. In contrast, his daughter, my mother, had great respect for the peyote religion, the Medicine Lodge, the Sun Dance, and all other Native ceremonial traditions.

Cloud was especially vulnerable to his adopted white family’s influence because he was an orphan and wanted desperately to have a mother and father again. He suffered horribly upon the death of his Ho-Chunk mother, father, and grandmother. He wrote to Mary Roe, “Since my mother of flesh and blood left me no one has seen my tears. They have been shed unseen. But you [Mary Roe] have seen them, because you have entered my innermost life.”76 In this letter Cloud discusses how he let down his protective mask, becoming vulnerable and expressing his emotions to Mary Roe. However, to open up emotionally in a settler-colonial relationship was, unfortunately, dangerous and must have taken a tremendous emotional toll.

Cloud performed a “good” Indian identity for whites, usually keeping his inner Ho-Chunk warrior self hidden and protected. His doubleness must have been excruciating at times, to camouflage his identity, while whites racialized him, treated him as lower on the social evolutionary scale, and saw him as a child, not a full-grown man. Because of power dynamics, Cloud would have to withhold his true thoughts and feelings—especially as he relied on the Roes for loans to pay his college education. Whites surrounded Cloud, so he had to see the world through their lens for his survival, which likely caused internal confusion and emotional trauma. The Roes’ socialization of Cloud to have a settler-colonial view of Christianity, placed above Ho-Chunk spiritual practices and traditions, caused arguments between Cloud and his Ho-Chunk uncle, Arthur Cassiman, and potentially caused distance between them.

Fortunately, my grandmother, Elizabeth Bender Cloud, a White Earth Ojibwe, whom he married in 1916, helped him develop proper boundaries between himself and his white adoptive mother. Indeed, Cloud strengthened his Native kinship ties and married a strong and powerful Ojibwe woman. Elizabeth was a fluent speaker of Ojibwe, and her mother, Mary Razier, taught her to be independent. After my grandparents were married in 1916, Elizabeth wrote a letter to Mary Roe. She understood that Mary was very possessive of Henry and had difficulty accepting Elizabeth as his wife. She wrote, “I realize that losing a son has not come without a struggle and not without a bitter fight, but Henry belongs to you as much as he ever did.” By offering to share Henry with Mary Roe, Elizabeth was also reminding Mary Roe of her pivotal role as his wife. In writing, “I shall not allow him to forget you and he never will,” she emphasizes her power to influence Henry’s feelings for Mary Roe.77 As a result of my grandmother’s positive impact, Henry’s emotional dependence on Mary transformed into a relationship with more appropriate boundaries.78 Here Elizabeth’s diplomacy and cautiousness is likely an indication of settler-colonial power dynamics and Cloud’s reliance on the Roes’ for loans and the Roes’ connection to a powerful, white, wealthy network that helped him found a high school, a Christian preparatory school for Native young men and boys.

Even though Cloud faced power dynamics in regard to gender, race, and class within his white adopted family, he was able to assert his distinct position. For example, he struggled to earn money to pay for his education and, as a result, the Roes offered him loans for his college expenses. Cloud wrote a letter to Walter Roe, outlining all of his bills, asking his adoptive father if his parents had paid for his college education. In his response, Walter answered in the affirmative that his father had paid for his college fees. He then wrote that Cloud could wait to pay Mary Roe back. Cloud’s question emphasizes his subservient role, not a biological son, who deserved money as gifts, which likely motivated Walter Roe to give him extra time to pay off his loan.79

Why was Cloud so willing to be informally adopted into a white missionary family? One must remember the period and how difficult it must have been for him to succeed at Yale as the only Native American. Cloud’s connection to whites made sense during this racist time. It must have allowed him to gain power and become successful in a white environment. There was not the strong Indigenous network that exists today, supporting Native college students, including Indigenous professors, staff, college-support programs, or available scholarships and other resources. Cloud faced continual racializing and emasculating dominant discourses, and he lived far away from his Ho-Chunk family and tribe. And so an alliance with white missionaries, who were connected to influential white reform groups, provided Cloud with a white network and reliable financial resources. Cloud told my mother and her sisters about his class anguish, like feeling awkward when he showed up in a tuxedo instead of a suit. The Roes could teach him how to blend into white upper-class culture, so that he would not have to feel so awkward. Furthermore, the Roes were Christian missionaries, a role he respected and wanted to emulate. His white informal adoption helped him lessen his feelings of loneliness, after the loss of his own mother, father, and grandmother. At the same time, this adoption could be understood through a Ho-Chunk cultural lens. When a child dies in a Ho-Chunk family, one will adopt another child to fill his or her place. Later in life, this is what Cloud did when his own son died at three years old. Following Ho-Chunk tradition, he adopted Jay Russell Hunter, the son of his Ho-Chunk friends John and Etta Hunter. Cloud’s “taking the place” of the Roes’ son, who died in infancy, made sense from a Ho-Chunk perspective.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Gardens in the Dunes provides some insight into Cloud’s adoption into a white family.80 A white couple holds “captive” an Indian girl, Indigo. In this story, Indigo does not become white. Thus, Silko reverses the usual captivity narrative in which Indians steal whites and these whites “go Native.” Indigo travels to Europe with this white couple and learns about European culture, while maintaining her Native identity. Similarly, the Roes taught Cloud much about white culture. At the same time, Native culture and my grandfather fascinated the Roes. For example, the Roes hired seventy men and women to make beadwork, bows and arrows, tepees, and ornamental pouches.81 Mary Roe wore a Native American buckskin dress. “Playing Indian,” argues Philip Deloria, helps whites construct an American identity, displacing Natives as the true Indigenous people.82 It also contributes to whites getting in touch with a savage freedom that Indians represent. By adopting Cloud, Mary Roe could finally play the role of mother, even though Cloud was a grown Ho-Chunk man in his twenties. It also brought her and her husband closer to a fascinating “savage other,” whose cultural relics they wanted to preserve.

Cloud not only kept his Ho-Chunk identity strong but also taught the Roes Ho-Chunk beliefs. Indeed, Cloud adopted Walter Roe into his tribe’s Thunderbird Clan, which challenged conservative Christian notions that his Ho-Chunk cultural ways were pagan. In a letter to Walter Roe, Cloud discusses that they must keep his adoption secret, because members of the mescal religion, now called the Native American Church, would say they were practicing pagan ideas.

I am taking the privilege of sending you what I consider your very adoption into the bird [Thunderbird] clan of the Winnebagoes [Ho-Chunks]. The totem is the eagle. As you will see he stands in the midst of sleet and hail, defiant, and confident. . . . He is the king of birds. If I publicly adopt you . . . the mescal followers would laugh us to derision as reactionaries for they now consider such acts . . . as heathenism and obsolete. As a recognized and true member of the Bird [Thunderbird] clan of the Winnebagoes . . . “Hochunk” “The Big Voice,” I “Wonagalohunka” the “Chief of the Place of Fear,” herewith adopt you head, scalp lock, and body into the warrior clan.

This adoption shows that Cloud was not an empty vessel who lost his Ho-Chunkness while learning white culture. Quite the contrary, Cloud adopted Walter Roe to be a member of his Ho-Chunk clan and in the process taught Walter Ho-Chunk cultural ways.83

Cloud also gave his adoptive white family Ho-Chunk names, including Mary Roe and Bessie (Elizabeth) Page, his adopted cousin. He wrote a letter to Mary Roe and gave her a list of possible Ho-Chunk names and asked her to choose one.84 He wrote a similar letter to Elizabeth Page: “I’ve got a lot of names for you. I submit them. You can choose the one you like. The first one’s nearest to ‘gift-to-God’—‘Hi nook who kaw chunk ka,’ means ‘Consecrated Woman.’ It’s a regular Indian name. ‘Wah cho gi ni wiu ga,’ meaning ‘leader’ (women). ‘Hamb goo mah ni wiu ga’ meaning—‘Coming dawn.’ ‘Wah nik shoo jay wiu ga’—meaning ‘Red bird.’ ‘Ho chunk ki wiuga,’ meaning ‘Winnebago woman.’”85

Thus, Cloud transformed his white adoptive nuclear family into a Ho-Chunk sense of an extended family. Cloud not only gave his white extended family Ho-Chunk names but also told them Ho-Chunk stories.86 He spent much time with Mary Roe’s relatives while he lived on the East Coast. Rather than traveling to Oklahoma to be with Walter and Mary Roe during Christmas, he spent his winter vacation with the Pages, and he saw them on weekends when he was a student at Yale. Upon his death, my grandmother, Elizabeth, wrote to Bessie Page and told her how much her beloved Henry appreciated Bessie and her extended family.87

It is a wonder that Cloud, as the only Native American at Yale University, not only survived but excelled in an all-white, highly competitive environment such as this. Letters in the Roe Family Papers show that he supported his Ho-Chunk identity and culture, which helped him survive and succeed. Cloud connected to his sense of Ho-Chunkness by using both geographic and virtual Native hubs. His creation of Native hubs included changing his white adoptive family into a Ho-Chunk sense of an extended family.

Cloud transformed the woods around Yale into another Native hub, a geographic location where he could rejuvenate himself as a Ho-Chunk person. His connection to nature brought a sense of his Ho-Chunkness into an alien environment while living away from his family and tribe:

The other day I went into the woods to be alone. I found the loneliest spot of all the places I had visited. At one place I found a wet spot. Last autumn’s leaves were laden with such moisture. I thought some spring must be beneath. The next I heard something beating the wet leaves as if it were a tiny switch. Looking around and up I saw a branch of a tree some fifty feet high and drops were coming from the branch. The next thing I did was to sprawl out my legs, bend back with my face straight up and mouth wide open; the drops splashed into tiny sprays on the end of my nose, cheeks and eyes before they found my wide-open mouth. In this way I drank a lot of it. I was on a ridge and the sun was just setting. It was a new sunset to me. The great fiery ball sank into the naked arms of some popular trees. . . . These two little experiences cheered me up for a whole week.88

In this moment drinking the water dripping from the trees and witnessing the beauty of a sunset, my grandfather invokes the power of the hub by transporting a sense of home and his Ho-Chunkness into the woods thousands of miles away from his tribal homelands. Cloud used the trees, the water, and a vibrant sunset as a protector and a healer, a portrayal that differs greatly from colonial narratives of the past. From my grandfather’s point of view, nature was not to be possessed but relied on in times of stress and disorientation. He imagined nature not as an object to be developed and tamed but rather as a place to heal. In this way, too, he claimed the woods as his own, a home away from home, where he gained a foothold, a sense of belonging, and rootedness in a time of uncertainty. This connection recharged and strengthened him to continue. At the same time, one could argue that the water provided him with a spiritual moment of cleansing, not only from a Ho-Chunk perspective but also from a Christian one. The use of water in baptism is integral to one’s Christian rebirth. The water could have helped him reconnect not only to his Ho-Chunk but also to his Christian identity.

Another way he maintained his Ho-Chunkness while at Yale was by constantly telling others Ho-Chunk stories, an example of Native hub making that is not necessarily tied to a geographic location, a virtual hub. As a college student, Cloud shared his Ho-Chunk culture by telling traditional Ho-Chunk stories to white audiences for their delight and for a price. He used this money to help pay for his education. He certainly must have known that sharing his Ho-Chunk knowledge was a way to become popular in an all-white environment. It was a strategy for him to use his cultural difference by playing on dominant notions of himself as a tourist curiosity, a commodity, and an exotic Indigenous man for his own goals and objectives.

While Cloud was the first “full-blood” Native American to graduate from Yale University, in June 1910 there was not much recognition of his feat in the local newspapers. As his granddaughter, I am amazed at his accomplishment. He was the only Native American attending this elite university at the time. A sea of white students, who came from radically different class experiences and backgrounds, surrounded him. Even so, he was popular with his peers. They selected him to be a member of the Elihu Club, a prestigious secret society. He won second place in the Ten Eyck speaking contest. As a result, he was named the best orator on campus. Because of all of these accomplishments, the local New Haven paper named him as one of the three most interesting students in 1910 and singled him out as the most prominent man in the class of 1910.89

The speech he gave that won him second place in the Ten Eyck contest, “Missions to the American Indians,” was published in the Yale Courant. He spoke in terms that whites would find pleasing, while embedding subversive critique in the narrative, another example of Cloud’s doubleness. He begins his published essay speaking on behalf of a vanishing race, supporting a white rhetoric that Indians are indeed vanishing and supporting settler colonialism. He then inserts his own Native perspective, critical of whites: “Civilization, sure of its divine right, has extended the hand of fellowship to those outside its pale, only to let fall the mailed fist of the oppressor.”90 Then he switches back to white rhetoric” “Here in their feather and paint are gathered a thousand Indians who have gone back to the gloom of paganism. . . . With weird chant, swaying to the wild rhythm of that strange music, the long line takes up its barbaric march.” At the end of the essay, he asks for more Christian missions, not more soldiers or government agents, to improve Natives’ everyday existence. Unfortunately, calling for additional Christian missions was in support of settler colonialism, as Christianity represented assimilation of Natives into white notions of gender, sexuality, marriage, and heteropatriarchal notions of the nuclear family.91 While Cloud most likely is arguing for Natives’ lives being “saved” in a physical sense, his discussing more Christian missions supported Natives potentially vanishing from a gendered, sexual, cultural, and identity perspective, supporting settler colonialism. Cloud uses white rhetoric to create a speech pitched to a white audience and still manages to include a short burst of Native critique to reach his goal, winning second place.

Walter Roe encouraged Cloud to speak about a Native topic when he was working on his speech for the Ten Eyck oratory contest. Walter thought an Indigenous topic would be more warmly received than a non-Native topic.92 It points to Walter encouraging Cloud to perform a role as an “exotic” Native man for whites to receive him positively. Given his many years of experience dealing with whites, Cloud taught his children not to be “show Indians,” Native Americans who performed Indianness without any substance. Teaching his children how to survive among whites shows his Ho-Chunk position. My aunt Marion was once put in this role her father warned her about. She was supposed to stand onstage in a buckskin dress, while a white person sang a stereotypical Native love song into a microphone. She vowed never to perform this kind of role again.

Being the only Native American at Yale definitely had its costs. He told a story to his children about his election to the Elihu Club. When his Yale roommate, Duncan, found out that my grandfather was elected and not him, he kept repeating, “What have you done? What have you ever done?” Duncan was very upset, because he had not been selected that year, and, as a result, he was trying to downgrade him. Cloud told his children he was not worried about getting elected into the Elihu Club, a highly prestigious organization and one extremely difficult to be accepted into, and didn’t fully understand his roommate’s disappointment.93 This example shows how he encountered disrespect by dealing with a roommate who did not value his abilities or accomplishments and alludes to how competitive Yale could be. It also points to how he experienced Yale from a distinctly Native perspective.

Auburn Seminary, Yale Master’s Degree, and Society of American Indians

Cloud enrolled in seminary at Oberlin College in Ohio. Because Cloud had many ties with people on the East Coast, he decided to leave Oberlin College and attend Auburn Seminary in Auburn, New York. This school would enable him to become an ordained Presbyterian minister. Later in life he told his children that he learned to relate the training there to his own Ho-Chunk background. He had a dim view of missionaries who cut Natives off from their unique culture, attempting to force Natives to forget ourselves as distinct people.94 He graduated from Auburn in the spring of 1913. The following year, in 1914, he graduated from Yale University with a master’s degree in anthropology. He enrolled at both Auburn seminary and Yale Graduate School concurrently. He was able to complete both degrees, because his master’s degree included not classes but rather directed readings with professors and a thesis.95 His master’s thesis was titled “An Anthropologist’s View of Reservation Life.”96

Cloud spoke twice before the Friends of the Indian, a white reform group, at Lake Mohonk, New York. His first presentation in 1910 backed taxation of Native lands to help provide money for public utilities. He argued in favor of taxes to support local governments, including criminal justice. Advocating for taxation of Native lands did not support tribal sovereignty as we know it today. By supporting the imposition of white laws on Native lands, as well as calling for the end of federal trust protection from taxation, he goes against tribal sovereignty.97 Naturally, the reform group received this recommendation warmly. His argument was likely consistent with the views of the majority of members of the Friends of the Indian, including his white adoptive mentors, the Roes. All these factors could have influenced his speech. By relying on white rhetoric, he was supporting settler colonialism. Cloud’s views on these matters, however, later changed and evolved. A little more than twenty years later, Cloud advocated in favor of the Indian Reorganization Act, which rejected the assimilationist Native policy and continued the trust status of allotted Native lands, including their exception from local taxation.

According to Lucy Maddox, Native intellectuals of the Society of American Indians, a pantribal organization Cloud co-founded, worked to reshape the dominant popular white rhetoric to reach their own goals and objectives.98 Their tactics were similar to the American Negro Academy, whose most well-known member was W. E. B. Du Bois. To strengthen their voice in the public sphere, both groups mixed the rhetoric of progressivism and racial uplift with their own distinct points of view. In a similar vein Cloud could have made the tactical decision to support dominant rhetoric about taxation of Native lands in one speech to garner financial support from white reformers to fund a college-preparatory school for Native boys in the future.

Cloud’s distinctly Indigenous position, in contrast, is strongly present in his own personal writings, which I found in our Cloud family files, showing how he changed his intellectual position from white-centric to Native-centric, depending on his audience. In 1931 Cloud argued that rather than try to erase Native knowledge as part of the federal boarding school’s civilization training, one should build on existing Indigenous knowledge:

Certain government employees come into the [Indian] Service and look upon the Indian and his ways of thought as beneath them, and think [they] are so common as to merit very little respect and therefore anything that is Indian is not worth preserving and not given much thought. . . . The right way to look at this question of Indian philosophy is to examine it very carefully and see how it contributes to the happiness and satisfaction of this individual. You make it possible for the Indian to build on what he already has. You have to proceed from the known to the unknown. You bring him a new philosophy entirely unknown to him. This mistake is being made in the attempt to civilize the Indian.99

Cloud challenges the lack of respect federal-government employees had for Native thought and philosophy, while he argues against assimilation and instead for a flexible and fluid notion of culture where Natives combine Indigenous and white knowledge together. His flexible and fluid notion of culture is a radical departure from static notions of culture linked to settler colonialism and which classic anthropology and federal policies of assimilation relied on. Assimilationists assume that dominant culture would overpower subordinated culture. Assimilation was viewed as a one-way process in which the oppressed people will be forced to give up their culture and replace it with dominant culture and ideas.100 Rather than erasing Native knowledge and thought, Cloud incorporates white knowledge along with Ho-Chunk culture and philosophy. In this way Cloud, who received a master’s in anthropology at Yale, shows how his anthropological ideas and his notions of culture and identity were flexible, fluid, and pathbreaking.

In 1914 Cloud again presented to the white group, the Friends of the Indian. His paper, the “Education of the American Indian,” was much more revolutionary and Native-centric than his first one. He wrote, “The first effort, it seems to me, should be to give as much as Indians are able, all the education that the problems they face clearly indicate they should have. This means all of the education the grammar schools, the secondary schools, and the colleges of the land can give them.”101 This is a radical statement at a time when the status quo was for Native Americans to be sent off to reservation boarding schools that taught only vocational education. His involvement in Society of American Indians could have moderated his earlier assimilationist and antisovereignty stance. This second talk provided a springboard for fund-raising to found his Christian college-preparatory school for Indian boys.

The recurrent themes in his early writings of individual self-help and self-support served as an intellectual precursor to his later ideas about Natives’ need for self-sufficiency as a group. He used the popular notion of self-help to inform his Native policy recommendations. Cloud argued in 1913 that, rather than be dependent on the government, Native Americans should work to sustain themselves: “So long as we crowd the Government schools, where everything is given free, so long as we let ourselves depend upon the agency, so long will our status as wards continue. I assert that in a country of so great and multiplied facilities for schooling, almost all our Indians now in Government schools can earn their own education. . . . We must live the doctrines of endeavor and self-support and preach the same continually. It must be an internal movement. The faster the movement spreads, the sooner the shackles of the [government] system will fall off.”102 He argued that for Native Americans to become strong, they must free themselves from a dependency on the federal government. These ideas likely contributed to his later ideas of economic development and self-sufficiency for Native people.

In an undated paper found in our Cloud family files, Cloud, a Ho-Chunk intellectual, links Natives’ need for liberation and self-support to our need to organize ourselves. He indirectly challenges and critiques the government’s suppression of Native languages in the boarding schools. He discusses how Natives’ maintenance of our tribal languages can help us express ourselves as well as serve as a mechanism to develop initiative and work toward freedom. In other words, he argues that maintenance of one’s tribal language can assist in Natives’ progress and development:

What the Indian needs today is freedom. He needs to develop initiative. When you force him to talk this other language [English] which he does not know think of the state of mind you throw the [Native] child in. The attitude of the educators who made this rule is that the quicker he learns the English language the better for him. Years and years ago we were not permitted to speak the Indian language. I forgot my language while I was away at [government boarding] school but picked it up again after I returned home. I have not forgotten it to this day. I can express myself in Indian more adequately than I can in English. There are certain things I can say in Indian that I cannot possibly make known in the English language. Every language that you know enriches your vocabulary and gives you a means of expressing yourself. The Indian needs freedom. He needs to express himself in activities and attitudes. He needs to fly away and be free. He needs to bear responsibilities in order to develop his personality. . . . The Indian needs the ability for organization, for group activities. . . . What the Indian needs is a means of self support.103

Thus, Cloud transforms an individualized Eurocentric idea about self-help and self-support, including the need for Indigenous peoples to shoulder responsibility, into a Native-oriented strategy for growth. By bringing together Eurocentric ideas with a strong Ho-Chunk belief in the importance of tribal languages, he combines both white and Ho-Chunk cultures to imagine a better life for Native Americans. In this way he argues for cultural pluralism rather than assimilation, and Native Americans’ right to be different and belong in American culture and society, an Indigenous cultural citizenship.

Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska

While Cloud was at Yale, he maintained his connections to his reservation in Winnebago, Nebraska. He visited his tribe often in an effort to convert other tribal members to Christianity. Because he was a tribal member and spoke Ho-Chunk, he had a definite advantage over other missionaries. Many of the traditional Ho-Chunks opposed him, especially members of the Medicine Lodge, the keepers of our tribe’s traditional spirituality. Medicine Lodge ceremonies were secret, and membership was tightly controlled and usually hereditary. He wrote about the angry faces of the Medicine Lodge members who passed him on the street or attended his Christian services to demonstrate their antagonism. He discussed his happiness when he was able to convert some of the Medicine Lodge members.104

While reading letters regarding Cloud’s delight about converting Medicine Lodge members to Christianity, I felt a strong sense of discomfort. My mother, Woesha, taught me to respect all religions, including the Ho-Chunk Medicine Lodge. The settler-colonial aspect of Christianity, which emphasizes that it is the only true religion, was something my mother always questioned. This shows how religious attitudes can change over generations.

Even though there was strong opposition from tribal members to Cloud as a Native Christian, he became a leader for his tribe and served on a delegation that visited Washington in 1912. Because of many removals, Ho-Chunks were divided. Half of the tribe was living in Nebraska, while the other half lived in Wisconsin, where we originated. The Nebraska tribe received most of the annuity payments from the federal government, while the organized Wisconsin tribal members demanded their fair share. Nebraska Ho-Chunks traveled to Washington DC to sort this out. The Nebraska Ho-Chunks also faced the end of the federal trust–protection period in 1912, which they wanted to extend. Federal trust protection meant that Natives did not have to pay taxes. This shows that Cloud, two years after his original 1910 talk to the Friends of the Indian, had changed his position. He did not support taxation of Native lands; he supported his tribe advocating for the extension of its trustee status.

Our Winnebago tribe chose Cloud to be one of the delegates. He assisted in drafting of the “Statement by the Winnebago Delegation on Behalf of the Nebraska Branch,” given to the commissioner of Indian Affairs, Robert G. Valentine. He was one of the three signatories of their formal petition. He met with the commissioner and other Indian Service officers during his visit to Washington. In July 1912 he wrote to Commissioner Valentine regarding other tribal concerns. He came away from this experience as an advocate for his tribe. His position as a member of the delegation helped other tribal members view him positively.105

Modern Ho-Chunk Intellectual

Cloud’s Ho-Chunk warrior identity influenced his analytical perspective as a Ho-Chunk intellectual, motivating him to challenge settler colonialism. In a 1915 letter to Mary Roe, he emphasizes his Ho-Chunk warrior identity by relying on “warrior talk” while examining Gen. Richard H. Pratt, the founder of the first government boarding school for Native Americans, Carlisle. It concentrated on vocational rather than college education, since Native Americans were assumed to be lower on the social evolutionary ladder and therefore not smart enough to handle college-preparatory education:

General Pratt has shown himself a venomous creature and we need to treat him as such. The poor old man is to be pitied for his long lost fight for Carlisle and his one idea. He has the Indian Office in general against him; all the missionaries who know actual conditions are one against him. All he can do is to join forces with people of like mongrel faith and there are many of them—all willing to come down to the lowest kind of muckraking methods. I would not have anything to do with him. If he gets in my way, I’ll hit him hard and knock him out and go on. The trouble with Pratt is—he is selfishly egotistical. . . . He would take the responsibility of recreating the Indian race if he thought he had the power. He little realizes what great harm he has done the Indian race by posing as their greatest friend. He was the man who in the first place limited the Indian education down to the eighth grade.106

Cloud utilizes warrior language by portraying Pratt as the enemy of the Indian race, although I do not believe he would have physically hit Pratt but rather would have “hit him” with rhetorical blows if he got “in [his] way.” Cloud condemns Pratt’s paternalism, assuming he has the right to “recreat[e] the Indian race.” Cloud also modifies the exceedingly racialized and white-supremacist word “mongrel” to employ against whites who backed Pratt and Carlisle and as a challenge against the negative influences of colonialism and racism on Indigenous people. This quotation shows how Cloud’s warrior training was central to his anticolonial strategies, since this education taught him to defend his people and fight aggressively against the enemy. It also educated him to use a Ho-Chunk intellectual lens, which enabled him to criticize Pratt as paternalistic and disrespectful.107

In sum, Cloud was a great storyteller, continually telling Ho-Chunk stories and other humorous tales. He relied on popular white notions of the self-made man to assert his masculinity and avoid being viewed as a Native nonman. This creative strategy helped him increase his power in the public sphere while receiving political and financial assistance from whites, including the Roes. He relied on his Ho-Chunk warrior training, including fasting, storytelling, courage, pride, and self-control for amazing fortitude and success in the midst of settler colonialism. Cloud developed a modern Ho-Chunk warrior identity, combining his Ho-Chunk warrior education with white ideas. Thus, Cloud challenged assimilation and argued for flexible and fluid notions of culture and identity. As a Native and a Christian, he used both Native and white rhetoric in his oratory and writing to be heard in the public sphere during an incredibly racist time. He relied on Ho-Chunk–centric hubs at Yale to remain connected to his Ho-Chunk people, including adopting a white missionary family into his Ho-Chunk sense of community and telling Ho-Chunk stories. He was recognized as a Ho-Chunk tribal leader as a young man and a Yale student and even traveled to Washington DC to advocate for our tribe. The following chapter discusses how Cloud, as a modern Ho-Chunk warrior and intellectual, fought for Geronimo and his fellow Apaches, co-founded the Society of American Indians, and founded a college-preparatory Native Christian high school, the American Indian Institute.