The couple of dusty cardboard boxes filled with my mother’s collection of Cloud family archival material that sat underneath my office desk for years was the beginning of an incredibly long journey of visiting many archives, Ho-Chunk Nation headquarters, my Winnebago Reservation, and relatives’ homes and discussions with Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe historians, UCSC graduate students, anthropology and history colleagues, and Cloud family members. The main inspiration for this book is my precious and beloved mother, Woesha Cloud North, Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe artist, poet, activist, and scholar, whose footsteps I decided to follow to become a professor of anthropology and Native studies.
When I first conceptualized this book, I planned to write about the activism and work of my mother, Woesha, as a Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe intellectual, but then I decided to save this discussion for future writing, where I can incorporate pictures of her beautiful artwork, her poetry, an analysis of her Ho-Chunk–centric PhD dissertation, and her activism when Natives occupied Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay Area. After writing this book, I now realize that she was following her parents’ example by joining a Native hub on Alcatraz Island and fighting for Native American rights. I learned that both her parents supported and fought for tribal sovereignty. Henry, for example, used treaties to struggle for Indigenous hunting and fishing rights, and Elizabeth, as part of NCAI’s American Indian Development project, organized community gatherings—which eventually led to the Red Power movement— to support tribal “revitalization,” while supporting Native women to be on tribal councils, an early precursor to later discussions of Native feminisms. The Clouds fighting for tribal sovereignty encourages historians, anthropologists, and Native-studies scholars not to divide so sharply the early twentieth century and the Progressive Era from later struggles against termination, relocation, and the formation of the Red Power movement of the 1960s. Indeed, more work examining the activist and intellectual work of Society of American Indian intellectuals is needed as a possible way to find these connections between their efforts and later Native activist movements, including the Red Power movement.
My mother, Woesha, decided to join the many Native activists when our people chose to occupy Alcatraz Island in 1969, to protest and make public the horrible socioeconomic conditions of Native peoples, settler-colonial policies of termination and relocation, the high suicide rates of Natives, their low life-expectancy rates, and many other important issues. This pivotal Native hub was a place for my mother to connect and reconnect with many other urban Native Americans and join together to support Indigenous culture, identity, gender, and belonging, while becoming empowered and struggling for social change. She had grown up surrounded by Native people at the American Indian Institute and traveled around Indian Country with her parents and siblings, including annual summer visits to see her Ojibwe grandmother, Mary Razier, on the White Earth Reservation and to visit Ho-Chunk relatives on the Winnebago Reservation, including Alice Mallory Porter, whose loving family had taken Henry in when his parents and grandmother died. My mother had lived a Native-hub existence, and she continued living in a Native hub, taking her children and my siblings on annual trips to the Winnebago Reservation to visit Alice Mallory Porter, the LaRose family, and our close Ho-Chunk relatives, the Hunter family in Wichita, Kansas—the site of the American Indian Institute.
I use the Paiute activist Laverne Roberts’s notion of the hub to show how Elizabeth and Henry maintained their Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe gender, culture, identity, and belonging, living away from their tribal land bases of the Winnebago Reservation and White Earth Reservation.1 The hub challenges previous literature in history and classic anthropology that assume that Native culture is incarcerated in the land, and movement away from tribal land bases means a distinct break from one’s tribal culture, gender, and identity.2 Henry and Elizabeth relied on flexible and fluid notions of gender, identity, culture, community, and belonging that they carried with them as they traveled around Indian Country and within white environments, such as federal boarding schools, white schools, and government jobs. The hub challenges older scholarship that assumes that traditional Natives lived on reservations, fight settler colonialism, and are “bad” Indians, whereas assimilated and progressive Natives were “apples” and “sell-outs” and fought to become full U.S. citizens. These static notions contribute to conflicts between “good” and “bad” Indians, “traditional” and “modern” Natives. This book challenges static notions of identity, where scholars and Native community members placed Elizabeth and Henry Cloud into fixed boxes as “assimilationists,” “apples,” “sell-outs,” and a “white bull with a red face,” and instead emphasizes their complexity—Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, Christian, citizen, warrior, and “good” and “bad” Indian.3
I argue that the Clouds combined their Native modern and warrior identities to fight settler colonialism and struggle for tribal sovereignty and Native cultural citizenship. I also argue that Elizabeth and Henry used their modern identities and ability to perform, wearing professional-looking clothes, shiny shoes, and great-looking hats as a camouflage to cover their Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe warrior identities, helping them in their struggles to fight in support of Native rights. Thus, both Elizabeth and Henry Cloud were “good” and “bad” Indians simultaneously, and their ability to morph between the two identities enabled them to become involved in high-governmental circles and fight for Native peoples. Their outer appearance and behavior made them look and be perceived as “good” Indians who helped whites, while, underneath, their Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe warrior identities were continually simmering just below the surface, and their “bad” Indian self would emerge at any moment and struggle for Native causes and rights. I argue that Henry and Elizabeth learned how to shape-shift and use masks from listening as children to Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe trickster stories. These stories also taught them how to use doubleness speech—speaking in language that the colonizer would not find objectionable, while underneath were powerful moments of resistance that often happened under the colonizers’ radar, while mixing dominant and Native discourses. Henry and Elizabeth Cloud as Native intellectuals used these tribal trickster strategies to challenge settler colonialism.
This family-tribal history revolves around the work and activism of my grandparents, Henry Cloud (1884–1950), a Ho-Chunk, and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (1887–1965), an Ojibwe. Their activism and intellectual work occurred during the twentieth century, including involvement in the Society of American Indians, the National Congress of American Indians, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Even though Henry has been recognized as the most important Native policy maker of the early twentieth century, only two books and four articles have been written about him.4 While Elizabeth fought against termination as part of her role in NCAI and GFWC, only one article has been written about her. Indeed, this is the first Ojibwe-centric and Ho-Chunk–centric analysis of Henry and Elizabeth Cloud.
Henry and Elizabeth grew up in the midst of settler colonialism and had to confront living in an extremely racist society that saw them as less than full human, as “savages” lower on the social-evolutionary scale and less intelligent than whites. They lived in the midst of dominant civilizing discourses that attempted to break their connection to Native land, treaty rights, and tribal identities. They were seized and taken to federal boarding schools—a cultural genocidal and abusive environment that attempted to erase their tribal identities and socialize them to follow white gender norms, become submissive, and follow white notions of the nuclear family. They both faced settler-colonial policies, including the reservation system, removals, and the Allotment Act, and Elizabeth confronted termination—all governmental efforts of land dispossession and the elimination of the Native. The Clouds fought these policies in varied ways. Henry documented the horrible abuse of the federal boarding schools, co-wrote the Meriam Report of 1928, and, according to available evidence, coauthored the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.5 Elizabeth and Henry worked together, running a college-preparatory Christian high school to educate Native young boys to become educated warriors for their tribes, who could then also fight settler-colonial policies. (They wished to include Native girls too, and school officials did eventually decide to admit girls, starting in 1932.)
The Clouds lived with, and struggled against, the impact of the dominant discourse of classic anthropology that incarcerates Natives in the land, supporting static notions of culture and identity and contributing to the notion of the vanishing Native—a story told over and over in Wild West shows, Hollywood films, museums, and popular culture overall. Henry struggled to change the colonial nature of the Pendleton Round-Up and Wild West show, and Elizabeth confronted Dillon Myer, the strong supporter of termination and relocation, to stop seeing Natives as “museum pieces.”6 This book also revolves around gender and settler colonialism, including how relationships in the intimate realm influence oppression along the lines of race, class, and gender. It examines how Mary Roe attempted to destroy Cloud’s Ho-Chunk kinship bonds in our Cloud family and replace them with white notions of the nuclear family and how Henry chose to marry Elizabeth, a strong Ojibwe warrior woman, and strengthen his Native kinship ties.
Standing Up to Colonial Power is a Native feminist approach to family-tribal history, arguing that Native archival materials are not always available for public consumption, and archival researchers should work with Native families, communities, and tribal nations in a collaborative manner, while relying on intersectional analysis to analyze government documents, letters, interviews, newspapers, and other materials. Rather than viewing Natives, and by extension our letters and archival materials, as “data” divorced from Native families, archival information is precious and should be respected and carefully used in conjunction with Native families’ permission, collaboration, and involvement. This book uses the Native feminist approach of intersectional analysis, not privileging one oppression, such as race, class, and gender, over another, and places colonialism at the center of my analysis. My methodology also incorporates my perspectives as an “insider,” as my beloved ancestors are Henry and Elizabeth Cloud, and an “outsider,” as a scholar, writing from these two social positions. The book is part of my work to decolonize our family-tribal history. Consequently, I usually call my grandparents the Clouds rather than the Roe Clouds, since Henry’s relationship with the Roes had a colonial element.
Drafting the book my mother, Woesha Cloud North, hoped to write (but, unfortunately, died before achieving her goal) took eight years from start to finish, while I, along with family members, including my sons, Lucio and Gilbert, and my daughter, Mirasol; and Ned Blackhawk and Reynaldo Morales, also made a film about Henry Cloud, primarily funded by the Ho-Chunk nation, in the midst of trying to write this book. I am following in the footsteps of not only my mother, Woesha, but also my aunt Marion and grandmother, Elizabeth, who also wanted a book written about the Cloud family. These female relatives started compiling archival documents and interviews and saving important pieces of family information. I must honor the efforts of these Cloud family women. Without their work at collecting material, this family-tribal history would not have been written.
I began this family-tribal history by staring at a couple of boxes underneath my desk and contemplated the idea of working on a book that discusses the activism and intellectual work of Henry and Elizabeth Cloud with my sisters, Mary McNeil and Woesha Hampson; my brother, Robert Cloud North; my cousins Robin and Mark Butterfield, Gretchen Freed-Rowland, and Susan Freed Held; my brother-in-law Chris McNeil; my Ho-Chunk colleague Amy Lonetree; my husband, Gil; my children, Lucio, Mirasol, and Gilbert; my niece Tasha Adams; and other family members. When I traveled with my son, Gilbert, to conduct archival research in the Yale Sterling Library during the summer of 2008, I had no idea how long of a journey this book would take from start to finish. As I sat next to my son in the Yale library, I felt the spirit of my mother, Woesha, sitting next to me and remembered her tearful phone calls, discussing the colonial aspect of the letters I was reading. As I write the final words of this book, I can feel my mom’s spiritual presence, and I am now shedding tears of joy that I have fulfilled the promise I made to her to write the book she wanted to draft but died before accomplishing her objective. I love our Cloud family, and this book is for all of my Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe relatives, colleagues, and friends and everyone whose lives were touched by Henry and Elizabeth Cloud.