Laura Cornelius Kellogg (1880–ca. 1949) was born on the Oneida Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she did not attend federal boarding schools but rather studied at Grafton Hall, a private school for girls in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where she graduated with honors in 1898. Kellogg taught at the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, between 1902 and 1904 before resigning to study law at Stanford University. Kellogg left Stanford after a few months and, in the fall of 1906, transferred to Barnard College, where she studied law and later social work until May 1907. She also studied at the University of Wisconsin, but she never completed her degree. Kellogg was a founding member of the Society of American Indians. Her views on the reservation differed from those of other members of the SAI. She saw the reservation as a place of opportunity, whereas many of the other members of the SAI believed that the breakup of the reservation offered the best path to citizenship. She eventually distanced herself from the SAI and expanded her concept of transforming reservations into industrial villages in her only published book, Our Democracy and the American Indian (1920). While Kellogg is best known for her legacy with the SAI and her book, less known is her lifelong activism for the Six Nations land claims and her other writings, which include short stories, essays, and poetry. (Ackley and Stanciu, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, 6, 12; Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction, 318–19)
The last few issues of Carlisle’s publications have so aroused my interest that I cannot refrain from humbly participating in an “Indian Council.” Not that the pages of the little paper have been filled, lately, with literature superior than formerly, but the part in it I like better is INDIANS’ public opinion.
I feel like living when I hear educated Indians advancing well-balanced ideas. It looks as if we [are] about to redeem our racial mental debility when we have opinions worth expressing, and express them.
For what, after all, is Public Opinion but literature? And literature in time makes and establishes the mental development of a people.
I like much perusing the artistic views of our own Native genius, Zitkala-Ša, on The Indian Dance, and I had to listen to that exponent of Carlisle, Dr. Montezuma, for the practical side bearing upon the subject.1
To this extent I agree with the former, that that element of our race which has no future is truly pitiable, that element whose present is a life of constraint and starvation of development, is a heartbreaking thing to look upon, but the latter points out that the present pleasure of the Indian dance is a corruption of sacred rite, and since it is an irreverent imitation, its tendencies cannot be wholesome.
Naturally the beat of the drum wakes up the human desire for recreation long pent up by the dead environment of reserve existence, and thither will go a weak youth, who once in the whirl of such doings forgets the moral and social codes that have replaced those of barbarism, only to wake up on the morrow, a shamefaced idiot, with the manhood gone, that perchance has been Carlisle’s hard won years.
So debased pleasure can undo honorable labor, so is ultimate transition retarded.
And can we afford as a race, and individually, to lose thus not only time, which is gold, but honor, the greatest and our all?2