Category: Farm life

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1900s Farm life Native American Poem

The Unruly Pigs

Two pigs by George Morland, late 18th century. Public domain.

The Unruly Pigs

By Hellen Rebecca Anderson (Cherokee), age 8
Annotations by Karen L. Kilcup
Two pigs by George Morland, late 18th century. Public domain.
Two Pigs, by George Morland, probably late eighteenth century. Public domain.
Billy Wiggs once caught some pigs, [1]
    And he put them in a pen,
But the pen was not strong,
    And so all went wrong,
And the pigs were gone again.

He followed them fast,
    And found them at last
And put them in another;
    They ate and they fussed,
As if they would bust,
    And he sold them to his mother.
HELLEN REBECCA Anderson, “The Unruly Pigs,” Twin territories 5, no. 4 (April 1903): 136.

[1] Wiggs may be a Chickasaw name. In the late 1890s, a Richard C. Wiggs applied for tribal enrollment on the Dawes Rolls. His application is listed in the National Archives catalog. See below.

Contexts

Anderson was featured in Twin Territories, an Indian Territories magazine that achieved national recognition. The lavishly illustrated periodical was edited and published by Ora V. Eddleman (later Reed) beginning in 1899, when the editor was herself only nineteen years old. “The Unruly Pigs” appeared in a new column that Eddleman inaugurated, “For the Little Chiefs and Their Sisters”; Anderson’s poem had the honor of being the first contribution by a young reader. Eddleman was responding to a letter from “a little Indian girl—a bright little Cherokee maid” who wrote to the magazine with a request: “Twin Territories is good, and of course we all read it, and look at the pictures. Once my papa’s picture was in it, and we all liked it. But I think if you would have a page for the children’s own it would be better. We want a page that we can write for and can have pictures in it. Won’t you please fix a page for us?”

Eddleman responds with encouragement, aiming to make the new feature “attractive” and announcing plans for “prizes for the best stories, poems, compositions, etc.” She comments, “Especially do we urge the Indian children to contribute.” Eddleman prefaces “The Unruly Pigs” proudly: “The following poem was written by a little Cherokee girl just eight years of age—Hellen Rebecca Anderson, daughter of Mrs. Mabel Washbourne Anderson, a contributor to Twin Territories. The poem is entirely original with little Hellen, and we give it just as she submitted the manuscript to Twin Territories.”

The magazine’s goal was to showcase the achievements of Native peoples in the area that would become Oklahoma and to combat the stereotype of Indians as uncivilized.

Resources for Further Study
  • Carpenter, Cari, and Karen L. Kilcup. Introduction. Selected Writing of Ora Eddleman Reed, Cherokee Author, Editor, and Activist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming.
  • Constantin, Dave. “Rewriting History—for the Better.” Teaching Tolerance 51 (Fall 2015).
  • Kilcup, Karen L. “Mabel Washbourne Anderson (Cherokee, 1863-1949).” In Native American Women’s Writing, c. 1800-1924: An Anthology. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000. 248-49.
  • Pennington, William D. “Twin Territories.” Oklahoma Historical Society.
  • Wilson, Linda D. “Reed, Ora V. Eddleman (1880-1968).” Oklahoma Historical Society.
  • ———. “Twin Territories: The Indian Magazine.” Oklahoma Historical Society.
Pedagogy

Numerous resources support teaching at various levels about Native Americans in the Twin Territories, Oklahoma, and the United States more generally. The Cherokees were long invested in fostering their citizens’ education, and teachers can help students learn about the Cherokee Female Seminary and the Cherokee Male Seminary. A few examples follow, but many more are easily found on the web.

Boatman, Christine. “Lessons Learned in Teaching Native American History.” Edutopia. George Lucas Educational Foundation, September 18, 2019. “A white teacher shares resources and things she’s learned: Be humble, find the gaps in your knowledge, and listen to Native voices.”

“Maps and Spatial Data: Map Resources for Teaching Oklahoma History.” Edmon Low Library. Oklahoma State University. Includes maps of Indian Territory from 1889 and of the proposed State of Sequoyah from 1905.

“Teacher’s Guide. American Indian History and Heritage.” EDSITEment! National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Transforming teaching and learning about Native Americans.” Native Knowledge 360° Education Initiative. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian. The site offers educators and others free webinars, including many hosted by Native Americans, aimed to correct problematic narratives about Native Americans; it maintains an archive of previous sessions.

Contemporary Connections

One ongoing manifestation of the Cherokees’ commitment to education is their newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. A version of this newspaper, edited by Cherokee Elias Boudinot, first appeared in 1829 as the Cherokee Phoenix, and Indians’ Advocate. The weekly newspaper, which appeared in both English and the Cherokee syllabary developed by Chief Sequoyah, contained a wide range of materials, including the Cherokee Constitution, political and religious news, biographies of notable Cherokees, and more. In “Education has always been important to the Cherokees” (March 12, 2004), Principal Chief Chad Smith celebrates the nation’s tradition, commenting that “before statehood, our school system was the envy of local states. In fact, many non-Indian families that lived on the border of the Cherokee Nation would send their children to our day schools because of the high level of education they would receive there.”

Masthead for the Cherokee Phoenix, and Indians' Advocate, May 5, 1832. Courtesy Amherst College.
Masthead for the Cherokee Phoenix, and Indians’ Advocate, May 5, 1832. Courtesy Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College.

Richard C. Wiggs, Dawes Enrollment Jacket for Chickasaw, Chickasaw by Blood, Card #1723. Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1793-1999. Applications for Enrollment in the Five Civilized Tribes, 1898-1914.

Categories
1910s Farm life Native American Poem Seasons

Playing and Haying

Playing and Haying

By Eugene Dutton (Anishinaabe)[1]
Annotations by Jessica Cory
Original image of the poem in print.
‘Tis such a fun in autumn time
To play at making hay—
To romp in meadows full of grass
Until the evening of the day.
 
‘Tis fun to cut and rake the grass,
To stack it way up high,
And then to climb a-top of it
Till you almost reach the sky.
 
And when on top to deftly go
Down it’s [sic] loosening side;
Oh isn’t it the greatest sport,
Down a hay stack to slide.
Dutton, eugene. “Playing and haying.” The REd Man 3 no. 5 (December 1910): 146.

[1] Dutton was noted by a local newspaper as being Chippewa. Today, the term used for Chippewa is Ojibwe. The Ojibwe . . . refer to themselves in their original language as the Anishinaabe, or “the people,” thus the changes seen here.  

Contexts

Dutton’s poem was published in The Red Man, a publication of The Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Dutton, however, did not attend The Carlisle School, as the editor’s note clarifies, instead attending Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial School. Because the Carlisle School published this Native student’s poem and he attended another residential school that was likely responsible for sharing his work, we should recognize how power and censorship shape such texts.

On the author: The Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial School has very limited digital records, and I was only able to find that Dutton’s guardians were his grandparents and that several of his siblings also attended Mount Pleasant School. However, I was able ascertain some information about Eugene Dutton from local newspapers. In June of 1912, the Isabella County Enterprise evidences Dutton performing in school choir event. The next year, in October of 1913, the same newspaper reports that “Eugene Dutton…of Mackinaw Island” [now commonly called Mackinac Island] was visiting “the Government School.” Nothing else is printed of him until July 10, 1925 when he appears on the front page of the Isabella County Enterprise and on page 3 of the Clare Sentinel. Both mentions note that he was “formerly [a] pitcher for the Mt. Pleasant Indian school [baseball] team” (1) and pitched for the “North Branch Indians” in their game against the “Delwin Indians.” (3) The baseball game was part of a Fourth of July picnic held the previous week “by the Indians east and north of Rosebush in the Chatfield grove” (3). His last mentions in the newspaper occur June 3, 1930, when he appears on pages one and three of the Mount Pleasant Daily Times; these are also the only public findings of his tribal affiliation. In the front page article, “Chippewa Indian Tribe Sues Federal Government For Large Sum Under Alleged Provisions of Aged Treaty,” Dutton is one of two names nominated to become a temporary Tribal chairman. He did not, however, win that role and was instead “elected for the position as assistant to the secretary” (3).

Interestingly, the 1913 mention of Dutton being “of Mackinaw Island” was not able to be confirmed nor disconfirmed through historical records, as his birthplace was always listed simply as “Michigan.” For most of his life though, records do show that he primarily lived in Saginaw, Michigan, where the Isabella Reservation for the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe of Indians is located.

Resources for Further Study
Pedagogy

The name “Chippewa” is used less frequently than the terms “Ojibwe” and “Anishinaabe” (sometimes spelled with one ‘a’) nowadays, so in searching for lesson plans, the latter two terms will likely need to be included in search terms.

  • The National Endowment for the Humanities has some excellent lesson plans for teaching about Chippewa/Ojibwe, Anishinaabe cultures.
  • The Saginaw Chippewa Tribe also has created several lesson plans on the residential school system.
Contemporary Connections

While the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe was awarded a grant to install fencing around two buildings that were part of the Mount Pleasant Boarding School, part of the fencing was destroyed by vandals trying to access the empty buildings, which are on the National Register of Historic Places in Sept. 2020. The Tribe also has regular commemorations to remember the closing of the school.

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