Wynema, a Child of the Forest was a historical novel by American (Muscogee) author, Sophia Alice Callahan, published in 1891. It is the first novel by a Native American woman in the U.S. [1]
The novel follows Wynema, a young Muscogee girl, who, like Callahan, becomes educated in English and teaches at a mission school. She later marries the brother of her friend, a white teacher. She has a child with him, but after Wounded Knee, also adopts a Lakota infant girl. [2]
She completed the novel and published it six months after the Massacre at Wounded Knee at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the year following the Ghost Dance, major events in Native American history. Her novel offered "the first fictional re-creation of both the messianic religious movement that reached the Pine Ridge Reservation in the spring of 1890 and the infamous slaughter of Lakota men, women, and children that occurred on December 29 of that same year." [2]
Callahan shows how strongly learning to read and write in English is related to assimilation, but she also shows her lead characters reading critically, applying judgment, and "scrutinizing contexts and subtexts." [3]
While Callahan has her characters (often through the white characters) express some of the common ideas about allotment, the Ghost Dance and the massacre, "Old Masse Hadjo," an Indian, explicitly explains how the Ghost Dance religion is better for the Indians than Christianity. His comments "validate the Native religion and emphasizes the threat of white hostility, turning dominant rhetoric on its head and thereby extricating the Ghost Dance from the violence to follow." [2]
In the late 20th century, Wynema, a Child of the Forest was rediscovered. [4] It was reprinted in 1997.
The timing of the publication of Callahan's novel in the spring of 1891 shows that she had to decide to incorporate the events of Wounded Knee into her novel, as they took place in December 1890. A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff says this section appears to be tacked on to the novel, which otherwise has a classic romantic structure that was resolved with the marriages of Wynema and her white teacher friend Genevieve. [2]
Callahan used the novel to dramatize the issue of tribal allotments and breakup of communal lands, and dedicated it to the Native American population, calling for an end to injustices suffered by Indians. Her heroine "Wynema serves as both a reflection of Callahan's Christian ideals and a vehicle through which those ideals can be shown to fail." [2]
According to scholars Gretchen M. Bataille and Laurie Lisa, the novel is "thin, and sometimes highly improbable, plots are woven through with themes concerning the importance of Christianity and education in English, fraud in Indian administration, allotments, temperance, women's rights, the Ghost Dance movement, and atrocities committed upon the Sioux at Wounded Knee". [5]
When Callahan addresses Wounded Knee, she repeats inaccuracies of the press. [2] But she introduces a radical element by describing Lakota women before and after the battle, which most other accounts ignore. In a contrived ending, Chikena, an elder Lakota woman finds and saves three infants from the battlefield. In this section, the reader learns that Wynema speaks Lakota; she invites the older woman to live with her and adopts the infant girl. "Wynema's charge, named Miscona after her dead mother, becomes ... a "famous musician and wise woman" (Callahan 104), offering at least the possibility of an Indian-identified life." [2] This is in contrast to the two Lakota boys, adopted by Wynema's white friends, who are given Anglo-European names and said to become a doctor and missionary as adults. [2] Lisa Tatonetti says that Callahan wrote from her position as an acculturated Native American but she also sought to imagine the lives of the Plains Indians. [2]
The Ghost Dance is a ceremony incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems. According to the teachings of the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka, proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits to fight on their behalf, end American Westward expansion, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples throughout the region.
The Wounded Knee Massacre, also known as the Battle of Wounded Knee was a massacre of nearly three hundred Lakota people by soldiers of the United States Army. The massacre, part of what the U.S. military called the Pine Ridge Campaign, occurred on December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, following a botched attempt to disarm the Lakota camp. The previous day, a detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment commanded by Major Samuel M. Whitside approached Spotted Elk's band of Miniconjou Lakota and 38 Hunkpapa Lakota near Porcupine Butte and escorted them five miles westward to Wounded Knee Creek, where they made camp. The remainder of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, led by Colonel James W. Forsyth, arrived and surrounded the encampment. The regiment was supported by a battery of four Hotchkiss mountain guns. The Army was catering to the anxiety of settlers who called the conflict the Messiah War and were worried the Ghost Dance signified a potentially dangerous Sioux resurgence. Historian Jeffrey Ostler wrote in 2004, "Wounded Knee was not made up of a series of discrete unconnected events. Instead, from the disarming to the burial of the dead, it consisted of a series of acts held together by an underlying logic of racist domination."
Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, was the Paiute religious leader who founded a second episode of the Ghost Dance movement. Wovoka means "cutter" or "wood cutter" in the Northern Paiute language.
Ella Cara Deloria, also called Aŋpétu Wašté Wiŋ, was a Yankton Dakota (Sioux) educator, anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and novelist. She recorded Native American oral history and contributed to the study of Native American languages. According to Cotera (2008), Deloria was "a pre-eminent expert on Dakota/Lakota/Nakota cultural religious, and linguistic practices." In the 1940s, Deloria wrote the novel Waterlily, which was published in 1988 and republished in 2009.
The Ghost Dance War was the military reaction of the United States government against the spread of the Ghost Dance movement on Lakota Sioux reservations in 1890 and 1891. The U.S. Army designation for this conflict was Pine Ridge Campaign. White settlers called it the Messiah War. Lakota Sioux reservations were occupied by the U.S. Army, causing fear, confusion, and resistance among the Lakota. It resulted in the Wounded Knee Massacre wherein the 7th Cavalry killed over 250 Lakota, primarily unarmed women, children, and elders, at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. The end of the Ghost Dance War is usually dated January 15, 1891, when Lakota Ghost-Dancing leader Kicking Bear decided to meet with US officials. However, the U.S. government continued to use the threat of violence to suppress the Ghost Dance at Lakota reservations Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock.
Mary Brave Bird, also known as Mary Brave Woman Olguin and Mary Crow Dog was a Sicangu Lakota writer and activist who was a member of the American Indian Movement during the 1970s and participated in some of their most publicized events, including the Wounded Knee Incident when she was 18 years old.
Lakota Woman is a memoir by Mary Brave Bird, a Sicangu Lakota who was formerly known as Mary Crow Dog. Reared on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, she describes her childhood and young adulthood, which included many historical events associated with the American Indian Movement.
The Wounded Knee Occupation, also known as Second Wounded Knee, began on February 27, 1973, when approximately 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian Movement (AIM) seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, United States, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The protest followed the failure of an effort of the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO) to use impeachment to remove tribal president Richard Wilson, whom they accused of corruption and abuse of opponents. Additionally, protesters criticized the United States government's failure to fulfill treaties with Native American people and demanded the reopening of treaty negotiations to hopefully arrive at fair and equitable treatment of Native Americans.
Samuel Benton Callahan was an influential, Muscogee politician, born in Mobile, Alabama, to a white father, James Callahan, and Amanda Doyle, a mixed-blood Creek woman. He is listed as 1/8th Creek by Blood on the Dawes Rolls. One source says that James was an Irishman who had previously been an architect or a shipbuilder from Pennsylvania, while Amanda was one-fourth Muscogee. His father died while he was young; he and his mother were required to emigrate to Indian Territory in 1836. His mother married Dr. Owen Davis of Sulphur Springs, Texas, where they raised Samuel.
Ghost shirts are shirts, or other clothing items, worn by members of the Ghost Dance religion, and thought to be imbued with spiritual powers. The religion was founded by Wovoka, a Northern Paiute Native American, in the late 19th century and quickly spread throughout the Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin and Plains tribes.
James McLaughlin was a Canadian-American United States Indian agent and inspector, best known for having ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull in December 1890, which resulted in the chief's death and contributed to the Wounded Knee Massacre. Before this event, he was known for his positive relations with several tribes. His memoir, published in 1910, was entitled, My Friend the Indian.
Mourning Dove or Humishuma was a Native American author best known for her 1927 novel Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range and her 1933 work Coyote Stories.
Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee is a 1994 TNT film starring Irene Bedard, Tantoo Cardinal, Pato Hoffmann, Joseph Runningfox, Lawrence Bayne, and Michael Horse and August Schellenberg. The film is based on Mary Crow Dog's autobiography Lakota Woman, wherein she accounts her troubled youth, involvement with the American Indian Movement, and relationship with Lakota medicine man and activist Leonard Crow Dog. The film is notable for being the first American film to feature an indigenous Native American actress in the starring role. Lakota Woman is also the third overall and first sound film with an entirely indigenous cast after In the Land of the Head Hunters and Daughter of Dawn.
Spotted Elk, was a chief of the Miniconjou, Lakota Sioux. He was a son of Miniconjou chief Lone Horn and became a chief upon his father's death. He was a highly renowned chief with skills in war and negotiations. A United States Army soldier, at Fort Bennett, coined the nickname Big Foot – not to be confused with Oglala Big Foot.
Gloria Bird is a Native American poet, essayist, teacher and a member of the Spokane Tribe in Washington State. Gloria spreads her work not only by writing for her but all Native American people. In her work, Bird’s main priority is to question and diminish harmful stereotypes placed on Native American people. Her focus in on educating about her community in accurate scripts without exploiting the culture.
Sophia Alice Callahan was a novelist and teacher of Muscogee heritage. Her novel, Wynema, a Child of the Forest (1891) is thought "to be the first novel written by a Native American woman." Shocked about the Massacre at Wounded Knee at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which took place about six months before she published her book, Callahan added an account of this and the 1890 Ghost Dance of the Lakota to her book in the first fictional treatment of these subjects. This may have been "the first novel written in Oklahoma," which was at the time Indian Territory. Callahan wrote in a romantic novel style but she also clearly intended what has been called a "reform novel," identifying many wrongs suffered by Native Americans in United States society. After being discovered in the late 20th century, the novel was reprinted in 1997. It has been the subject of scholarly studies.
Zintkála Nuni, alternatively 'Zintka Lanuni', was a Lakota Sioux woman who was a 4-month-old infant when she was found alive among the victims at the Wounded Knee Massacre.
Emma Cornelia Sickels (1854–1920) was an American teacher. She had a complex relationship with Indigenous peoples through her work with the United States government. White society regarded her as a hero for collecting information and mediating peace between the US and the Lakota people in 1890. During this time, she incorrectly blamed Native Americans for the Wounded Knee Massacre. In 1893, she was publicly fired from the Anthropology and Ethnology Department at the Chicago World's Fair for protesting how her boss was falsely showcasing Native American life to display Indigenous people as uncivilized.