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South Dakota: Finding the Girl in the Middle (with Marni Sandweiss) · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Marnie Sandweiss: And these men are all members of a peace commission that the federal government has created to go out west and persuade the Lakota and the other tribes on the northern plains to sign a treaty confining them to reservations.
• 0:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: And they're well-known men.
• 0:14
  Marnie Sandweiss: They've all just distinguished themselves in the Civil War, which has just ended three years before.
• 0:19
  Marnie Sandweiss: And they're always named in the Prince.
• 0:22
  Marnie Sandweiss: And the girl never has a name.
• 0:25
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I wanted to find out who she was.
• 0:29
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 0:36
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:40
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 0:52
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 1:01
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
• 1:08
  Crista Cowan: Today we are going to the state of South Dakota.
• 1:14
  Crista Cowan: Now, I came across this story when a picture with an attached article came across my newsfeed on Facebook.
• 1:23
  Crista Cowan: It was this picture that if you're watching on YouTube, you'll be able to see.
• 1:28
  Crista Cowan: If you're listening, it is a picture of a young indigenous woman standing between a group of white men who were kind of towering over her.
• 1:38
  Crista Cowan: And the story that I read in that article was so compelling that I wanted to know more about it.
• 1:46
  Crista Cowan: Turns out I'm not the only one who wanted to know more about it.
• 1:50
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is Martha Sandweiss.
• 1:53
  Crista Cowan: She goes by Marnie, and you'll hear our conversation in just a minute.
• 1:57
  Crista Cowan: She is a professor at Princeton.
• 2:00
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, she is a professor emerita of history from Princeton University, where she is the founding director of the Princeton and Slavery Project.
• 2:10
  Crista Cowan: And the thing that's a little bit different today than normal is that this is not her family story.
• 2:17
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, she is a historian, and like genealogists, she loves digging into the context surrounding the stories that happen in the lives of people.
• 2:30
  Crista Cowan: With genealogists, we just happen to be digging into usually our own people.
• 2:35
  Crista Cowan: But Marnie dug into the story, and as she started to uncover the details, she was able to connect with the family.
• 2:43
  Crista Cowan: Now, she and I have an interesting conversation about the nature of telling stories for groups of people that we are not a part.
• 2:53
  Crista Cowan: In this case, she's telling the story of an Indigenous woman.
• 2:57
  Crista Cowan: But I think it's interesting to think about the context in which all American history lives, regardless of which particular group or culture you belong to, and how those stories both interweave and can be told from different perspectives as we collect the historical facts that we collect in this work of family history that we do.
• 3:21
  Crista Cowan: So as we head to South Dakota today, enjoy my conversation with Marnie Sandweiss.
• 3:27
  Crista Cowan: Well, Marnie, thank you so much for joining us.
• 3:31
  Crista Cowan: I think we would love to start with just hearing a little bit about your background and your education and your journey into history as a career.
• 3:41
  Marnie Sandweiss: Well, I grew up in an old streetcar suburb of St.
• 3:44
  Marnie Sandweiss: Louis.
• 3:44
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I think, like so many people at the time, I thought history happened somewhere else.
• 3:49
  Marnie Sandweiss: I really didn't understand that history happened right where I lived, because the history I read about in my textbooks didn't talk about my place.
• 3:58
  Marnie Sandweiss: And it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that every place has a history, and every place has an interesting history.
• 4:06
  Marnie Sandweiss: So I gravitated towards the study of American history in college, but always imagined I would go to law school.
• 4:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: And in my senior year of college, I went to a women's history conference and I was stunned.
• 4:20
  Marnie Sandweiss: I saw women giving lectures, and I realized only at that moment I had never had a woman professor.
• 4:28
  Marnie Sandweiss: I didn't know women could teach history.
• 4:31
  Marnie Sandweiss: So I went back from that conference, ripped up my law school applications, and said, I can do this.
• 4:36
  Marnie Sandweiss: I can go to graduate school.
• 4:38
  Marnie Sandweiss: I applied to graduate school in American history, but I came back to uh teaching American history in a roundabout way.
• 4:45
  Marnie Sandweiss: I actually began my career as a photography curator at a Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.
• 4:52
  Marnie Sandweiss: And then from there slowly migrated my way back to becoming a professor of American history.
• 4:57
  Crista Cowan: That's incredible.
• 4:58
  Marnie Sandweiss: And how long have you been doing that?
• 5:00
  Marnie Sandweiss: I recently retired, uh, but I started my career 46 years ago.
• 5:06
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I would say the last 35 years or so, I would a professor.
• 5:12
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 5:12
  Crista Cowan: And as you think about your teaching career and the impact that those women teachers had on you, um, do you do you feel like you succeeded in passing that successfully on to the next generation?
• 5:27
  Marnie Sandweiss: I'd like to hope so.
• 5:28
  Marnie Sandweiss: I like to hope I've shown my students that what I do is really fun.
• 5:32
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 5:33
  Crista Cowan: I would I probably could ask you a million questions about that, but in service of our conversation today, I am, of course, a professional genealogist, and I've been doing that for more than two decades now.
• 5:46
  Crista Cowan: And family history is this really interesting um juxtaposition against history.
• 5:56
  Crista Cowan: And sometimes historians and family historians are a little bit at odds, but I find that there is a lot of similarities.
• 6:03
  Crista Cowan: And so as you have kind of delved into personal stories of individuals, which we'll talk more about, um, have you seen similarities between those two fields?
• 6:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: You know, that's such a good question to bring up, Krista.
• 6:16
  Marnie Sandweiss: Thank you.
• 6:16
  Marnie Sandweiss: Yeah, let me back up for a moment and say, I think there are two kinds of historians.
• 6:21
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I'm I'm borrowing the phrases here from a well-known French historian who said there are parachutists and truffle hunters.
• 6:28
  Marnie Sandweiss: So a parachutist is operating as if from a drone, looking at the big, the big pictures, the how diseases spread across continents where people migrate or whatever.
• 6:40
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, and truffle hunters like to dig down deep and find the little stories.
• 6:46
  Marnie Sandweiss: So I need to tell you right off the cuff here, I'm afraid of heights.
• 6:50
  Marnie Sandweiss: So I'm a pro hunter.
• 6:52
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 6:53
  Crista Cowan: I could tell that by reading your book, like that you're very much into those personal stories.
• 6:59
  Crista Cowan: And yet you still manage to give the context of the broader history and the person's place within that, which is one of the ways that I think sometimes um historians and family historians are a little different.
• 7:11
  Crista Cowan: I think because so many family historians are hobbyists or are just curious about their own family as they start on this exploration, they don't always understand the importance of broader context in telling those stories.
• 7:25
  Crista Cowan: And so for me, that's one of the differences.
• 7:27
  Crista Cowan: I don't know if you've seen other differences.
• 7:29
  Marnie Sandweiss: No, I agree with you entirely.
• 7:31
  Marnie Sandweiss: So I was going to say I'm a truffle hunter.
• 7:32
  Marnie Sandweiss: And in being a truffle hunter, that does make me somewhat akin to family historians or genealogists.
• 7:39
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, but I still think there's a difference.
• 7:42
  Marnie Sandweiss: And if I can over-generalize just a little bit, I'd say it's the point you just mentioned.
• 7:47
  Marnie Sandweiss: Historians are more concerned with context.
• 7:51
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, so someone who's researching their own family line might focus exclusively on a particular bloodline, say.
• 7:59
  Marnie Sandweiss: And a historian has to have a somewhat wider view.
• 8:03
  Marnie Sandweiss: A historian has to look at the community that person lives in or uh consider the circumstances that shaped the opportunities that person had in their life.
• 8:14
  Marnie Sandweiss: And sometimes those things aren't as of much interest to a genealogist simply trying to document their family.
• 8:22
  Marnie Sandweiss: But that said, I want to say right up front, I am so indebted to genealogists and family historians uh for the documents they've saved, for the stories they've put together.
• 8:34
  Marnie Sandweiss: Again and again, I turn to those.
• 8:36
  Marnie Sandweiss: Those are so valuable to me in my work.
• 8:38
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, they are they are valuable for not just my work as a genealogist, but also like my work as a storyteller, because that's for me, family history and genealogy are a vehicle for storytelling, and storytelling is a vehicle for connection and understanding.
• 8:54
  Crista Cowan: And I think sometimes people are comfortable with just doing the genealogy piece, just like some of those parachutists are comfortable doing that history piece.
• 9:03
  Crista Cowan: Um, but I think when you start to blend it all together, there's these real moments of human connection that are available to us, to all of us, no matter which direction we're coming at it from.
• 9:13
  Crista Cowan: Well put.
• 9:14
  Crista Cowan: I totally agree.
• 9:15
  Crista Cowan: So uh so you mentioned that you started as a photography historian in Fort Worth.
• 9:22
  Crista Cowan: And so your book, which I have here, um, was framed around this photo.
• 9:29
  Crista Cowan: And I'm super curious to learn what it was about this photo in particular that drew you.
• 9:35
  Marnie Sandweiss: Well, as you may have inferred, I like writing about the sort of people that other historians haven't cared about.
• 9:41
  Marnie Sandweiss: And some years back, I began to wonder if I could unite my interest in old photographs and my interest in thinking about history in a broader way in one project.
• 9:51
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I thought maybe I can go back to some of those very well-known photographs that we're all familiar with that document the Civil War or the westward tracking of the railroads or Americans' emigration west and the Indian Wars.
• 10:06
  Marnie Sandweiss: If I could go back and find a photograph and identify some of the unnamed people in those photographs, it was just a challenge to myself.
• 10:14
  Marnie Sandweiss: Could I do that?
• 10:15
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I quickly realized if anybody could identify those dead soldiers at MTEM or Gettysburg, it wouldn't be me.
• 10:22
  Marnie Sandweiss: It would be someone who's an expert in military uniforms.
• 10:25
  Marnie Sandweiss: But I got stuck on this photograph.
• 10:28
  Marnie Sandweiss: So what I'm writing about is a photograph made at Fort Laramie, which was then in Dakota territory, in May of 1868.
• 10:37
  Marnie Sandweiss: And it shows six uh big white men standing to either side of a little girl with long braids who's wrapped in a blanket.
• 10:48
  Marnie Sandweiss: And the child is dark complexed.
• 10:50
  Marnie Sandweiss: If you look at her, you think that she probably is an indigenous child.
• 10:54
  Marnie Sandweiss: And these men are all members of a peace commission that the federal government has created to go out west and persuade the Lakota and the other tribes on the northern plains to sign a treaty confining them to reservations.
• 11:07
  Marnie Sandweiss: And they're well-known men, they've all just distinguished themselves in the Civil War, which has just ended three years before.
• 11:14
  Marnie Sandweiss: And they're always named in the prince.
• 11:17
  Marnie Sandweiss: And the girl never has a name.
• 11:20
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I wanted to find out who she was.
• 11:23
  Crista Cowan: When you first came across this photo, were those men clearly identified in the version you were looking at?
• 11:29
  Crista Cowan: And and that was the spark, was the unknown or unidentified nature of her, or was there something about the composition of the photo?
• 11:37
  Crista Cowan: Like, was there something specific about it that's that made you interested?
• 11:42
  Marnie Sandweiss: Those are good questions.
• 11:43
  Marnie Sandweiss: In in the extant prints of this image, uh, the men are always identified.
• 11:48
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I can I know those identifications are correct because I can find other photographs of them.
• 11:54
  Marnie Sandweiss: They were prominent military or political leaders.
• 11:57
  Marnie Sandweiss: One of them was General Sherman, whom listeners will know who he is.
• 12:01
  Marnie Sandweiss: The picture is so peculiar.
• 12:03
  Marnie Sandweiss: The men are three on one side of her, three on the other, and none of them look at her.
• 12:10
  Marnie Sandweiss: And she just stands there in the middle, wrapped in a trade blanket, looking straight at the photographer's lens.
• 12:17
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 12:17
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 12:18
  Crista Cowan: And they're all kind of positioned in interesting ways as well, um, which I just find fascinating, whether that was a choice of the photographer or a commentary about something.
• 12:29
  Crista Cowan: I don't know because we can't really attribute intent without them telling us what their intent was.
• 12:34
  Crista Cowan: But I wonder if you have thoughts on that.
• 12:37
  Marnie Sandweiss: Well, that's where you're uh putting me on the spot as a historian, because historians don't speculate about that kind of thing.
• 12:44
  Marnie Sandweiss: Yeah.
• 12:45
  Marnie Sandweiss: You know, and and the photographer Alexander Gardner, who had distinguished himself as one of the great Civil War photographers, left behind almost no writing.
• 12:53
  Marnie Sandweiss: So we don't know what was in his head, but I think we can say with some confidence, even without a written document, that he arranged those people because the poses are just too formal and symmetrical for it to have happened by accident.
• 13:08
  Crista Cowan: So as you started to research more about this photo, uh, did you intend to write a book from the beginning or or some kind of did you have some kind of output of this exploration that you were expecting, or did that kind of just naturally evolve through the process?
• 13:25
  Marnie Sandweiss: Excellent question.
• 13:26
  Marnie Sandweiss: Because my first question is not a conventional question for a historian.
• 13:30
  Marnie Sandweiss: A historian probably was once to say, what was the cause of the Civil War?
• 13:34
  Marnie Sandweiss: Or how did the Lakota get pushed onto a reservation?
• 13:38
  Marnie Sandweiss: But I really just wanted to know what this girl's name was.
• 13:41
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I was very, very lucky.
• 13:43
  Marnie Sandweiss: It was uh quite an adventure to identify her.
• 13:47
  Marnie Sandweiss: And then as I pursued the story of her life, I just stumbled into an incredible story.
• 13:52
  Crista Cowan: And so let's talk a little bit about the identification of the photo.
• 13:57
  Crista Cowan: Um, like as genealogists, that's something that we all crave as well.
• 14:02
  Crista Cowan: Um, I have boxes of photos and slides that I've digitized.
• 14:05
  Crista Cowan: I've gone that far.
• 14:07
  Crista Cowan: But as I pull them up, I can recognize maybe an aunt or an uncle or a cousin here or there.
• 14:12
  Crista Cowan: But there are people in those photos, even at a personal family level, that I can't identify.
• 14:18
  Crista Cowan: Um, and so I've reached out to, you know, my parents and when my grandmother was still alive, I tried to get her to remember who some of these people were.
• 14:26
  Crista Cowan: But there's just some of those little mysteries, some of those faces in those photos that just grab you and you're like, I want to know who this person is.
• 14:33
  Crista Cowan: And so I think our listeners in particular would be really interested in just knowing some of the process you go through in your profession to identify those individuals.
• 14:44
  Marnie Sandweiss: Yeah, it was really a challenge.
• 14:46
  Marnie Sandweiss: And it was certainly the biggest challenge of working on this project.
• 14:49
  Marnie Sandweiss: Because as you know, Krista, a name is everything.
• 14:52
  Marnie Sandweiss: Once you have a name, if you're resourceful as you are, or as many of the listeners are, you can find a person in the archive.
• 15:00
  Marnie Sandweiss: But when you're starting with a photograph and you don't have a name, there's really a limited amount that you can do.
• 15:07
  Marnie Sandweiss: So when I looked at this picture, I thought, hmm, maybe she's the daughter of one of the headmen or the chiefs who have come into Fort Laramie to sign the treaty.
• 15:18
  Marnie Sandweiss: Maybe she's a translator, a very young translator.
• 15:23
  Marnie Sandweiss: Because a children growing up in this part of the world then would have been multilingual.
• 15:28
  Marnie Sandweiss: But I read the papers of the Peace Commission, I read the papers of the peace commissioners, I read all of the digitized newspapers that recounted the story of what was happening at Fort Laramie, and nobody mentioned a child.
• 15:42
  Marnie Sandweiss: So finally, at Fort Laramie, which is now a national park site in southeastern Wyoming, I found a little note card.
• 15:51
  Marnie Sandweiss: In 1978, a man named Eddie Ryan came through the fort.
• 15:55
  Marnie Sandweiss: He saw a copy of this photograph and said, I know who that is.
• 16:00
  Marnie Sandweiss: That's my grandma.
• 16:01
  Marnie Sandweiss: Her name is Sophie Mousseau.
• 16:03
  Marnie Sandweiss: Now, Mr.
• 16:04
  Marnie Sandweiss: Ryan was no longer alive by the time I found the note card, so I couldn't talk to him about this.
• 16:10
  Marnie Sandweiss: But I can see that he was 30 years old when his grandmother died, and he could have plausibly have recognized a picture of her.
• 16:17
  Marnie Sandweiss: But he was also what we call an unreliable narrator because he also claimed to be descended from Marie Antoinette.
• 16:25
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I just don't think so.
• 16:27
  Marnie Sandweiss: So I took uh Mousseau, I quickly learned is a popular name or a common name on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
• 16:38
  Marnie Sandweiss: So I sent a copy of the photograph to the local newspaper, the Lakota Times, and I said, I believe this child to be Sophie Mousseau.
• 16:47
  Marnie Sandweiss: I would love to hear from any descendants.
• 16:50
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I did.
• 16:51
  Marnie Sandweiss: So um quite quickly I found some of Sophie's uh great and great-great-grandchildren, and I quickly learned they don't have any photographs of her.
• 17:00
  Marnie Sandweiss: They have a few fading stories, but no photographs.
• 17:05
  Marnie Sandweiss: So um it's been wonderful to have them on my team, and I like to think I'm on their team.
• 17:11
  Marnie Sandweiss: Every time I find documents, I share them with the family.
• 17:14
  Marnie Sandweiss: I've shared drafts of my work with the family.
• 17:18
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, and they've shared with me the really the fading family stories they have about someone who died almost 90 years ago.
• 17:26
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, wow.
• 17:27
  Crista Cowan: So it's interesting as you as the story starts to unfold.
• 17:30
  Crista Cowan: You have this photo that took place in Fort Laramie, but you know, now you have this connection to the Lakota, you have some, you know, tentative identity identification of her.
• 17:40
  Crista Cowan: South Dakota then becomes kind of a new part of the story.
• 17:45
  Crista Cowan: And one of the things that we have to think about as genealogists a lot is not just the people, but the place is also a character as we build these stories of our ancestors.
• 17:55
  Crista Cowan: So, how did South Dakota kind of become a character in this narrative?
• 18:00
  Marnie Sandweiss: When the photograph is made in uh May of 1868, Fort Laramie is in Dakota territory.
• 18:06
  Marnie Sandweiss: Later that summer, Fort Laramie is in the newly created Wyoming Territory, which will become the state of Wyoming.
• 18:14
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, and then eventually Dakota Territory becomes split into North and South Dakota.
• 18:20
  Marnie Sandweiss: So all these political boundaries are changing around her.
• 18:24
  Marnie Sandweiss: She's on an Indian reservation and she's not.
• 18:27
  Marnie Sandweiss: She's in a state, she's in a territory, she's in that territory, she's in that territory.
• 18:32
  Marnie Sandweiss: And sometimes those boundaries are changing around her when she's just living in the same house.
• 18:39
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I want to say that that matters because every time those boundaries change, you're subject to a different set of laws and a different government is regulating the options you have in your life.
• 18:52
  Marnie Sandweiss: So South Dakota is a character, but it's a very fluid sort of character during young Sophie's lifetime.
• 19:02
  Crista Cowan: I love the way that you framed that because I think that's something that a lot of us deal with in family history.
• 19:09
  Crista Cowan: And when we've been doing this for a long time, we understand that almost intuitively and you know, through years of experience.
• 19:16
  Crista Cowan: But as new people come into family history, and I know I've got a lot of listeners who are brand new and excited about the exploration of their family tree, that concept of the fluidity of boundaries doesn't really always register right away.
• 19:30
  Crista Cowan: Um, I once had a gentleman ask me, you know, I have family that lived in Prussia.
• 19:34
  Crista Cowan: Prussia doesn't exist anymore.
• 19:36
  Crista Cowan: Do I look for them in Poland or Germany?
• 19:38
  Crista Cowan: And my answer was yes.
• 19:39
  Crista Cowan: And he was very confused for a minute because he didn't understand.
• 19:44
  Crista Cowan: Like he was looking for something concrete and not just the fluidity of the borders, but sometimes the fluidity with where we look for those records, because the records can end up anywhere in and with any of the government entities that owned or or governed that particular spot of dirt at any given time.
• 20:02
  Marnie Sandweiss: Yeah, and I would say the other thing that's very fluid in Sophie's life is her racial identity and her ethnic identity.
• 20:07
  Marnie Sandweiss: So we can get into our personal story.
• 20:09
  Marnie Sandweiss: Yeah, let's do that.
• 20:10
  Marnie Sandweiss: Let's go ahead and dive in.
• 20:11
  Marnie Sandweiss: I want to hear all about Sophie.
• 20:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: Sophie's story in the most implausible way starts 13 years before this picture was made.
• 20:20
  Marnie Sandweiss: And this is what can happen when you're a truffle hunter and you just fall way too far down a rabbit hole of research and you don't know how to get out.
• 20:27
  Marnie Sandweiss: One of the people standing with Sophie in the picture, I call him my evil general Harney.
• 20:34
  Marnie Sandweiss: He's the villain of my story.
• 20:36
  Marnie Sandweiss: He was called woman killer by the Lakota, and with good reason.
• 20:40
  Marnie Sandweiss: So in 1855, 13 years before Sophie poses with him in this photograph, Harney led a vindictive assault on a peaceful Lakota encampment in a place called Blue Water, which is in western Nebraska.
• 20:54
  Marnie Sandweiss: And his men shot a young mother named Yellow Woman in the leg, and they took her baby and used it as target practice.
• 21:02
  Marnie Sandweiss: They murdered about 86 Lakota people and rounded up women and children who survived and marched them about 140 miles to Fort Laramie.
• 21:12
  Marnie Sandweiss: In that attack, Harney and his soldiers discovered that the native people had ammunition that had been sold to them by the French-Canadian trappers who tended to control trade in this part of the country.
• 21:25
  Marnie Sandweiss: So Harney ordered all of those traders, including a man named M.A.
• 21:30
  Marnie Sandweiss: Mousseau, to come into Fort Laramie as well.
• 21:33
  Marnie Sandweiss: So Yellow Woman came to Fort Laramie, M.
• 21:36
  Marnie Sandweiss: Mousseau came to Fort Laramie, they met, they married, they became Sophie's parents, and they remained married for over half a century.
• 21:45
  Marnie Sandweiss: So, in the weirdest of ways, the evil General Harney was an accidental matchmaker.
• 21:51
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 21:52
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I don't ever want to minimize the horror of the massacre or the horror of that violence, but I do want to make the point that sometimes violence can have very unexpected consequences.
• 22:04
  Marnie Sandweiss: And sometimes those consequences can be good.
• 22:06
  Marnie Sandweiss: And in this case, the consequences uh involved the creation of a very large and spoiling family.
• 22:13
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that's so beautifully put.
• 22:15
  Crista Cowan: Um, and I love that sometimes we have to, after all of our truffle hunting, take a step up and look at the patterns that emerge or the consequences and choices and the wave of evil and wrongdoing and goodness and light that come out over the course of time.
• 22:35
  Marnie Sandweiss: So Sophie grows up with a French-Canadian father and a Lakota mother.
• 22:40
  Marnie Sandweiss: And she grows up on the road ranches that her father has in the region around Fort Laramie.
• 22:45
  Marnie Sandweiss: He would sell horses to overland emigrants.
• 22:48
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, he would sell supplies to Native people.
• 22:51
  Marnie Sandweiss: He just made a living.
• 22:53
  Marnie Sandweiss: And shortly before the photograph at Fort Laramie was made in 1868, the family was subject to yet another raid from some angry and hungry uh young Native men who burned down their house and stole their horses.
• 23:08
  Marnie Sandweiss: So the Mousseau family comes into Fort Laramie to be safe.
• 23:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I've actually found the records that that family was at Fort Laramie when Gardner made the picture, which makes me feel better since we don't have any other photographs of Sophie to verify things.
• 23:24
  Marnie Sandweiss: So Sophie grows up in a kind of mixed-race world around the fort where there were many mixed-race families.
• 23:30
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, and when she's a young teenager, maybe only around 14 or 15, she marries a white Civil War veteran named Posey Ryan.
• 23:39
  Marnie Sandweiss: They have five children.
• 23:42
  Marnie Sandweiss: And then when Sophie's around 25, Posey falls in love with a white woman and he banishes Sophie to Pine Ridge, to the Great Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.
• 23:54
  Marnie Sandweiss: And what was so unusual is he took the children.
• 23:58
  Marnie Sandweiss: He kidnapped their children.
• 24:00
  Marnie Sandweiss: And Sophie's a young native woman, she doesn't have any rights in a territorial court.
• 24:06
  Marnie Sandweiss: She lost those children.
• 24:08
  Marnie Sandweiss: She uh she gets a job briefly at a boarding school in in Pine Ridge.
• 24:15
  Marnie Sandweiss: She's working at that boarding school when the massacre at Wounded Knee happens in the final days of 1890.
• 24:20
  Marnie Sandweiss: And in 1893, she marries again.
• 24:24
  Marnie Sandweiss: And she marries a man who likewise has a white father and a Lakota mother.
• 24:28
  Marnie Sandweiss: He's been traveling the country as a juggler and Wild West show.
• 24:33
  Marnie Sandweiss: But he's a very fluent Lakota speaker and he speaks archaic forms of Lakota.
• 24:39
  Marnie Sandweiss: So when all the anthropologists start coming to uh Pine Ridge in the late 19th century and early 20th century, he becomes their translator.
• 24:48
  Marnie Sandweiss: And so it's so ironic at a moment when Lakota people there are losing so much knowledge of the old ways, Sophie is gaining them for the first time because he's coming home at dinner and saying, I just interviewed a person who made teepees.
• 25:02
  Marnie Sandweiss: I'm just I just interviewed a person who remembers the great bison hunts.
• 25:06
  Marnie Sandweiss: So she had eight children with her second husband, uh, that's 13 and all, and uh lives the last half century of her life in one of the very poorest parts of America, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
• 25:20
  Crista Cowan: Wow, what a life.
• 25:22
  Crista Cowan: Was she ever reunited in any fashion with her older children?
• 25:28
  Marnie Sandweiss: Those older children were basically raised as white.
• 25:30
  Marnie Sandweiss: Descendants in that part of the family sometimes didn't know they had a native grandmother until they were quite along in years themselves.
• 25:39
  Marnie Sandweiss: But one of those white uh one of those children from the first family, uh, later learns that he can acquire uh land at Pine Ridge by virtue of his connection to his mother and her tribal membership.
• 25:56
  Marnie Sandweiss: So he does, but he also becomes, and I didn't see this coming, the first Lakota man to go to law school.
• 26:02
  Marnie Sandweiss: Oh wow.
• 26:04
  Marnie Sandweiss: He ends up living um near the reservation, and the others acquire land, but they never move there.
• 26:10
  Marnie Sandweiss: So they they have a white identity in their everyday life, but they've invoked their um they're quite legal, right, to be members of the Lakota community by acquiring land around the reservoir.
• 26:24
  Crista Cowan: Interesting.
• 26:24
  Crista Cowan: And that story brings up a really interesting concept, which is this idea of you know racial identity, racial fluidity.
• 26:31
  Crista Cowan: You know, Sophie is mixed race.
• 26:35
  Crista Cowan: I don't know what you know about her mother, if she was also mixed race or came from mixed race people at all, but then you know, her Sophie's children are mixed race.
• 26:44
  Crista Cowan: And and at what point then do you still identify as indigenous versus not?
• 26:50
  Crista Cowan: And that's an interesting thing that I think people are grappling with even today.
• 26:55
  Marnie Sandweiss: Absolutely.
• 26:56
  Marnie Sandweiss: And and I will say her that her descendants in the third and fourth generation, some of the relatives I've been speaking with have gone very different paths along that route.
• 27:04
  Marnie Sandweiss: Some um feel very identified with uh the the the Oglala Lakota people, and others can hardly believe that's a part of their family past.
• 27:16
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 27:16
  Marnie Sandweiss: You know, and I think it's really interesting to think, Krista, about how it is that we can find out so much about Sophie, because we can really actually know more about this little girl who is unidentified in the archives for over a century and a half than we can about most people born on the Northern Plains in 1860, which is when she was born.
• 27:35
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 27:36
  Marnie Sandweiss: There's some interesting reasons for it.
• 27:37
  Marnie Sandweiss: One is that her father, the French Canadian trader, lived to be quite old.
• 27:44
  Marnie Sandweiss: And he was the kind of man that journalists and historians would seek out to hear stories about the old times and find interviews with him.
• 27:52
  Marnie Sandweiss: Then he was resourceful.
• 27:55
  Marnie Sandweiss: Sometimes he identified as a member of the Oglala tribe, and that allowed him to get land in Pine Ridge, but other times he identified as white, and that allowed him to file legal claims against the federal government to be compensated for his losses from these repeated Indian raids that were committed against him over the years.
• 28:17
  Marnie Sandweiss: So he told his story to government agents for decades, trying to get the government to pay him back.
• 28:25
  Marnie Sandweiss: And every time he tells the government agents what he lost in a raid, we learn what Sophie grew up with.
• 28:32
  Marnie Sandweiss: But then, and this is moving more towards your point about native identity, the federal government is pretty assiduous about trying to keep track of who lives on the reservations.
• 28:43
  Marnie Sandweiss: Because they're trying to keep track of who should or should not get um food rations, how and how the land will be allotted when the great reservations are broken up at the very end of the 19th and early 20th century.
• 28:56
  Marnie Sandweiss: So there's legal records, journalistic records, and government records, even though Sophie never left a word in her own writing.
• 29:06
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and that's such a lesson to family historians, which is you can never research an individual in isolation.
• 29:14
  Crista Cowan: You have to understand their family, their community.
• 29:17
  Crista Cowan: All of that context comes into play, and particularly with women, um, and even more so, I suspect, with indigenous women, there are not going to be many records that mention them by name.
• 29:28
  Crista Cowan: So that context is where the story is found.
• 29:31
  Marnie Sandweiss: When you know who she is, this is a completely different picture.
• 29:35
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it is.
• 29:36
  Crista Cowan: And it becomes so personal to hundreds, I suspect, of her descendants as well.
• 29:42
  Crista Cowan: Um, as you think about the story in this particular instance, but even just in the broader context of some of the other work you've done in your career, um there are stories that that we just need to tell, that need to be told.
• 29:57
  Crista Cowan: And I think Sophie's story certainly reads that.
• 29:59
  Crista Cowan: That way, as a story that needs to be told.
• 30:02
  Crista Cowan: What are the ways that we can be more respectful of how we tell the stories?
• 30:07
  Crista Cowan: Uh, not just in history, but in family history in particular, for cultures we're not connected to.
• 30:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: I get asked about this a lot because I've also written about African American history.
• 30:18
  Marnie Sandweiss: And people are usually polite and they don't say, What are you doing here?
• 30:23
  Marnie Sandweiss: But they will say, What makes you interested in this story?
• 30:26
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I've gotten this about this latest project as well.
• 30:30
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, I am Jewish, my grandparents and great-grandparents came from Europe in the late 19th and very early years of the 20th century, so that's my background.
• 30:40
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, I want to say two things to you.
• 30:43
  Marnie Sandweiss: One is, I don't think your DNA gives you uh a direct access to the past.
• 30:51
  Marnie Sandweiss: I understand the power of family stories, absolutely.
• 30:55
  Marnie Sandweiss: I understand that growing up in a particular place gives you access to understanding the experience of other people who grew up from that place.
• 31:03
  Marnie Sandweiss: But your DNA doesn't uh give you direct access to the documents that really lay out the parameters of someone's life, whether it's the legal records or the census records or the newspaper stories.
• 31:19
  Marnie Sandweiss: I also think that historians, unless they're writing about very contemporary stories, are always writing about people they don't know.
• 31:27
  Marnie Sandweiss: And as a historian, you have to have a kind of empathy for for people that you've never met, and you have to have um a kind of sense of when you share a common experience.
• 31:41
  Marnie Sandweiss: And so uh I can infer what someone in the past might have thought at that moment, and when the experience of that person or the the cultural values of that person are just so different that I really can't tap into their feelings.
• 31:58
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, and that's something I'm always aware of.
• 32:02
  Marnie Sandweiss: But I I I think that we all have something to teach one another.
• 32:08
  Marnie Sandweiss: I've learned from the family.
• 32:09
  Marnie Sandweiss: What I've really powerfully learned from the family is that Sophia is a real person.
• 32:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: You know, to me, she was a subject of my research.
• 32:16
  Marnie Sandweiss: She's a photograph that I've looked at for many years.
• 32:19
  Marnie Sandweiss: She's a figure who keeps popping up in the documents that I've been collecting.
• 32:24
  Marnie Sandweiss: But they remind me that she was grandma and that she lived over on that hill and that she had a hard life, and she died during the heart of the depression.
• 32:35
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um and that's humbling and important for every historian to be reminded that the characters they're writing about are not just characters, they are actual human beings whose families care about them so deeply.
• 32:50
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 32:51
  Marnie Sandweiss: Maureen, I wasn't expecting you to make me cry.
• 32:56
  Crista Cowan: But but that, but you said that so beautifully.
• 32:59
  Crista Cowan: So thank you for that reminder.
• 33:01
  Crista Cowan: Because I think even when we're dealing with our own family history, sometimes we fail to look at them as real people, right?
• 33:07
  Crista Cowan: I have a ancestor in my tree who was a horrible human being.
• 33:12
  Crista Cowan: He was a bigamist, he treated the women in his life terribly, he didn't treat his sons any better.
• 33:17
  Crista Cowan: Like, and the more stories I find about him, the more awful he becomes.
• 33:22
  Crista Cowan: But it's easy to villainize him when I just have these snapshots of his life.
• 33:28
  Crista Cowan: And it's also easy to villainize, you know, the one son who chose to follow in his father's footstep and the one who didn't, and and like to try to put my own feelings on that.
• 33:38
  Crista Cowan: And so I think when we approach it with empathy and remember that real people's lives were affected and ultimately their choices affected where we show up in our lives, I think that that that helps us approach that situation with more empathy, whether we're researching our own family or or someone else's.
• 33:58
  Marnie Sandweiss: Yeah, you know, Christa, I thought I was writing a book about the past, but in the last few weeks, something has happened that has so powerfully reminded me that the past is not over.
• 34:08
  Marnie Sandweiss: I mentioned the evil General Harney who who led the assault at Blue Water, which indirectly led to Sophie's parents meeting.
• 34:16
  Marnie Sandweiss: Well, a descendant of General Harney reached out to me after my book came out a few months ago.
• 34:21
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I thought he would be angry at me for saying all these negative things about his ancestor, but in fact, he was kind of glad I'd found more negative things than he already knew about.
• 34:31
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, because it turns out that for 20 years he has been working on a project of reparations with one of the families impacted by the violence at Blue Water.
• 34:42
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um an army doctor went to the killing fields there right after the battle and collected things.
• 34:50
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, a child's uh carrying device, moccasins, a child's doll, medicine bags, and he donated them to the Smithsonian Institution.
• 35:01
  Marnie Sandweiss: And unbelievably, about three weeks ago, the Smithsonian agreed to return these things to the family.
• 35:08
  Marnie Sandweiss: And that ceremony is taking place this fall, and I will be there to watch it.
• 35:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um I just never imagined that uh the descendants of people I wrote about, a battle that I mentioned, or really a massacre that I mentioned in my book, could have such powerful resonance right now.
• 35:28
  Marnie Sandweiss: But you know, that's the power of history, right?
• 35:31
  Marnie Sandweiss: That's that's why we do this.
• 35:33
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it absolutely is.
• 35:34
  Crista Cowan: That's lovely.
• 35:35
  Crista Cowan: Thank you so much for sharing that.
• 35:37
  Crista Cowan: A little bit of an epilogue to your experience in learning more about Sophie.
• 35:42
  Crista Cowan: I think that that's wonderful.
• 35:43
  Crista Cowan: And I suspect it won't really be the final epilogue.
• 35:47
  Crista Cowan: Um, like the the beauty of telling these stories is that the connection points that then come in sometimes years later, is continue to bear fruit, which I think is lovely.
• 36:00
  Marnie Sandweiss: Yeah.
• 36:00
  Marnie Sandweiss: And that's what I'm, you know, I do not, I found Sophie's story, but I do not own it.
• 36:05
  Marnie Sandweiss: And um I am thrilled that the family or the the extended um Oblala community can use the story for their own purposes.
• 36:15
  Crista Cowan: Well, as you've spent time with, you know, the Lakota, and one of the things that I know about their culture is that it is a lot less documentary and a lot more oral history.
• 36:25
  Crista Cowan: In what way does that oral history play into the way that you put together the narrative or the story as you tell it?
• 36:35
  Marnie Sandweiss: Well, I really don't want to pretend that I've spent very, very much time, um, although I've I've been up to Pine Ridge and spoken at the local um college and and met some of the descendants up there.
• 36:47
  Marnie Sandweiss: There's nobody alive now who knew Sophie Musell, but there are people alive now who heard stories from people who knew her.
• 36:58
  Marnie Sandweiss: Honestly, those stories are rather faded now, and there just aren't a lot of them.
• 37:04
  Marnie Sandweiss: There's just little tidbits of stories that the family's the family has, and I've I've every tidbit I've used in my book.
• 37:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um but you're absolutely right.
• 37:16
  Marnie Sandweiss: I think this is one of the reasons why Sophie's story went untold for so long.
• 37:20
  Marnie Sandweiss: All of the men in the photographs left records and diaries and military records and records of their government service.
• 37:29
  Marnie Sandweiss: And Sophie left nothing.
• 37:32
  Marnie Sandweiss: And um historians, of course, privilege written sources.
• 37:39
  Marnie Sandweiss: And so I think, you know, when we think about South Dakota or South Dakota history or how it appears in textbooks, in general, I think the stories we read favor the stories that writers have learned through written sources.
• 37:55
  Marnie Sandweiss: So it's the stories of the settlers, the stories of the railroads, the stories of uh how how South Dakota created small urban centers and a huge um uh when it's agricultural economy because those things are documented in written records.
• 38:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: But I think one of the things I've learned from this project is that even people we think might not have left records behind, have left traces.
• 38:24
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um and we we can know a lot about Sophie Mousseau, Ryan Monroe now.
• 38:31
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um but you're absolutely right.
• 38:34
  Marnie Sandweiss: There's so many important tribal stories that just exit just exist as oral histories.
• 38:40
  Marnie Sandweiss: And you know this, Krista.
• 38:42
  Marnie Sandweiss: Traditionally there's been a divide between anthropologists and historians, right?
• 38:46
  Marnie Sandweiss: Anthropologists privilege oral histories and the family stories they hear, and historians tend to dismiss them.
• 38:53
  Marnie Sandweiss: And I'm telling you, historians need to get over that.
• 38:56
  Marnie Sandweiss: They need to listen.
• 38:58
  Marnie Sandweiss: They need to listen.
• 39:00
  Crista Cowan: Well, and especially to those cultures like the indigenous Americans, like the Polynesian cultures.
• 39:06
  Crista Cowan: There are some cultures in Africa, like where where that is the only records they have, is those oral stories.
• 39:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: So yeah, and I think that's that's one of the really powerful things about this latest development with the Smithsonian returning artifacts from the massacre site, is that the Smithsonian can document where those things were collected.
• 39:27
  Marnie Sandweiss: There are paper records for that, but they're not questioning the family members who say they are part of this family.
• 39:35
  Marnie Sandweiss: Yeah.
• 39:35
  Marnie Sandweiss: Not questioning the family members who say, I heard this and my grandpa was there.
• 39:40
  Marnie Sandweiss: Yeah.
• 39:40
  Marnie Sandweiss: So it's it's a coming together of two ways of knowing in a really unexpected way.
• 39:46
  Crista Cowan: Two ways of knowing.
• 39:47
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 39:47
  Crista Cowan: That's beautifully said.
• 39:48
  Crista Cowan: We were looking specifically for stories from each state, but so far, everybody has had a personal connection to that state or the story being told from that place.
• 39:58
  Crista Cowan: Um, but the story of Sophie was so powerful to us that we wanted uh her to represent South Dakota.
• 40:07
  Crista Cowan: And uh you just became the vehicle, not just for telling her story in your book and uh in all the research and the time and the effort you've spent, but also here uh in this series to represent South Dakota.
• 40:21
  Crista Cowan: So thank you so much for that.
• 40:23
  Crista Cowan: I would love to know if you just have any last thoughts about the places and the events that made Sophie who she was.
• 40:32
  Marnie Sandweiss: You know, I think in closing, I I would just say, I hope everybody listening to this will open up their closet, take out that shoebox full of photos photographs, and label them.
• 40:43
  Marnie Sandweiss: Um, you may remember that's Aunt Edna, but your grandson may not remember that that's Aunt Edna.
• 40:50
  Marnie Sandweiss: And working on this project has taught me every name matters, and every story matters.
• 40:58
  Marnie Sandweiss: And without names, we cannot recover those stories.
• 41:02
  Marnie Sandweiss: So uh this is what makes me love being a historian.
• 41:06
  Marnie Sandweiss: It's it's not that you you don't have to just write about Abraham Lincoln or General Sherman or something like that.
• 41:13
  Marnie Sandweiss: Every person has a compelling story, and uh it's always an adventure to figure out what it is.
• 41:22
  Crista Cowan: Beautifully said.
• 41:23
  Crista Cowan: Marty, thank you so much for the conversation, for being here.
• 41:27
  Crista Cowan: I appreciate your time.
• 41:29
  Crista Cowan: Thank you so much.
• 41:30
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.