Tribal Histories

Brothertown History

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– Joan Schadewald: I used to go to the secondhand stores and to the bookstores and everything, and I’d go to the back of the book and I’d find Brothertown, buy it, get it, take it, rummage sale, anywhere. So I’ve got the whole shelves of the books because I really thought I could come together with the true story and then the oral history is another thing. But the thing that I benefited the most from is going out to the East Coast and going into the Hamilton College, and they had professors, they had anthropologists, historians. And the documents there are rare books, you have to wait for them to go down, bring them up with the white gloves on. Now that I can believe. They welcomed a whole busload of us that went out there and presented us with banquets, with welcome home after 150 years. We’re together a lot today. Our community has grown to the point that we have our own bingo hall. We have our community center in Fond du Lac, which is our only source of income, plus donations and contributions from people within the tribe.

We make our own crafts to sell or we have benefits, fundraisers, that type of thing. We have no one that’s sponsoring us to later build a casino because that really isn’t what we want. We just actually want to be identified as what we had been in the past.

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– Announcer: Brothertown History was funded in part by: Irene Daniell Kress, Francis A. and Georgia F. Ariens Fund of the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region, Evjue Foundation, Ron and Patty Anderson, Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, Timothy William Trout Education Fund, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

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– Joan Schadewald: Well, my name is Joan Schadewald. 81 years ago, President Roosevelt just came in to become president, Prohibition had ended, and I was born.

I was born in an area that was called Indian Town because of the fact that when my ancestors– who were the Brothertown, and I am a Brothertown– emigrated from New York to Wisconsin. My ancestors arrived a little bit later. And so the land was already patented out, and they moved on from Wisconsin to Minnesota. And that area where our home was, where my father was born– and I was born in the same house as he was– was the land that had previously been occupied by the Sioux Indians before their conflict with the European settlers. And they were removed and the land was vacant. The soldiers that fought there, the generals and whatever, purchased the land and offered it for sale half price of what it would have cost to settle in Wisconsin. Today the Brothertown Indian Nation is headquartered in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. We’re governed by our constitution, and we have an enrollment criteria. The Brothertown are all direct descendants of the historic Indian tribes that were in the northeast part of what is now the United States when the first Europeans arrived. I was out on a trip not too long ago.

We were taken to see this soapstone quarry, and they had a bowl that they had officially identified as a 4,000-year-old item that was probably touched by one of my ancestors. So that would have been 2,000 years, in my mind, before Christ. So, then, from that time until the first Europeans came, they lived there. So they’ve been around a long time. But when the European settlers came over, they were escaping three important things: one was the wars that were going on in Europe– France fighting with England and all the other countries involved– and class distinction, and then religious persecution. They came over for their reasons, personally, and also because they were asked to come over by the colonists. We were a colony of King George III at that time. And they were asking people to come over because they needed– Before we had money, cash money and all of these ATM machines, everything was gauged by land. So England wanted the land. It made them wealthier.

France wanted it, and they were fighting over who was going to have control of it, which meant then, they needed the Indians to cooperate with them and become a colony. And they did with the English. And that was successful for a short time, but then so many came over that there wasn’t enough room for the Indians and the settlers. They had the theory that they were the chosen people that were coming over. It was destined that they were the people to decide how they could, like, take the land into their possession, and it didn’t matter how they did it. They needed that land for the thousands and the millions that were going to be there years from that time. But the Indians didn’t cooperate because it was their land, and it was cultivated. It was– They had their homes there. It was just a situation that was so unusual. They did have an Indian entity there, which was a nation in its own: the six-nation, Iroquois Nation.

In fact, the government of the United States of America with Ben Franklin and George Washington and all of them took the same theory of governing from them. The one high power. Today we have representatives and senators. Back then they had– each tribe had a representative that came to the meeting. They worked as a nation. If anyone attacked one of the tribes, all the tribes joined together to defend that one tribe. And that’s what we do in the United States. So, anyway, when it came to a point before the American Revolution, in about 1773, there was a Mohican minister, Samson Occom, that had gone to a Christian church, became an ordained minister, spoke English, who wisely could see that they weren’t going to survive, fighting to stay as they were, but if they took on some of what they call the English ways, they would be treated differently, and they would be able to maintain their identity. So, what they did then was they sort of compromised, I guess you might say. But after time, that didn’t work.

So in Farmington, Connecticut, which is the gathering place, it’s also what they call the Tunxis Indians that live there, which means the same thing, and five other tribes. These six tribes plus this Mohican minister that were part of what they called the Praying Villages. They had accepted Christianity, and they were dying out from the diseases that were brought over that they weren’t immune from. And the wars that they participated in between the French and the English decimated their populations. They had meetings and they came to the conclusion in 1773 that they were going to move farther west and establish, along with the Oneidas who were already in New York, what they would call their own confederacy similar to the six-nation Iroquois. And the tribes that were involved were the tribes from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York. The Mohican, the Montauk, the Narragansett, the Niantic, the Pequots, and then those Tunxis Indians that were from Farmington. The seven nations then made an agreement with the superintendent of Indian Affairs for the colony, British colony, which they were, and he had written it up for how the Oneidas then agreed to take these seven nations. There was money involved and land involved in the deals. It wasn’t all like squatters or just giving land.

They had the possession of that for the land that they were giving up. And they were to go immediately there. And so they prepared for that. In the meantime, then, the war broke out between the Colonies and England, and in which– the Brothertowns said– were sort of like put on hold. Some of them fought for the Colonies, some of them fought for England, and some of them didn’t fight. They just were neutral. After the war was over, then they moved to New York and established a town. In 1785, they decided to name their town, and so Samson Occom named the town Eeyamquittoowauconnuck. It means in Indian “town of brothers living together in peace.”

When they lived in Brothertown, New York– because of the lands they gave up farther east– they had a superintendent.

Everything is written down. They’ve got field books. We have how much they spent on their corn, their wheat, who plowed their fields. And in Brothertown, what they wanted them to do is learn how to farm, put up the fences– which was not natural for the Native Americans– and develop their own little area. And they did. They did a very good job of that and learned the skills. It is a nice little area. It looks the same as Brothertown, Wisconsin, to some extent. The rivers running by and the farmland, you look out over it. There’s fields of corn.

Well, wherever there was good land, farmland or whatever, that’s what the settlers wanted. And so that’s what they were pushed off of. It was just a short time after they settled there that you can kind of imagine what happened. More settlers came in. The soldiers and the people that were in charge were new, inexperienced. General Washington– and all them– then became president, and they had their War of 1812 that had to occur. Okay, now they’re settled in, and they’re doing just exactly what was happening before by the English King George. So, now, they were being asked to move out of Brothertown, New York, and go to the Michigan Territory. Wisconsin was part of the Michigan Territory then. And so they moved to around Green Bay, Wisconsin.

And then they wanted them to move away from there. During the same period of time, the Michigan Territory became Wisconsin Territory. Wisconsin Territory became the Wisconsin state. And every time that happened, the regulations and the rules, for where they wanted the Indians, kept changing. So they moved here to Wisconsin, and everything looked good. They had their mill. They had their boat building. They had their fields. Their towns were settled. Just like today, we would have the grandma, the garden, the kids, the grandkids and everything.

And they got the announcement they had to pack up everything and go again. And they had no control over saying yes or no as long as they were wards of the Government. And so they negotiated with the Government. And one of the options that were given– And if you think of this, the options weren’t really options because if you are familiar with the Trail of Tears of the Choctaw, the Cherokee, the Navajo, all the different tribes at that time, they were put on marches and they died. So do you want to do that, or do you want to give up your right to be who you are, your culture, your national identity and become US citizens? But I don’t think they realized that. I mean the people that asked them to sign the papers were just doing their job. And maybe they thought they were doing us a favor. “Boy, they’re going to be so happy we’re doing this for them.” If they could only know what the future would bring.

And maybe it was a favor. They got to stay here, you know? And now we can fight it out, if you want to call it fighting. But they didn’t understand all that writing at the bottom. They were educated, they were intelligent, but they didn’t understand government. So they continued as a tribe. And they were considered a tribe after that. But if you get to the Government now in Washington, DC, at the BIA, they say they discontinued the day they signed papers. So in the morning, they woke up and they were a Brothertown Indian. And the person I identify with is my father’s great-grandmother.

And I’m a great-grandmother today, and I have great-grandkids and I think that’s not so far back in history, if you think of it that way. She had to decide with the others in the tribe whether to pick up her kids, her grandkids, her furniture, whatever you can carry, and move yourself to God knows where, whatever the conditions were, or sign this paper. So she signed the paper. So she woke up in the morning, had her house, her garden, her grandkids and everything, she decided to sign the paper and did. That night she went to bed, she wasn’t an Indian anymore. She was considered a citizen. She had to pay taxes. She had to do all the different things that were so unfamiliar to her that– Of course, their money system was different so when they went to Chilton over here to pay their taxes and they didn’t have the $1.25 or the $3.00, they gave them one year to come up with it, and if they didn’t have it, they took the land back. And guess who bought the land? The guy that collected the taxes in Chilton.

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So he got her land, and he got the land of so many others.

– Caroline Adler: Every person got 50 acres. Every person. Every man, woman, and child got 50 acres. But all of my ancestors are down here– The William Johnson and his wife Charlotte Skeesuck Johnson. My great-great-grandma Ester Johnson. She married John Hammer. He’s over here. And my grandma, Clarabelle, was born here.

– Joan Schadewald: Now they actually had 24,000 acres to begin with, right?

– Caroline Adler: 24,000 that they divided.

– Joan Schadewald: They had squatters that came on.

– Caroline Adler: This whole area over here, east going towards Michigan, most of that was never ever even lived on by the Brothertowns because mostly Germans moved in–

– Joan Schadewald: Those were the squatters.

– Caroline Adler: Yeah, just moved in. They just moved in and took over and that’s why they had to start moving away then.

– Joan Schadewald: You know, they just left. They went to town, and they stayed here in the Wisconsin area and they lived. They could vote.

And they lived the same lifestyle, you know? You didn’t cease to be Indians and you didn’t cease to be identifying with your culture. They had the school. They had a mill and they had the lumber company– that when the settlers came in they had a town to come to, which was the Brothertown town– to buy their supplies or to do their work for them. They had the Protestant church. They were divided a couple times between which one they wanted to follow, but there were some that stuck with their “Indianness,” I think as they called it, where they had their old rituals and their old beliefs. And I think it remains that today.

Spoke English because there were seven different tribes that went together. They all had their dialects and they all had their– It would be like coming to America and you have a little German accent or a Swedish accent or an Italian accent and it just faded, and they encouraged that. So they gave up their language.

And once in a while someone in the tribe will try to like get a Brothertown language here, and my comment is we didn’t have one. That’s why we’re Brothertown. But we didn’t cease to be Indians and you didn’t cease to be identifying with your culture. But, to me, Indian was Indian, the way I was raised, and you were Brothertown. We just wanted to be able to call ourselves what we are. If our nation is the Brothertown and that’s our culture and that defines us. The first time I went in to apply for one of my sons that was going to go to college, to Ashland, Wisconsin, and I asked for them to sign the papers, and at that point you had to be a recognized tribe. The word “recognized.” They said, “You’re not a recognized tribe.” What?

That was like a blow. What are you talking about, you know? Well, who are you if you don’t know where you came from? Or why you are what you are? It has an impact on your life. And to deny the person the right to be that by just saying, “Well, why would you want to be it anyway; “Why would you want to be Brothertown or Indian?” would be to then have them consider themselves in a different light than everybody else is entitled to? To be Brothertown, to be recognized. 1979 and ’80, they started to do this thing that we were then allowed to do is a petition. So we did.

And the people available to do it were very few in number, and trying to collect all of that information wasn’t easy without computers and all the newfangled things that we have today that we can get information just by pressing buttons. So it took a long time just to assemble the names of the people, the documents that would be needed and procedures to be followed. Plus, over that 30 years, they kept changing what the procedures were, which meant then that we had new criteria, okay. I came into it full-time when we were amending the petition. Updating everything. It was getting closer to when we could accomplish what we wanted. There was some goal in sight. Whereas before it was just you’re number 65 and we’re on number four. Now we’re on number five. The Pequots had to be acknowledged, and we gave up a space so they could go together, do that, and it went on and on and on.

It was like forever. So that’s when I became involved. And what we had to do then was like rewrite, update our constitution. So I worked with that. And then we had to have our different ordinances. We had enrollment ordinances that had to be written. And I’m a Peacemaker now, so we had to write our Peacemaker ordinance. We’re like the judge. We’re like the judicial system of the tribe, and there’s five of us. And we’re not too popular if we make decisions that some people don’t like, but that comes with the territory.

But for the petition itself, that was really involved and really demanding. When we sent our information in, in December of 2005, we had about nine or 10 of these huge containers of just documents. And they all had to be accurate, had to be in a certain order, and we had to have three copies of everything. And that’s the kind of work that had to be done. You’d be up half the night, days after days, because you once you got on it, you want to get to the end of it and finish it. That’s what my life has been. Then Caroline Adler was the chairperson, and then she wasn’t able to continue, so then I stepped in just because somebody had to be there because I don’t want to be chairman of anything. I didn’t feel qualified, but I was. And then, when we sent it in, we started waiting. Came back and said that “You’ve been refused because you didn’t qualify.”

Why didn’t we qualify? You have to fulfill seven criteria in order to be accepted back and recognized or acknowledged that you are a tribe. But if you fail one, you fail them all. So what we failed in when were denied was that we accepted to be citizens in 1839 when we signed that paper. But some officials said, “No, that wasn’t true.” And we have letters and then we have letters that refer to carbon copies. When we got to the point of pressuring them to give us the letters that stated that we did not give up our right by signing those papers. They couldn’t find the letters. And so then they had to decide in Washington whether it was or it wasn’t. Who interprets it, because it’s been interpreted by different officials and prevented us from getting our petition approved and being a tribe right now.

So then my son wrote a letter back, “Well, why didn’t you tell us that back–” You know, etc., etc.– Well, what are we going to do? Well, finally, one of their attorneys there in Washington, DC, looked it over, studied it, and he says, “We’re going to not take your petition into consideration. “In fact, we’ll never use any of the information from it. “You must now go through Congress and be restored.” So, for 30 years we worked with the assumption that we hadn’t given it up and we had a right to go the process, which was to petition. You cannot petition if you’ve already been denied the right by Congress in 1839. If that was accurate, they never should have allowed us the right to petition. We would have had to immediately go to the Congress and have Congress approve it.

– Caroline Adler: The one good thing that came out of 30 years of working on the petition is like her papers, those were at Hamilton College. So you have these archives, these little historical societies. Some places you wouldn’t even think where they have our history, and, for the most part now, most of it is copied and we have it here. So at least we have accumulated our own history here, which we didn’t have before. So that’s a good thing that came of it.

– Joan Schadewald: And great number of tribes don’t have. Now we’ve been relegated to having to go the political way, which is called restoration. We have to restore ourself. We have to restore that we are like we were when we were a tribe. We’re not in that category until we go through the process, and we’re going to continue doing that just because of the future.

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It might not be something that I ever see, but it’ll happen someday because it’s just a fact.

– Caroline Adler: In 1860, if he can draw a Mohican warrior on his letter, he’s been told who he is, what he is, everything has passed on to him, and he knows he’s a Brothertown Indian here. You know? They didn’t give up who they were just because they took citizenship.

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– Announcer: To learn more about the sovereign Indian nations in Wisconsin, visit WisconsinAct31.org. To purchase a DVD of this and other Tribal Histories programs, visit WPT.org, or call 800-422-9707.

Brothertown History was funded in part by: Irene Daniell Kress, Francis A. and Georgia F.

Ariens Fund of the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region, Evjue Foundation, Ron and Patty Anderson, Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, Timothy William Trout Education Fund, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.