Sophie Mousseau (1859-1936)

"A lot of history in a single image"

 

This photograph, taken by an unknown photographer in 1867 or 1868, gathered dust in a Smithsonian Institution cabinet until it was digitized by Google in 2018. The original caption read: “Members of the Peace Commission pose with an unidentified Indian woman. From left to right: Generals Terry, Harney, and Sherman; Commissioner Sanborn, Samuel Tappan, and General Augur.”

At far left, Alfred Howe Terry signed the Fort Laramie Treaty giving the Dakotas to the Sioux. He commanded the troops that intercepted the Nez Perce’s escape to Canada and imprisoned Chief Joseph. The Nez Perce called him "Koot-nee-to-koot," "the long beard."

Some 200 Sicangu Lakota were camped along Blue Water Creek
in what is now western Nebraska. Eighty-six people were killed,
and many others taken prisoner. Photo: Jaida Grey Eagle

William S. Harney was known among the Lakota as "Woman Killer" (“Wiŋyan Waṡiču-ŋni”) and "Mad Bear” (“Mahto Ocinsica”). He enjoyed tormenting and beating to death his slaves, including a young woman. He destroyed entire villages and laid waste to crops in the Seminole War and mistreated prisoners and slaves in the Mexican War. Against the Sioux, he commanded the rape and murder of women and children at Blue Water Creek, Grattan and Ash Hollow massacres, after which the Sioux gave Harney the nicknames of “The Butcher” ("Aŋpíŋŋka Kte") and “The Big Chief who Breaks His Word” ("Tatanka Wacintapi"). Harney County, Oregon, Harney, Nevada, and Lake Harney, Florida, are named for him.

William Tecumseh Sherman, known for his famous scorched earth "March to the Sea" through Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864, telegraphed Grant in 1866 that "we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” In 1873, Sherman wrote in a private letter that "during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age. As long as resistance is made, death must be meted out…” Sherman believed that bison eradication should be encouraged as a means of weakening Indian resistance to assimilation. When Congress passed a law in 1874 to protect the bison from over-hunting to extinction, Sherman persuaded Grant to veto it.

The “unknown woman” is Sophia Mousseau (1859-1936), the daughter of Louis Mousseau, a French-speaking trader, and Ellen Yellow Woman, Pine Ridge Lakota. Sophie was the Lakota interpreter for the peace commissioners at the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868, the subject of the photo. Thirteen years before the photograph was made, Harney, the general who stands with Sophie in the photograph, attacked a Lakota village at a place called Blue Water Creek in western Nebraska. His men used her mother’s infant son for target practice, then frog-marched her mother, wounded but alive, 174 miles to Fort Laramie. Blue Water Creek was the start of a 35-year ethnic cleansing campaign that concluded with Wounded Knee in 1890, at a time when Sophie was working as a laundress at a federal boarding school in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Wounded Knee is within the Reservation. Presumedly, Sophie learned English and possibly French as a child from her father and was then hired as an interpreter for the Treaty Commission.

 John B. Sanborn, another Civil War general, negotiated the Medicine Lodge Treaty that forced native peoples from Kansas to relocate to Oklahoma. Kiowa Chief Lone Wolf filed suit against the government for fraud on behalf of the tribes in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. In 1903, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the tribes, determining that Congress had "plenary power" and the political right to make such decisions, even if fraudulent. He would later become known for the Sandborn Incident, extorting money from companies by falsely making claims of back taxes and pocketing the money.

Samuel F. Tappan was an adjutant to General John M. Chivington at the time of the Sand Creek Massacre, negotiated the removal of the Navajo, and later became the first superintendent of the United States Indian Industrial School in Genoa, Nebraska.

General Christopher C. Augur took an active part in the campaigns of the western frontier against the Yakima and Rogue River tribes of Washington and, in 1856, against the Oregon Indians. Following the Civil War, Augur went on to command several ethnic cleaning campaigns—including the Platte River watershed, Texas, Missouri, and the Southeast and Gulf regions. A fort in the Wyoming Territory was named Fort Augur in his honor. He was present at the Petersen House where the mortally wounded President Abraham Lincoln was taken after he was shot and commanded the troops that captured Lincoln 's assassin.

These days, we risk becoming inured to atrocity. Hardly a day passes that we do not learn of a new one, whether it is starvation in Gaza or West Africa that had been being narrowly prevented before the present US administration assumed office in January; the end of rapid vaccine development and monitoring of outbreaks, hurricane forecasting, or climate reporting; the euthanization of thousands of specially-bred and expensive lab animals, from mice to bonobos; or the shattering of treaty obligations by closure of the Indian Health Service centers as well as the gutting of budgets at VA hospitals. We only vaguely appreciate that these DOGEs mean that millions will die, needlessly. Not may die. Will die.

But this is not new. It has happened before. Modern USAnians have largely been spared the ravages of wars suffered by those in Europe and Asia, or the historic ethnic cleansings in the Americas, Australia, and Africa.

Every year, nearly a million people visit the Medieval Torture Museums in their three US locations. The motto of those museums is "Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it." According to pamphlets, the goal is to help visitors “recall how much suffering can be caused with the power placed into the hands of fanatics, madmen and tyrants." Visitors are invited to explore the dark aspects of their own psyches. An electric chair is one of the exhibits.

Nike has apologized for using the phrase “Never Again” in a billboard placed along the route of last week’s London Marathon after it was pointed out that the phrase was associated with the Holocaust. Nike said the billboard was to “inspire runners … based on common phrases used by runners.” The company retreated, recognizing what a dumb advertising move it was.

George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" in his book, The Life of Reason, in 1905 and the phrase was later made famous by Winston Churchill in a speech to the British House of Commons in 1948, when he paraphrased, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

In 1936, partway between Santayana’s warning in 1905 and Churchill's in 1948, Sophia Mousseau quietly passed into history at the Pine Ridge Reservation and was forgotten.

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Gazans flood the road north after false ‘open checkpoint’ rumors in 2024 REUTERS/ Ramadan Abed

 

 

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.

And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.

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#RestorationGeneration.

When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.