Angela hudson, an associate and soon to be full professor at texas a m university, an expert in American Indian history, representations of American Indian and popculture as well as intersection of American Indian and africanamerican lives. She received her phd from yale held fellowships at the American Philosophical Society and the rare book and manuscript library, among others. Her first book was called indian settlers and slaves and the making of the american south. Her most recent book is, real native genius how an exslave and a white mormon became famous indians. It was just published from the university of North Carolina press. She is a dear friend and occasional mentor to me. I will dispense with any embarrassing stories and say it is an honor and pleasure to welcome her here today. [applause] thank you for that introduction. Thank you for coming this morning. I will tell you a story today about real native genius. Two of them actually. Like most stories it is unbelievable and highly entertaining. Interwoven are strands of many other stories and like many stories, there are lots of places where one can begin so i will naturally start in the middle. Pressed a white woman charges against her indian has to has been for bigotry. She had met him on a canal boat in the summer of 1851 and married him after a courtship of only a few days. Her new husband, known to audiences across the region as okah tubbeetic already had a family. Even more shocking was the discovery that the lever was no indian at all. Rumors began to spread that the performer was actually a negro barber who had managed to humbug his way across the United States, performing his chauffeur unsuspecting audiences from missouri although it in new hampshire. Whoseke other celebrities salacious stories kept the newspaper readers titillated and horrified, has a charade made good copy and he became something of a tabloid sensation. As dramatic as this case seems , the brief affair between sarah and okah tubbee was just another episode in the life of a man , okah tubbee,cary and a doctor ok. He had been born into slavery in mississippi and became the property of his black siblings when the owner died. He is born into slavery and he becomes the property of his own free black siblings when his owner died. He was mostly hired in and worked at a variety of trades. Sometime in his youth he began to play music and he found he had an exceptional natural talent as a performer. And in time, he became a celebrated a flute player, a riverboat confidence man, a coat , ader, a ventriloquist medicine man and an international fugitive. His companion from 1846 onward was lucy stanton. Although, she like her husband, professed to be descended from native world he, after performing as the mohawk princess, she was in fact a white mormon divorcee with three children. And together they crafted an elaborate traveling act that included a shortlived but fanatical religious sect, a medical business and three editions of their composite autobiography. Their professional indian personas helped conceal their interracial relationship, as well as many other secrets they wished to hide, like their unorthodox religious beliefs and medical practices. They capitalized on the simultaneously reinforcing beliefs about American Indian. The emancipatory potential of their indian act was compromised however by the marinus of the stereotypes on which are it relied. In other words, while their pretend identities could have liberated it them, they were not doing American Indians any favors. Ofy people have never heard okah tubbee or his wife and if it was not for the work of Daniel Littlefield junior, who edited and republished their autobiography, even fewer people would recognize their names. What little scholarship exists on the narrative and his wife tends to make one or more of these claims. First, he was a fugitive slave that claimed indian ancestry to obtain his freedom. Second, that while he was not maybe in indian as he claimed, his wife certainly was. And third, that they are responsible for the ban on blacks in the mormon priesthood that was not lifted until 1978. All of these claims are wrong, sort of. The first most common is that he was a fugitive slave that used the claims of indian ancestry to escape bondage. That he claimed to be native american in order to become free. Since there was to become free. Since there was considerable intermixture between people in the river valley, it is certainly possible that he had choctaw ancestry. But the truth of the matter is it was totally unknowable and in my opinion, irrelevant. Choctaw might have rejected his claims anyway, since he insisted the ancestry came from his father and choctaw ancestry historically operates mothers,rn of not fathers. So while it was sometimes used by enslaved people to sue for their freedom, this view of his life is not just to narrow, it is wrong. Although born a slave and is slated to remain there by his , he was already a free man. He was freed by his halfbrother , owner, whose name was bob. By the time he was freed he had already come to appreciate anonymity. That the riverboat and port cities afforded. And the vagabond began to travel beyond his hometown of matches, along the Mississippi River, the ohio river, moving from new orleans to st. Louis, to louisville and beyond, playing in ballrooms, staterooms and solutions. He was ultimately brought to 1846 he, where in married lucy stanton. Sometime during this time, but after becoming free, he began to use an indian name and identity. Assume a he did it variety of disguises over his if his strategy was to lay low, he did a miserable job. From the moment he lost left home, he consistently thrust himself into the spotlight. So the claim that he was trying to mask his identity in order to obtain his freedom is fairly debunked. Whether he was advertising his skills as a musician for higher, given himself the white women, or taking the stage at popular solutions, like Castle Garden in new york, excitement and publicity followed him all around. With time and help from patrons and managers, he became practiced in the art of self fashioning. I will come back to all that. The second most common and wrong claim about the people at the center of the book is while he may or may not have been native american, his wife certainly was. With the exception of mormon scholars, his wife was described as delaware and mohawk, or usually just delaware. Despite the absence of evidence for these claims, some scholars have crafted a lab or arguments based on presumptions of identity. Her indian identity. While it is possible that okah tubbee could have had indigenous stanton was not the Indian Princess that she claimed it to be. Born in western new york in 1817 , by the time she was a teenager she had moved with her family to the southern shore of lake erie to the community of kirtland, ohio. In they converted to a new 1830, mormon religion brought by missionaries from new york. The missionaries had been sent by a profit and they were on their way to the west of each preach their gospel to the people they call the lamanite. So while they were interested in American Indians largely as potential converts one thing the early mormons apart was the centrality of American Indians to their religious doctrine, their centrality to their theology. The book of mormon identifies indigenous americans as descendents of those dark skinned and degraded ancient people scattered across north america who although they were not believers, were nevertheless capable of future redemption and marked for special attention. Native americans may have been considered sort of spiritual kin by early mormons including lucy stanton, who were themselves facing violence and forced migration for their religious beliefs. It seems likely thatwarner mccary and lucy stanton first met in quincy, illinois, where she and her three Young Children lived alongside her parents following her divorce. It was from a next mormon. And after the stanton family converted 10 mormonism, they had migrated to missouri with other latterday saints. But they were expelled during the racially charged mormon wars of 1838. They then settled in quincy just downriver from the mormon metropolis. Despite the fact mormon immigrants were among the beneficiaries of the indian removal living on land recently , cleansed of its indigenous inhabitants mormon persecution , and flight during this era interestingly mirrors the removal of American Indians although they tended to be , forced in opposite directions. Crossing the mississippi going west. Mormons being forced across the Mississippi River east. From the time they united in the mid 1840s, the cultivated a particular public image presenting himself as a mormon , elder and the pair were married for eternity. Although she was not yet claiming to be delaware, she had already distinguished himself as somebody with a particular fascination with indians. And as a youth in ohio, she and her sisters, along with a number of other early mormon converts, mostly women, used to get the power, as they put it. They would speak in tongues, which they refer to as speaking indians. She was drawn to indians through her own faith and probably through the romanticized depiction of native people in the popular fiction of the day. When she met this choctaw flutist who had claimed he had received prophecies, she found him irresistible. But her own performance as a delaware princess was sad. Despite the fact she was never andd during her lifetime, scholars as recently as a decade ago were still writing articles based on the fact that she was a delaware woman. Lucy stanton would later have one child with okah tubbee, a connect himr way to to the man who was his father. He appeared on stage with them in a pintsized indian custom costume from time to time. But she also had three children from her first marriage. One child was 12, another nine, and another eight years old when their mother married okah tubbee. And four years later when they hit the road for the eastern tour, she left her older children in the care of her parents. She would not see them again for 19 years. The third predominant and only slightly wrong or a line about them, was their time among the onmons but before the embarq their national tour, was largely responsible for the ban on black in the mormon priesthood. Which was not removed until 1978. Scholars of mormon history discussed a white female members were supposed to have had sex the limited profit no fewer than three times each in order to fully sealed in their his prophetic eminence. The unorthodox nature of the Little Movement was revealed and white women age 16 to 60 came forward to admit that they had been there, the couple was run out of town again. This particular storyline is true, though there are two things wrong with it. It suggests that it was largely the result of the misbehavior of one person not attributable to an undercurrent of White Supremacy and mormon thinking. But also claims there were certain that he was black and not indian. My Research Suggests it was based on the widespread notion that he couldve been a American Indian. That lucy also show stanton was not his victim, but his coconspirator, helping to hape his rise as a also his subsequent career as well. By the end of 1847 when he was performing in baltimore as mr. , stanton now using the name like field played a growing role in shaping the indian show including their autobiography a thrilling sketch of the life of the distinguished chief published in 1948. For about a year a year they were the talk of the town on the east coast. He and his wife performed at notable venues, including the chinese theater in philadelphia and even did a stint at pt barnums American Museum in new york. 18471849, they appeared at most of the major theaters in the east. Concerts,nted indian lectures on the plight of the red man, and occasionally offered medical advice. He wore an elaborate indian costume and she appeared by his side as a christianized indian in theand they basked brief glow of the limelight. And they succeeded in their performances in part because the figure of the indian was as one scholar put it, sufficiently remote from the spectators everyday life on the east coast to permit the dramatist to spread of the order familiar andut to be rendered convincing. Performing also allowed them to identityheir racial and complicated past as a former slave, and i think they liked it. But their fortunes shifted when they returned in mid1849 facing Financial Hardship after reuniting with her older children and assaults from indian neighbors who ultimately accuse them of crimes and committed crimes against them, they made themselves once more as purveyors of real indian medicine. Thats how they advertised it. They traveled through the ohio valley and they stopped to treat patients and occasionally take the stage. It was not a fortuitous time the race due toon of the slave act passed in september 1850 codifying the audibility of slaves and threatening people of color. For many it was a final catalyst and made their way to canada. Before long, they would also be in canada, suddenly in the heart of toronto. But fear of racial persecution was only one reason that they fled the state. During the same time, he was the subject of a startling expose in United States newspapers. In june 1851 a kentucky paper published a story claiming the choctaw leaders was not American Indian, but a black man. Many southern and western papers followed suit, each adding fuel to the flames by including personal knowledge of his earlier life in new orleans, st. Louis, and louisville, and poking fun at dimwitted northerners who flocked to the performances under the delusion that he was an indian. A yankee could not tell and ass from an elbow, in this case indian from the negro. The tone of the initial revelations was decidedly mild and emphasized the humorous nature of what they call this humbug. Word of the purported real identity was slow to emerge. He and his wife had been the darling of audiences for some time. But by midsummer 1851 word began to spread and it showed up in newspapers in new york, connecticut, new hampshire, massachusetts, and maine. In in the midst of the rising controversy did something remarkable, he took another wife white woman who we have , a already met. Newspapers carried word of the next to that took place the Niagara Falls and highlighted the fact that the selfproclaimed choctaw already had an indian wife. One early response said that while much was said about womens rights, they dont believe one woman in the right to marry another womans husband. Stories about the bigamist marriage were exposed to exposes about is purportedly true racial identity. The once famous indian performer was now called notorious scoundrel, although audiences might have suspected earlier that he was perhaps not exactly who he said he was. Dupe a whiteto woman into marrying him rendered him now a dangerous character. The specter of a black man seducing white women was too much for many antebellum americans to bear. Interestingly the unmasking in the potential slave effectively obscured the truth. Brought forsuit was bigamy and details were trotted she was courtroom, always depicted as a longsuffering squaw, just one more victim. Although the bigamy charges were dropped, partially because no one could prove the original marriage is legal and also because bigamy was not an extraditable offense, the new life in toronto was not an easy one. Public claims of malpractice plague them. They published the final edition of the blogger fee and 1852. Its primary purpose was to reiterate claims and assert his qualifications as an indian doctor, which had become their primary source of income since their stage shows had ended. Again, little or no scrutiny was and behind the scenes she had managed to assume the primary role in their medical practice, apparently specializing in treating womens ailments. Scarce. 56, records are frustratingly, but perhaps fittingly given the wild twists and turns of his life, he simply disappeared. Essctor n as an indian carried on. As the civil war was unfolding , she was arrested for manslaughter in buffalo, new york not far from her birthplace. The indian doctoress was suspected of running an illegal abortion practice. The buffalo courier was the to first report on what they called a human slaughterhouse across from a Prominent Health and just steps from the buffalo waterfront. June 5, 1862, police learned that a hearse had suspiciously parked in front of the residence, which was also her business. After they carted away a body, they contacted other local authorities. The victim was a 29 yearold married mother of three from new york. Her estranged husband was fighting for the union army and she had been brought allegedly to procure an abortion by a michigan man purporting to be her uncle, but the rumors suggested was undoubtedly her paramore. Convinced that something was amiss, police returned to the home with a search warrant and inside they found two more desperately ill young women, one of whom would die within the day also from an apparent abortion attempt. Western new york papers eagerly seized on the salacious details of this story and alleged the indian wretch had been running a slaughterhouse. She faced persecution, not only from press and from local law enforcement, but also from medical professionals in the area who were busily trying to rid their profession of both indian doctors and women practitioners. The anxieties about socalled kwak doctors converged with doctors converged with rising concern over womens reproductive control command she was vilified. Convicted of manslaughter she spent seven years at hard labor in sing sing. But at no point in the investigation or her subsequent incarceration was her indian identity questioned. So the underlying question the drove my research was why. What would drive, compel, or inspire a free black southern man and a divorced white mormon woman to become indians . For protection, profit . I think sometimes for pleasure. It helps to reveal a central paradox in American Attitudes periodthe antebellum about identity itself. On one hand, broad social changes attributable to the market revolution inspired a belief with self fashioning and public performance. It was the era of humbug, confidence men, and black faced minstrels. The fugitive slave law provides aa barometer of the anxiety , resting on the logic of racial recognition and reinforced the widespread concern that people were passing for something they were not. The rise and what was termed scientific racism demonstrates the paradox. At a time when audiences flocked to theaters every night to be full by white men wearing blackface, scientific men were busy measuring and codifying the differences of the races , and insisting not on the fluidity, but they fix i icity. Argue that examining a lives this way were both of these impulses. They capitalized on the category very much in flux. To obscure fixed identities command i think the choices reveal the currency and flexibility of the indians as a signifier. Indianess involved a wideranging set of ideas about how native people looked, talked, lived, and loved. The period between indian removal in the 1830s and at the civil war was arguably the most generative and American History with regard to the popular presentation of American Indians. These representations took many forms and had many sources , including the performances of native people themselves. Date drew on this deep well of ess and exploited audiences fascination. Most often to make money but often to conceal the highly controversial mixedrace marriage. Behind their schemes, it is clear that they were fascinated and seduced by the idea of the indian. Scholarly considerations have focused on a practice known as playing indians, a phenomenon wherein primarily nonnative people imagine create and put on indian costumes and engage in real or imagined activities. One of the oldest and most pervasive forms of american cultural expression. With a few notable exceptions, these analyses and scholarships on playing indians has focused on white men who don indian outfits, costumes, and activities, for a variety of reasons, from the sons of liberty of Boston Harbor to the boy scouts and Halloween Costumes of today. Because they do not conform to expectations as to who plays , it complicates our ideas about the performative ness of indian underscores the centrality of and underscores the centrality of shaping american identity. In addition to concerns public debates about identity for frequently indicated as concerns about faith and religion. The market revolution coincided with the tail end of the great awakening, years of intense religious excitement and sectarian invention. This is a time when profit prophets rose from unlikely quarters to proclaim the revelation and exhort followers to join churches conquest and revolution. Mormonism was but one of these units in the degree to which he was depicted as a dangerous seducer of women offers striking parallels to how he was ultimately regarded. I argue that what is most important is how and why they constructed and performed alternative personas that allowed them to transcend the prescribed identities, while often capitalizing, quite literally, on popular cultural beliefs about what it meant to be an indian. The actions may have subverted some discourses of race and gender, but they emphatically endorsed others. As Cultural Studies scholars maintain, images and negotiation with power are often ambiguous, complicated, and implicated in the crimes they seek to address. So not all questions about the ir extraordinary lives can be satisfactory answered, but it is perhaps fitting that some mystery remains. After all, went to Great Lengths and some efforts remain successful to this day. These uncertainties while frustrating to the reader, and trust me maddening to the historian, must nevertheless , but stories must have endings, even if they are unsatisfying. After she was released from prison in 1869, she turned up in utah. I like to think she took the newly completed transcontinental railroad. Thats probably not true, but i like to imagine she did. Although her son, the child she had with him, was nowhere to be found, in utah, she was reunited with her daughter now grown with five children of her own. The next few years were bittersweet, once more using her name, she was also reunited with her other daughter and her son who have been estranged from the family for a number of years. Sadly within the space of two years, they all died. In march 1873 at age 57, lucy stanton married the brother of andfirst husband oliver , where shee a basset had been Lucy Stanton Bassett becomes again at the end for life by marrying the brother of her first husband. She began to work as a midwife. Did her mormon friends in utah know about her experiences in the 20 plus years since she had seen them . Surely some of them have read the news of the escapades over noted his apparent bigamy, and yes, the news had spread that far. When he married her at Niagara Falls, the news was carried in the newspaper all the way to utah. Interestingly her time in springville and brought her back likely brought her back into contact. For instance, one wife who had astonished him into muteness with a description of the indian profit and was now an elder. Whether or not she had been forgiven is difficult to say. Her marriage to the brother of her first husband might have also raised eyebrows because he had been excommunicated from the church and because of the time he married her he had a wife and children in california. May her daughter status in the town helped to shield her from scrutiny. She had been among the earliest mormon settlers in the area, and she was married to the son of a prosperous businessman and the mayor of spring hav springville. She become known for promoting musical entertainment and the frontier town. When her brother in law turned hird husband left her in 1876 and died traveling to philadelphia, Lucy Stanton Bassett was once more woman alone. Perhaps seeking the support of the church, she was rebaptized and reconfirmed as a member of the latter day saints church. Her reentry into the fold was complete. She was not well p or she suffered from intermittent bouts of paralysis brought on by advanced diabetes and finally died after a long bout with the illness in 1878. She is buried in the City Cemetery in springville, utah, next to members of her family. Among the other grandchildren to who paid their respects a herdmother lucys funeral, adopted son frank, perhaps to rescue him from a life of bondage, her husband purchased during a mission and brought home. Standing at her grave in the looming shadow of the mountains the young indian man would have been nearly the same age as her mysteriously absent son. One can only wonder what he knew about the extraordinary life of his grandmother as a famous ending or her tumultuous marriage to a man who like himself and started life as a slave. Thank you. [applause] so i am happy to take questions. Yes . How varied was the evidence story . To retell the was it something overlooked or did it take a lot of digging . That is a great question. Most of the evidence is not buried deeply. One of the interesting things that happened is i discovered and this is why i talked about these things we know about people that turn out to be wrong there has been a good deal of scholarly attention paid to them, but one of the things that happens particularly until very recently with mormon history is that it exists alongside other avenues and subfields of American History. A lot of us trained in American History dont think about mormon history or geography, so a lot of that stuff on the mormon side of things was very well known, he they did not know that was okeechobee. It is one of the import and autobiographies of the 19th century, but you may have no idea, and scholars had no idea, that his wife was a white mormon. In many ways it was many about uniting streams of evidence that were relatively apparent in trying to weave them together to tell a coherent story. Yes . Pt barnumtioned tt , did he know or have a suspicion . I talk about this in the book a little bit, that it is possible the people who paid to see him at barnums museum were in fact in on the joke, right . They kind of got it. Part of what they were paying to see was the spectacle of this men of african descent and all in all of his costuming and performing his musical act. It is unclear. Barnum does not talk about him. He also interacted with solomon smith, who was a famous theater promoter in the 19th century who does write about him and talk about him in his own memoirs and is very candid that we all knew he was an indian, but it was entertaining nonetheless. Especially in the context of blackface minstrels, where people knew what they were seeing, but wanted to see it anyway. They sort of paid to be fooled every night. We have to leave that possibility open that not only the managers and promoters but the audiences, that is what was interesting to them about what they were seeing. For some, and this is true when you think about museums at the time, which are not like museums we think of today. They are not places where we go and look at objects. These are more like theaters where there would be a whole host of Different Things going on at these museums. There was an interest, especially in the east, going to see indians in museums because there was a perception that they were a vanishing race, that it would be your last chance to see a true, authentic indian, so i would like to keep the possibly open that some people they were in another joke and that they were going to see a choctaw. That this might be their last chance to witness something of a dying race. Yeah . Interested inbe seeing somebody who is a lot safer. The indians were perceived as fearsome and warlike, so if you see a guy and a show like this, you may feel better he is not a real indian. Absolutely. Part of what their show hinged on was the idea they were christianized. They made appearances, talking raisingbriety, always money to promote sobriety or christianization of the indians. I have no evidence that any of that money made it to the missions or temperance organizations, but yes, absolutely. They were not going to get up there and make threatening gestures or make strong statements about native rights. They were playing on this notion of the noble savage, not the ignoble savage. Yes . Could you talk a little bit about the research, particularly the lds side of things. Archives are not necessarily open in the same way that the National Archives are open to researchers. Could you talk a little bit about how that part of the research went. Absolutely. One of the thing surprised me is that when i went to Salt Lake City to do some research, as soon as i got there, everyone knew who william mccarry was. Everyone knew who he was because of this narrative that he was brighamthat caused young to announce a ban on blacks in the priesthood in 1847. This is a huge issue in church history, this idea of black men not be to obtain the priesthood. So part of what was challenging for me was not so much the closed nature of the archive, but getting beyond that perceived wisdom to figure out what was the nature of these peoples relationships to other mormons at the time. One thing that is very helpful is that the mormons in the 19th century were very prolific in more ways than one, and they created lots of documents, so variouse at institutions and organizations primarily in utah, there are all of these efforts underway to digitize and make searchable and accessible to researchers all of diaries,rland trail by ree all about the different winter experiences, and i found no barriers to my access to that information. When i started poking into patriarchal blessings, which are for some people something that should be close to researchers because it is given from elders to people in the church and it is deemed experiencecuments or. So when i was trying to find out whether she was rebaptize in springville and reentered the church that is the sort of thing you would expect to find in any sort of religious but the amount, of information i got from the mormon sources far outweighs those moments where i ran into a closed door, and that was incredible. I was even able to research the material about her to force from her first husband using records from illinois that had been put on microfilm and lives in a Family History library in Salt Lake City. It was part of one of the consequences of the ongoing effort of the church to document all kinds of things about genealogy, that they have access to and provide access to an incredible amount of information that you would never imagine anything to do with the church and it really doesnt, insofar as it my connect to members and descendents of members. Speaking of Sacred Temple records and things like that, do you happen to know if her her arranged for i do not know. I dont know very much about what happens to the family after of death with the exception just a few kind of pieces of information here and there. I was contacted by the , which was really fascinating because here you are as a historian and you think you are laboring alone in the dark somewhere and suddenly you get any mail from someone saying come i heard you are writing about this person and i am actually a relative, but i did not think to ask that question. It is fascinating. The discovery that her daughter had adopted a boy, which was not particularly uncommon in the valley at that time, right, so during these missions in the great basin they were often in these situations where the utes in particular would offer indian children and mormon missionaries for sale or exchange, and the mormon missionaries not wanting to take them as slaves, which is the situation in which they existed among the youth, would sometimes say we dont want them, dont believe in slavery, dont want to take a child. One historian talked about that in some of those cases they would turn around and kill one of the children and say now you are going to take one, because if you dont take one, i will kill another one, so they put them in this difficult situation where they were then taking these children back, but it seems clear that many of the young native children who come back are not embraced as full members of the families into which they go. They often end up as a sort of limbo as domestics in the household, cared for and fed and clothed, but not fully embraced as a member of the family. That is part of what i think is so striking about the parallels between frank would and william mccarry. He to as a slave of his family was in this limbo, being both related to the distance from and how the part from the people amongst him he grew up. Other questions . Thank you very much. [applause] there will be books for sale in the back just outside the door. The author will be signing them. Stick around. Fill out a survey. Thank you very much. Announcer on history bookshelf, here from the countrys bestknown history writers of the past decade every saturday at 4 00 p. M. Eastern. You can watch any of our programs at any time when you visit our website, cspan. Org history. You are watching American History tv all weekend, every weekend on cspan3. Interested in American History tv . Visit our website, cspan. Org history. You can view our tv schedule, preview upcoming programs, and watch college and lectures, archival films, and more. American history tv at cspan. Org history. This year marks the 50th anniversary of sociologist Robert Bellas essay on americas civil religion, a term given to a shared set of values, belize, and rituals. Next on American History tv, Yale University sociology professor Philip Gorski shares his view on the cultural wars to finding the nation. The Arizona StateUniversity Center for the study of religion and conflict hosted the event. It is just over one hour. Todays lecture is part of the Speakers Series on religion and conflict. As dear friends, the marshals and doubt the speakers endowed the speakers because reflected their concerns to promote Peaceful Solutions to pressing complex in our world. Ther generosity funding series continues to bear fruit long after their passing. It is also important to remember the contributions of