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In Missouri, nearly two centuries ago, the Jesuits forcibly moved six enslaved Black people to the St. Louis area to help build their forthcoming institutions. That same year, they also laid the groundwork for a “plan for “the civilization of the Indian,”a practice that separated families and stripped young Native Americans of their culture through assimilation.
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Curtis was born in Topeka in 1860, one year before the Kansas Territory became the 34th state. Around age three, his mother died and his father joined the Union Army to fight in the Civil War. He lived at various times with his non-Native paternal grandparents and his Native maternal grandparents, Louis and Julie Pappan Gonville, who lived on the Kaw reservation in Kansas. As a young boy, he became known for winning races as a horse jockey.
Around 1873, when Louis and Julie were moving with the Kaw Nation to the Indian Territory in the current state of Oklahoma, Curtis planned to go with them. But his grandmother dissuaded him from joining them.