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Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 4, 1999
Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography:Lillian Wineman
and the Trade in DakotaBeadwork, 1893-19291
Karen V. Hansen
How can researchers learn about the social lives of people and
cultures who leavelittle or no written record of their lives? This
article introduces the idea that oneperson's partially documented
life story can serve as a kind of prismatic tool,illuminating a
multitude of historical and sociological paths of inquiry about
hercontemporaries which might otherwise prove elusive. Breaking
with traditionalhistorical and sociological methods, it shifts the
focus from how biography canillustrate social theory or serve as a
case to represent a group, treating it insteadas a critical "point
of entry" into a newly refracted, freshly observed array ofsocial
processes and relationships.
Historians and social scientists who seek an interdisciplinary
understandingof lives, societies, and cultures of the past, face a
daunting set of challenges witha limited set of tools. Once a
scholar chooses a subject whose actions and ideaswere not recorded
in a surviving text, the methodological difficulties
increasedramatically. How are we to come to a deeper understanding
of the lives of commonpeople in the past? Or of a people whose
language tradition was oral rather thanwritten? Or of the
interactions of colonizers and colonized in a
predominantlyilliterate agrarian society? When a social scientist
is limited by the documents thathappen to have survived, an
historical researcher can be driven to desperation andhence
creativity. My agenda in this article is to recount my research
strategies asthey have emerged in my work-in-progress, in hopes
that others will find themsimilarly useful.
Direct correspondence to Karen V. Hansen, Department of
Sociology, MS 071, Brandeis University,Waltham, MA 02454-9110.
KEY WORDS: historical methodology; biography; Lillian Wineman;
Dakota Sioux; beadwork; NorthDakota.
353
1999 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
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Soon after I began researching how my Norwegian grandmother came
togrow up on an Indian reservation in North Dakota, I discovered
that hers was notan idiosyncratic history. In fact, many Norwegians
settled on the Devils Lake SiouxIndian Reservation.2 Like Europeans
and Yankees in other parts of the country,they were participants in
the U.S. federal government's plan to assimilate NativeAmericans
and to usurp their land. Early in my research I visited the Lake
RegionHeritage Museum in Devils Lake, North Dakota and spied an
exhibit of stunningIndian beadwork and artifacts. Among other
things, the glass display case held abeaded Dakota Sioux scissors
holder and pouch, an Ojibwa breechcloth, WesternSioux moccasins,
and a porcupine quill shoulder band.
Given the dearth of written sources, the beadwork appeared to be
a trove ofinformation. Because I am not an archeologist asking
questions about how it wasused, nor an art historian asking about
the symbolic meaning of the designs, myquestions focused on how the
beadwork represented social relationships. My firstquestion about
the beadwork on display was, how did it come to be here? Whomade
it? Who collected these artifacts and placed them in a museum? How
werethey made? For whom? I discovered that the collection had been
owned by LillianWineman, the daughter of a German Jewish father and
a Norwegian Protestantmother. Not only did Wineman appear to be a
woman whose family straddledJewish and Gentile cultures, but unlike
my grandmother and great-grandmother,she left behind
artifactsessays, poems, clothing, furniture, photographs, andIndian
beadwork. The more I learned about Lillian Wineman's privilege and
hersimultaneous cultural marginality, the clearer it became that I
had to investigateher life more closely. She potentially provided
entr6e into a world I was tryingto understand but found elusive and
undocumented in the media to which I hadbecome accustomed in
studying nineteenth century New England.
This article is about the investigative journey I have taken in
an effort tosituate this collection of Indian beadwork, how it
intersects with the life of LillianWineman, and how this research
process, shaped by me as an historical sociologist,illustrates a
useful path of inquiry for historical sociology. Beginning with
theseartifacts of material cultural, I have gone on to conduct oral
history interviewswith tribal elders, analyze land ownership
records, connect with local and tribalhistorians, and search
through local newspapers. A turning point in this processwas the
detection of Lillian Wineman, and understanding how these
historicalforces converged in her life. The biography of Lillian
Wineman sheds light onthe production and exchange of Dakota
beadwork, on ethnic settlement in NorthDakota, and on trade between
whites and Indians on the northern Great Plains atthe turn of the
twentieth century.
I have not been able to discover the specific stories behind
each of thesetreasureswho made them, through whose hands they
passed, how many livesthey touchedbefore they came to be in Lillian
Wineman's trunk. However, Ican put them in context and suggest ways
to understand their social meaning and
354 Hansen
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historical importance. Lillian Wineman was a woman at the nexus
of cultural andreligious traditions; she was a woman on the cusp of
two centuries, and at leastthree cultures. Born in Dakota Territory
in 1888, Lillian Wineman liked to raisehavoc in the Devils Lake
region where she grew updriving a fast car, ridinghorses, and
parading on her bicycle in a white linen suit, her bright red hair
flyingbehind her. Living well into her nineties, Wineman cherished
the belongings thatrepresented her family history and important
moments in her life. She especiallytreasured her trunk full of
Indian artifacts and beadwork. In her late life infirmity,she would
request that the trunk be brought to her while she took out each
item inturn and fondled it (Wilcox Interview 1998).
My intention is to illustrate the connections of historic forces
that convergedin this particular place and time, through her
particular life, and what can be learnedabout historical
sociological methods from this example. Wineman's biographyoffers
one way, one among many, to ground and to grapple with the
complexhistorical forces at play in turn-of-the-century North
Dakota. And in turn, myconstruction of her biography is shaped by
my interests in the larger project, andmy assessment of the ways in
which her life is interesting because it intersectswith a larger
history (Hertz 1997). And in turn, the multiple ways of
approachingWineman's life reveal the importance of the researcher's
interests and choices inconstructing her history. Like a
contemporary interviewer (Hertz 1995), I playan active role as a
researcher attending to certain things and not others,
probingparticular issues while ignoring others, developing one
aspect of her life and leavingthe remainder to be explored by
someone else (Gluck and Patai 1991).
The biography serves as a prism through which to explore and
analyze thesocial relationships that surrounded the production of
the beadwork and the pro-cess of it being traded into European
hands. Sociologists have found the metaphorof a prism appealing
(e.g., Baca Zinn, Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Messner 1997;Burawoy 1998;
Laslett 1991; O'Brien 1999). Prisms are transparent from a
par-ticular vantage point, almost like windows. But if you turn
them at a specific angleand catch the sunlight in a particular way,
they refract multiple colors and shadedimages. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary (1987, p. 1384), prisms "trans-form the
colors of things into a thousand shapes." I argue that those colors
andshapes point to avenues of exploration not necessarily visible
through an ordinarylens.
This prism perspective is valuable to historical sociology for
three reasons.First, the biography as prism alerts the historical
sociologist to aspects of the periodotherwise hidden. It prompts
one to articulate questions about taken-for-grantedphenomena.
Second, the prism metaphor illuminates a life as a point of entry
thatthen connects to larger social and economic processes. Starting
with the specific,the local and particular, the researcher is able
to make connections outward toexamine the social embeddedness of
this one life. And third, the prism perspectiveillustrates how
connections come together in one life. Rather than ending merely
as
Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography 355
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unrelated parts of a larger spectrum, those interrelationships
can serve to advanceto a more complex and nuanced understanding of
historical processes.
Historical sociology as a method has come to be associated
primarily with"big structures, large processes, huge comparisons"
(Tilly 1984), and its datasets have been largely comprised of large
archival holdings of newspapers, la-bor force statistics, and the
like. Central subjects include revolutions, transforma-tion of
economic systems, development of nation states and the like. Other
typesof historical sociological approachesmore micro, more
qualitative, smaller inscopehave co-existed but remain the
exceptions (Abbott 1991). I want to broadenthis methodological
scope by arguing that individual biographies can be useful indoing
historical sociology. Biography has long been used by historians to
under-stand the role of influential men and women in the arts, in
science, in politics, andduring the past few decades, in everyday
life. However, because of sociology'sinterest in collectivities
rather than individuals, and in broad patterns of behaviorrather
than idiosyncratic conduct and peculiar psychology, sociologists,
particu-larly those conducting historical research, have largely
shied away from a focus onindividuals.
My approach proposes using a biography as a point of entry into
an historicalsociological problematic. Rather than consider it a
"case" in history, representativeof a population or small group, I
counter with using it similarly to the way DorothySmith (1987) uses
institutional ethnography. Dorothy Smith (1987, p. 157) saysher
intention in an institutional ethnography is not to study a single
phenomenondiscretely, but rather to use it as a conduit to the
larger social relations which shapeand limit it. In other words,
the biography is a way of studying how economic,cultural, and
political forces come to bear upon a life, the relationships that
defineit, and the way it changes over time. The biography is not
intended to be an isolatedstudy of an individual life. In its
historical context, it can be a tool to lay bare the"relations of
ruling," as Smith (1987) puts it, through this dynamic
investigation.
For example, in no way can Lillian Wineman be considered
one-dimensionallyrepresentative of women of her time. In some ways,
she was the proto-typical in-sider. She was born in Dakota
Territory and could and did belong to an historically-minded group,
the Pioneer Daughters, a North Dakota version of the D. A.R. Shewas
gregarious, belonged to numerous volunteer organizations, and was a
memberof the dominant ethnic group in the stateNorwegians. However,
a fuller portraitof her life places her in a liminal position. She
belonged to the Episcopalian church,not the Lutheran one (as most
Norwegians did). Although she was born of a JewishGerman father, I
can find no evidence of her religious training in Judaism. I have
noway of assessing to what degree if any, she saw herself as
Jewish. While other Jewslived in the Lake Region (see below), to
the majority of the region's inhabitants, theJewish religion was a
curiosity at best and a target for prejudice at worst. Winemanspoke
Norwegian, English, and a few words in Dakota, but not Hebrew. She
wasthe only child of a father who was disowned by his family,
although a portrait ofher Jewish grandparents hung in her home.
And, she never married. Thus, she had
356 Hansen
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a relatively small kin network. A wealthy businessman and
political office holder,her father had extensive land holdings in a
region comprised of small, independentfamily fanners. In other
words, in multiple ways, Lillian Wineman was the ex-ception, not
the rule. Also critical, as a collector, Lillian acted as an
intermediarybetween cultures. Even with her own prejudices about
the Dakota, she made aneffort to breech the divide between Indian
and white worlds. So Wineman is notrepresentative of North Dakota
Pioneer Daughters, not even Norwegian ones. Andmy decision to focus
on her religion, ethnicity, and collecting activities
necessarilyportrays her in a different light than had I
concentrated on her time as an actor ina theater troupe or the
shape of her life as a single woman (Bateson 1989; Hertz1997).
By starting with a propertied white woman, daughter of a
prominent busi-nessman, my investigation necessarily takes a
particular path. These ways are notexclusive, nor are they
definitive; and in my larger project they constitute but
onedimension of inquiry. Importantly, someone who purchased Indian
beadwork wasin a very different position in 1910 than, for
instance, the Dakota woman wholabored to make the beadwork,
regardless of whether or not she owned property.I cannot give an
account of how she came to learn her craft, or what it meant tobe a
skilled beadworker in her tribe. I cannot speak to her intended
recipient ofor market for the work, or what these particular pieces
meant to her. Nonetheless,even with the lopsidedness of the
account, the vantage point of Wineman's lifeoffers multiple ways of
seeing and analyzing a complex history.
While the use of biography in historical sociology is not
entirely new (see,Barry 1990; Breines 1986; Hansen 1995; Laslett
1991; Stanley 1993), it remainsa seldom-used tool (Erben 1993). C.
Wright Mills, the best-known advocate ofbiography as a sociological
tool, places it squarely within the discipline: "Socialscience
deals with problems of biography, of history, and of their
intersectionswithin social structures... These threebiography,
history, societyare the co-ordinate points of the proper study of
man [sic]" (Mills 1959, p. 143). In other words,if the sociological
enterprise is to understand human behavior, sociologists muststudy
individuals as well as groups. That is, we must study individuals
embeddedwithin a social and historical context (Laslett 1991).
Franco Ferrarotti (1983, p.68)writes that "sociological biography
is not only an account of lived experiences" butalso of social
relationships. Other characteristics of biography include its
potentialfor exploring social theory (Evans 1993; Reinharz 1994);
for illustrating the generalwith the particular (Evans 1993, p.7);
and for providing a mechanism for analyzingthe links between the
private and the public and the social realms (Alpern et al1992;
Evans 1993; Hansen 1994; Laslett, 1991). Sociologists and
historians oflaboring classes, women, and other dispossessed
peoples have found that biographyprovides entrde to
under-documented or otherwise lost history. In this article, Iwant
to shift the focus away from how biographies can illustrate social
theory orhistorical experiences, to how biographies can serve as
points of entry into a newlyrefracted, freshly observed array of
social processes and relationships.
Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography 357
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Over and over in my previous work, the prism of a single life
has altered myvision and shifted me to a previously unconsidered
avenue for discovery (Hansen1989; 1992; 1995). The prism of
biography has also served as an historical so-ciological tool since
I began studying Norwegian immigrant and Dakota Indianrelations in
turn-of-the-century North Dakota. Lillian Wineman's life viewed as
aprism refracts many bands of light that could be investigated,
including: how Jewscame to settle in North Dakota; the dynamics of
anti-Semitism in the rural mid-west; the production of Indian
beadwork; European trade in furs and other itemswith Indians;
Norwegian immigration to North America and settlement patterns
inthe Great Plain states; homesteading laws; single women in
frontier communities;inter-faith and inter-racial marriages; the
role of business people in agriculturaltowns; and the Chautauquas
and the Chautauqua movement at the turn-of-the-century, to name a
few. In my larger study of relations between the Dakota
andNorwegian immigrants, I plan to pursue this full range of
problematics and ques-tions. However, for this article I have
selected just a few bands for elaboration,in order to demonstrate
how Wineman's life can illuminate aspects of Europeanand Yankee
trade with Native Americans, Jewish settlement in North Dakota,
andtrade in Dakota beadwork.
This paper details these dimensions of her life as they
intersect in the artifactsshe left behind. To illustrate my paths
of discovery, in the remainder of the articleI outline the cultural
and economic interchange between Indians and Europeansthat was set
in motion by the fur trade on the Northern Plains. I then trace
howWineman's family, with its Jewish and Norwegian history, came to
live in NorthDakota. In the following section I discuss Dakota
women's production of beadworkand the systems of trade in place
that enabled Wineman to purchase it. In the finalsection, I return
to a discussion of the various points of entry into Wineman's
life,and, in turn, the lessons learned for historical sociology in
using biography as aprism to refract "points of entry" into a broad
range of inter-related subjects.
HOW DID TRADE EVOLVE ON THE NORTHERN GREAT PLAINS?
Thousands of years ago, the Great Plains were part of a vast
inland sea. Overmillennia, the sea transformed to an "inner ocean"
of grassland, and became a hometo fowl, large and small mammals,
and, starting approximately 12,000 years ago,human beings
(Schneider 1996). When the ocean receded, it left a large,
rathersaline lake in the northeastern corner of the area now known
as North Dakota.The Indians called it "mini-wakan", spirit water,
or enchanted water. When theEuropeans came, they translated this
into "Devils Lake" (Minnewaukan HistoryBook Committee 1983,
p.l).
For millennia, the Great Plains operated as a major crossroads
on the continentwhere people and animals migrated and where they
settled. Europeans came tothe region beginning in the eighteenth
century and tapped into systems of trade
Hansen358
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between indigenous people, extracting natural resources
primarily in the form offur pelts. "As the foundation that led to
the area's discovery by Euro-Americans,the fur trade stimulated
exploration, was a prime factor in the destruction of
Indianculture, and brought the first white people to settle the
area" (Wood 1994, p.2).It was not the intention of the fur trader
to destroy Indian culture or even to takethe land. However, it was
through trade that European infectious diseases weretransmitted to
indigenous peoples, devastating their population (Thornton
1987).And trade figured prominently in destroying the free ranging
bison that populatedthe Great Plains, the mainstay of the diets of
the Sioux and Chippewa, amongothers (Schneider 1994).
In the fur trade, Indian women were important as cultural
mediatorsthroughthe trading itself and by establishing and linking
kinship systems via intermarriage(Kidwell 1992). The Dakota Sioux
had an economic system based on exchange andsituated within kinship
obligations (DeMallie 1994). Indigenous trade occurredprimarily
through kinship networks. "In order for the Euro-Americans to
tradewith the Dakota, social bonds had to be created" (Whelan 1993,
p.249) becausethat made the system compatible with the Sioux social
structure. Effective tradingrelations were established with white
men who came to be called "brother." This kindesignation often
occurred through intermarriage: Indian women were linchpinsin this
complex system of exchange (Kidwell 1992).
Indian women were not passive pawns in this process, but active
participantsin negotiating their position within the fur trade
culture. As wives, they taught theFrench and British how to survive
in the wilderness. They saved the men fromstarvation by trapping
small game, drying meats, revealing how to identify andto use the
fruits of the land, translating languages, and educating the
Europeansabout Indian culture. Most importantly, through child
bearing and child rearing,the Indian women integrated the cultures.
For themselves, they chose husbands,exercised their influence where
possible, and arranged to lighten their labors withthe use of
European technologies (Kidwell 1992; Van Kirk 1980).
Through this band of the prism, it becomes apparent that the
historical dy-namic of trade between Europeans and Native Americans
carried with it exchangeand friendship as well as the seeds of
colonialism. Throughout this history, Indianwomen have been at the
heart of trade relations on the Great Plains.
HOW DID INDIAN LAND COME TO BE "SETTLED"BY EURO-AMERICANS?
The fur trade virtually ended around 1867, primarily from
over-harvesting ofanimals (Wood 1994). Not coincidentally, 1867 is
also the year that a new reser-vation was established in North
Dakota, the Devils Lake Sioux Indian Reservation(now renamed the
Spirit Lake Sioux Reservation), at the site of Fort Totten,
amilitary fort (Schneider 1994). The reservation has been home
primarily to the
Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography 359
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Dakota Sioux, who moved to the area after the Great Sioux
Uprising in Minnesotain 1862 (Schneider 1994). It covers
approximately 245,000 acres, bordered on thenorth by Devils Lake
itself and on the south by the Sheyenne River.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the reservation land that
remained (afterthe continued retraction of Indian lands) was held
in trust by the U.S. governmentfor Indian nations. However,
beginning with the passage of the Land AllotmentAct of 1887 (also
known as the Dawes Act), reservation land was parceled out
toindividual Indians for private ownership, rather than collective
ownership (Sutton1975). The government reasoned that owning private
property would make farmersof the Indians and would push them into
a form of economic self-sufficiencycompatible with American
capitalism. This imposition of private land ownership(in contrast
to tribal ownership) clashed with widely-held Native American
valuesand disrupted the traditional systems of tribal government
(Hoxie 1984). By design,once reservation land was allotted,
hundreds of thousands of acres on reservationswere then treated as
"surplus" land. While the tribe retained possession of someland in
addition to that owned by individuals, vast tracts of unfilled open
spacewere viewed by European-American settlers as "unused." As an
eminent historianof North Dakota, Elwyn Robinson (1965, p. 181,
emphasis added), put it, "As theIndians began to live by fanning
and on government rations, it became obvious thatsome of the
reservations were much larger than they needed to be" In other
words,the U.S. government ignored the Indian approach to thinking
about land, culture,and economic systems, and reneged on its
previous treaty obligations. Because itdetermined that the Indians
did not "need" as much land as they had access to on
thereservations, it opened the unallotted land to white settlers at
a very low price. As aresult, white homesteaders gained access to
millions of acres heretofore belongingto Native Americans. The Land
Allotment Act of 1904 extended the U.S. federalencroachment upon
Indian territorial integrity by opening 100,000 acres on theSpirit
Lake Sioux Indian Reservation to homesteading by Euro-Americans
andEuropean immigrants (Schneider 1994, p. 138).
The expansion of territory for settlement of the U.S. went
hand-in-hand withimmigration. In the Dakotas, territorial and state
governments purposely recruitedimmigrants, Scandinavians in
particular, to help fulfill their vision of settling theheartland
(see propaganda brochure, Dakota: official guide, containing useful
in-formation in handyform for settlers andhomeseekers, concerning
North and SouthDakota, 1889). In 1910, just six years after the
Spirit Lake Reservation had beenopened up to white settlement, the
majority of the population (70.6%) of the statewere "foreign-born"
or "born of foreign or mixed parents." Norwegians were thelargest
ethnic group in North Dakota in 1910 and a major ethnic group in
theDevils Lake region (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1915). The rapid
settlement ofthe reservation created heterogeneous communities of
immigrants and Indians.
Refracting history through the prism of Lillian Wineman's life,
we learn that"pioneers" like Wineman's father and mother did not
stumble into Dakota Terri-tory by accident. Through territorial and
state settlement plans, through the active
360 Hansen
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recruitment of Scandinavians, through the usurpation of Indian
land, white landseekers were able to pioneer. Wineman's biography
raises the question of histor-ical precedents for land taking, and
problematizes the North Dakota economicsuccesses that were
predicated upon appropriation of Indian land.
HOW DID JEWS COME TO HOMESTEAD IN NORTH DAKOTA?
The many layers of Lillian Wineman's biography point to the
importanceand complexity of ethnicity and religious affiliation in
North Dakota early in thecentury. While most people shared the lot
of being a poor farmer, not everyoneshared a religion. Among the
immigrants to North Dakota were Jews from urbancenters in the U.S.
and from Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia. The saga of
theWineman family illuminates the reasons for this ethnic
settlement. Lillian's father,Samuel L. Wineman left his
German-Jewish family in Chicago, where his fatherhad been involved
in real estate, seeking opportunities in Dakota Territory in
1883.In partnership with his brother, he established a clothing
store in Devils Lake andone in Grand Forks. When the partnership
broke up in 1884, Samuel took overthe Devils Lake store and his
brother, J.B., took the one in Grand Forks. Over thecourse of his
life, Samuel was involved in numerous commercial and real
estateventures. He built the first (and only?) opera house in
Devils Lake and by 1918owned 1,000 acres of land. He promoted
development of the region through hisbusiness and his membership in
the Commercial Club; he was elected aldermanand mayor of Devils
Lake; and he was involved in the Masons, the Woodmen, andthe
Knights of Pythias (Hennesey 1918).
This American success story begs the questions: Why North
Dakota? WhyDevils Lake? Aside from the obvious potential profits to
be made in Dakota Terri-tory as it stood on the brink of statehood,
there were two Jewish colonies establishedin North Dakota in the
early 1880sone at Painted Woods and one in Devils Lake(Plaut 1963).
Although they have different origins, they shared a motivation
fortheir establishment. The early colonists and the philanthropists
that supported thesecooperative communities attempted to establish
a safe haven and a livelihood forthose fleeing pogroms in Russia
and Eastern Europe. Another group of Jews, wholater called
themselves the "Russian Hebrew Society of Ramsey County," settledin
the Township of Sullivan, just north of Devils Lake, which is where
SamuelWineman bought a quarter section of land in 1892. Wineman and
his neighborswere soon followed by several other "colonies" of
Jewish settlers, funded by Baronde Hirsch, the philanthropist. De
Hirsch and the organization he helped to found,the Jewish
Agriculturalist Aid Society, helped Jews found farming communities
indifferent regions in the U.S. (Schulte 1990). The philosophy of
de Hirsch, similarto other colonization philanthropists, embraced
the concept of empowering andtraining its aid recipients: "I
contend most decidedly against the old system ofalms giving," he
wrote, "which only makes so many more beggars; and I consider
Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography 361
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it the greatest problem in philanthropy to make human beings who
are capableof work out of individuals who otherwise must become
paupers, and in this waycreate useful members of society" (Joseph
1935, p. 15-16). The society was alsoconcerned with economically
diversifying the Jewish community in the U.S. Itsmembers believed
that geographically dispersing people would also help to "wardoff
anti-Semitism directed at all Jews in response to the crowded
conditions of thenew immigrants" (Shulte 1990, p.233).
All told there were 50 to 60 Jewish families who lived in the
Devils Lakeregion in the 1890s (Papermaster, 1956). But times were
hard and many settlerswere not used to the uncertainties or the
rigors of farming. Jewish homesteaderswere a minority, and they had
to rely on itinerant rabbis, which made strict religiousobservation
difficult. Until 1906, the only synagogue in the region was in
GrandForks, one hundred miles away. Some of the colonists found
helpful non-Jewishneighbors, but many faced anti-Semitism and also
resentment over the aid thewider Jewish community was providing to
the struggling colonists.
Like the fur traders before him, Samuel Wineman found marriage
withinhis religious and ethnic group in this frontier environment
challenging. At theage of 26, when he fell in love and married
Trina Moe, a young woman recentlyarrived from Norway (via
Wisconsin), he was disowned by his family. Samuel'sfaith appears to
have also changed. In a published collection of laudatory
portraitsof civic and business leaders, the author writes, "In
religious inclination, Mr.Wineman is a Protestant" (Hennessey 1918,
p.349). Now whether this was a resultof being alienated from his
family, intense anti-Semitism of North Dakota, and/ora spiritual
change of heart, this places Mr. Wineman outside his faith of
origin,even while the community identified him as a Jew.
The prism of Lillian Wineman's biography surfaces a unique and
otherwisenearly invisible religious and ethnic community in the
Devils Lake region. Ob-viously, other scholars have written about
Jewish settlements in North Dakota(e.g., Rikoon 1995; Trupin 1984)
. However, because of its largely agriculturaleconomy, rural
settlement patterns, and immigration history, North Dakota hasbeen
characterized as Protestant and Northern European. One does not
associateJewish farmers with the region. Wineman's family's status
as religious outsidersproblematizes the religious affiliation of
white settlers. Like other bands of theprism, this prompts the
researcher to pose questions about the dominant culturethat
otherwise might have gone unasked.
HOW DID THE TRADE IN BEADWORK BECOMEECONOMICALLY IMPORTANT?
Through another band of the prism, Lillian Wineman's biography
illuminatesan important point of cultural contact between Native
Americans and EuropeanAmericans. Lillian Wineman's collection of
Indian beadwork opens the door to a
362 Hansen
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host of questions about how it was produced, why it was
produced, who made it,how was it viewed by its creator, and how it
came to be in Wineman's hands. WhileLillian did not live on the
reservation, she lived in close proximity to it. On thereservation,
trade and commerce were occasions for encounters between Dakotaand
whites. Dakota leased land to white farmers; they sold seed and
horses to eachother; and they traded and sold numerous other items,
including farm produce andartwork.
Trade in beadwork and farm products, in this context, provided a
point ofcontact between cultures. This prompts one to ask about the
many ways that thesetraders may have served as cultural
intermediaries, like the fur traders before them.And, did the roles
of women develop as they had during the fur trade?
Dakota women's involvement with various kinds of home
manufacturingprimarily beaded goods and quiltsprovided an important
resource to families,resulting in either goods or cash. Albers
(1985) argues that "Although much ofthis work was geared toward
home consumption, many women created goodsto sell or trade in
neighboring white communities. The earnings from this workwere
meager, but they did provide Dakota women and their families with
sources ofincome partially independent of federal control"3 (Albers
1985, p. 119). Accordingto Albers (1985), women's earnings were
also independent of the control of men.
Women's craft work was important in its cultural status as well
as its economicvalue. In surveying women's involvement in arts and
crafts production of manyof the Plains Indians, Schneider (1983, p.
113) says, "The woman who excelled incrafts not only had a chance
to become a member of a select group, but she couldalso increase
her family's status and wealth by working for others and by
teachingher craft." To borrow an example from the Lakota Sioux of
the pre-reservation era,Lakota women, the primary bead workers,
honored warriors by spending manylong, careful hours making them
beadwork clothing. In effect, their craft work"supported [the]
social system of generosity and bravery" (Bol 1985, p.37).
Bol(1985, p.37) writes that "If a Lakota man wore a buffalo robe
with many rowsof quill work, this was an indication of the high
regard in which he was held byhis female relatives." She also
argues that women's needlework contributed tomaintaining internal
cohesion: "Women's art operated as an important vehicle
inconfirming and maintaining kinship relationships" (Bol, 1985,
p.38). These valuesassociated with women's beadwork continued into
the early reservation period (thelate nineteenth century).
Interestingly, much of the beadwork finery in the earlyreservation
era was made for children. "By creating particularly fine
traditionalclothing for her children, a mother found a method for
combating the threat ofassimilation" (Bol 1985, p.49).
Museum records report that Lillian Wineman purchased her
beautiful beadedgoods at the Devils Lake Chautauqua. A Chautauqua
was a month-long summer-time event, similar to a county fair, which
focused on education, religion, andrecreation, rather than
agriculture and livestock. The emphasis of the Chautauquawas on the
"acquisition of knowledge, sacred and secular" (Snyder 1985,
p.81)
Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography 363
-
which made it an innovative forum for adult education. The
Chautauqua spon-sored lectures, music, theater, dance,
entertainment, and even provided childcare.Lecture topics included
"the graduated income tax, slum clearance, tariffs, womansuffrage,
juvenile courts, prison reform, pure food laws, the school lunch
pro-gram, a balanced diet, [and] physical fitness" (Snyder 1985,
p.85). At height ofwhat became a Chautauqua movement, 12,000 sites
around the country hostedChautauquas. In 1924, the peak of the
movement, an estimated 30 million peopleparticipated (Synder
1985).
The Devils Lake Chautauqua, founded in 1893, was situated on the
shoresof the lake and covered 160 acres with hundreds of buildings,
both temporaryand permanent (Ryan 1990, p.27). A steam boat ferry,
the Minnie H., left theChautauqua grounds several times daily
traveling to other points on the lake,including Fort Totten on the
reservation. Speakers at the Devils Lake Chautauquaincluded William
Jennings Bryan on the gold standard versus the silver standardfor
currency and Carrie Nation on temperance and woman suffrage (Ryan
1990).
One of the highlights featured at the Devils Lake Chautauqua,
the third largestindependent Chautauqua in the U.S., was "Indian
Day". Indians from all four reser-vations in North Dakota were
invited. "They came in full Indian dress, bringingtheir own tipis,
and performed grass and war dances and displayed many of
theirnative crafts and beadwork" (Chautauqua Program 1907 N. page,
cited in Ryan1990). In this context, presumably Lillian Wineman
partook of the festivities, andpurchased some of the beautiful
beadwork. A question remains: what actually tran-spired on "Indian
Day"? While interviewing Agnes Greene, a Dakota tribal elder, Itold
her of the 1907 newspaper article that reported the gathering of
all five tribes inNorth Dakota for "Indian Day." The article said
two thousand Indians participated,many traveling by canoe across
the lake and arriving at the Devils Lake Chautauquagrounds in full
Indian dress (Ryan 1990). Mrs. Greene characterized this portraitas
nonsense. "Who makes up these things?" she wanted to know
(Interview withGreene 1999). She thought the portrait of Indian
fanfare simply suited someone'ssense of what the Indians should be
doing, and therefore embellished the account.At the same interview,
she showed me a postcard of a troupe of ChautauquaIndian Day
dancers. Her mother stood in the center, dressed in her dancing
regalia.Mrs. Greene's pride in her mother's Chautauqua
participation combined with herskepticism about the newspaper
article, has prompted me to search for other oraland published
accounts of the day. Her seasoned resentment towards the
white"invention" of Indian history prompted me to review this
newspaper report andothers that I might otherwise have accepted as
accurate. Thus I have yet to piecetogether the multi-dimensional
puzzle of "Indian Day". It will be important toattend to the
interests of the Devils Lake boosters and how they
sensationalizednews in order to promote the region. What did
"Indian Day" mean to the Dakotaparticipants? What did it mean to
dance for the de facto victors of the protractedstruggle over
Indian land? And alternately, how did recent immigrants view
theseindigenous people's performance?
364 Hansen
-
The overarching point I want to make is that the life of Lillian
Wineman ledme to these issues by providing a point of entry into
this history. It is possible thatI would have eventually found out
about "Indian Day" because it was a ritualized,highly visible point
of contact between whites and Indians. Regardless, approach-ing
"Indian Day" via Lillian Wineman's biography reveals how the
Chautauqua,Dakota beadwork, Norwegian immigration, and U.S. federal
land policy convergedin this particular time and place.
THE PRISM OF BIOGRAPHY IN HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY
As with all methodologies, the "biography as prism" approach
also has po-tential drawbacks. There is the danger of idiosyncrasy,
for example. An individualmay be so unique and distinct from his or
her contemporaries that we learn littleabout the historical period
and the conditions that shaped his or her experience andsocial
location. And another danger for the historical sociologist is that
in becom-ing enamored of the puzzle of an individual life, one can
lose perspective on theconnections to collectivities and historical
environments, and the larger political,economic, and cultural
forces at work. Because of its particularity in a situationand an
historical period, a biography can also limit the vision and narrow
the scopeof inquiry.
Although her life is important in its own right, it has not been
my objective toexplore Lillian Wineman's biography for its own
sake. Rather, I sought a meansto understand and to analyze a far
broader spectrum of social and historical expe-riences.
Investigating her life has served as a point of entry into this
project. Fromthe vantage point of the life of one person, the
historical world takes on a perspec-tive it otherwise lacks. As
with institutional ethnographies like those conducted byDorothy
Smith (1987), the interconnections of micro- to macro-structures
surface,agency becomes apparent, and history comes alive. Biography
roots a study in timeand place, and gives perspective to economic
and social processes. As a prism,Lillian Wineman's life illuminates
important avenues of historical pursuit, includ-ing the trade in
Dakota beadwork, ethnic settlement patterns in North Dakota,
theChautauqua movement, and the role of single women in frontier
communities,among others.
To summarize, the biography-as-prism strategy serves as a useful
tool forhistorical sociology in at least three ways. One, it
surfaces issues that may remainsubmerged in overviews of a topic or
a region. The historical sociologist is calledupon to attend to the
idiosyncrasies of the individual subject, and through theprocess of
situating them in historical context may come to question
taken-for-granted assumptions about the period or processes. Two,
the researcher traces theparticularities of a life to larger
historical events, thus revealing the interconnectionsbetween
micro- and macro-processes. And three, the bands of the prism
spectrumconnect to other lives and larger phenomena, they are not
ends in and of themselves.
Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography 365
-
Lillian Wineman had a position, a social location, a point of
view. Becauseher father was a prominent businessman, she had
disposable income to purchaseIndian finery. Had I begun this
discussion from the vantage point of my Norwegiangreat-grandmother,
the story would have unfolded in a different way, without thesame
intersections. The prism would have refracted a different pattern
of light. Or,more profoundly, had I been able to tell this history
from the point of view of theDakota woman who made the beadwork, my
account of the same series of eventswould have been seen from a
different angle and taken on different hues.
At the same time, to borrow from another metaphor, a
work-in-progress inmany ways approximates map making during a
voyage of discovery. My over-arching intention is to construct a
grand map of largely uncharted relationships.This task, impossible
without the guidance of local knowers and rich sources ofevidence,
nonetheless is one made more possible through the use of
biography.The biography is not just about plotting a particular
location, but situating a lifewithin a larger set of cultural
practices and inter-relationships.
ENDNOTES
1. I want to thank Andrew Bundy and Anita Carey for their
thoughtful support and critical feedbackon several earlier drafts
of this article. In addition I want to acknowledge the astute
editorial eyeof Rosanna Hertz, who saw the article in the talk and
worked with me to develop and clarify myargument.
2. The tribe changed the name of the reservation to the Spirit
Lake Sioux Indian Reservation, in themid-1990s. To respect their
efforts to make the contemporary English more consonant with
itsDakota meaning, I will refer to the reservation as the Spirit
Lake Sioux Indian Reservation, evenwhen I am discussing its early
history. The lake on the reservation's northern border, Devils
Lake,and the town on the other side of the lake, also called Devils
Lake, continue to be called by theiroriginal European
appellation.
3. Scholars debate the issue of what kind of impact trade had on
the status of women. Shoemaker(1995, p.9) argues that trade had a
negative impact, like all assimilationist policies of the
U.S.government. Others argue that women gained power in this
transformation. Regardless, one cannotunderstand Indian history
without understanding the history of the U.S. government policies
towardIndians regarding their language, culture, and economy. "Over
the past century, the condition ofIndian participation in the
economy, either as land-owners, wage-laborers, or entrepreneurs
havebeen governed by federally-initiated Indian policies" (Albers
1985, p.l 16).
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