The Musical Odyssey of Cleo Hewitt, Cattaraugus Seneca, 1889–1987

In undertaking fieldwork on Seneca Indian reservations in western New York State in the 1970s, I had the good fortune to meet some extraordinary Hodinöhsö:ní elders. One of the most memorable was Caroline Glennora Cleopatra (“Cleo”) Hewitt (1889–1987), a Cattaraugus Seneca. Fluent in the Seneca language and quite knowledgeable about herbalism, Hewitt came from a prominent Seneca–Tuscarora lineage. I was to learn that Cleo, as she was nicknamed at an early age, had been a music teacher for nearly four decades at several state Indian district schools as well as at the Thomas Indian School, and that she also had given private piano lessons at her home on Brant Road.¹ In her desire to become a teacher and musician, she had attended the state Indian district school on the Cattaraugus Reservation, an off-reservation intermediate school in Angola, New York, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, the United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Dana Musical Institute in Warren, Ohio.

Although she faced no battle with a cyclops and was never diverted by Poseidon’s winds, Cleo faced major impediments in her long odyssey to become a music teacher in her Cattaraugus community. Growing up in an age when Native Americans faced political and cultural extinction, her long and extraordinary life is a case study revealing the strength of Hodinöhsö:ní (Iroquoian) women. It also fits in with previous conclusions made by writers and anthropologists, namely that the Senecas had great abilities to adapt to change while maintaining their separate Hodinöhsö:ní identity.²

Caroline Glennora Cleopatra Hewitt (“Cleo”), Cattaraugus Seneca, 1913. Photograph taken on her visit to see her uncle J. N. B. Hewitt at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. Note her impressive Iroquoian sweet grass hat. (courtesy of national anthropological archives, smithsonian institution.)

While Hewitt became a successful music teacher, I began to realize that at a more tolerant time in America, she might also have taken her place as a violinist in a symphony orchestra. By the 1970s, her remarkable life story and achievements had faded away from memory and had been largely lost to the new generation coming of age on the Cattaraugus Reservation. No one I encountered mentioned that Hewitt had achieved success as a violinist-performer. She died in 1987 and was buried at the United Missions Cemetery on the Cattaraugus Reservation not far from both the Presbyterian church that she attended and the former site of the Thomas Indian School where she had taught.³

Hewitt faced many challenges throughout her life: the deaths of her mother and father during her childhood; a frail constitution that resulted in major health problems; education at totally inadequate state Indian district schools; the highly regimented structure of schools on the reservation and in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio; racial and gender discrimination that limited her salary and career opportunities; and an authoritarian boss at the Thomas Indian School who subverted her innovative teaching methods. Moreover, during her long life, her Seneca people faced one crisis after another: from efforts to break up their lands after the passage of the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 right through major land losses in the building of the New York State Thruway in the mid-1950s, the condemning of nearly ten thousand acres for the Kinzua Dam construction in the 1960s, and the construction of the Southern Tier Expressway in the 1970s and 1980s.⁴

Hewitt’s long life also challenges major assumptions about the education of Native Americans, especially at boarding schools. While recognizing the physical and psychological damage done to Indian students as well as a curriculum based on gender stereotyping, historian David Wallace Adams has suggested that while these institutions were “hothouses of assimilation,” there was at times “a less dismal side of the boarding school story.”⁵ Hewitt clearly was able to adapt better than most of her fellow students and was quite able to take advantage of the programs offered. Cleo’s motto, one...