Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World

6. Commemoration in Wisconsin

120 6 Commemoration in Wisconsin Hannah Dick’s grave sits in a small cemetery in the northwest corner of Brothertown, Wisconsin, adjacent to the lot where she spent the last twenty-one years of her life. It is the only Brothertown cemetery bounded by stone walls reminiscent of the vernacular architecture of New England. Such walls cleaved the landscape of Charlestown, Rhode Island, the place that Hannah called home for the first thirty-two years of her life. Her marker, a modest marble gravestone, faces the tranquil waters of Lake Winnebago to the west (figure 6.1). It reads: HANNAH DICK DIED Aug. 6 1855, Aged 88 y’rs. & 7 mo’s. Like the corn, fully ripe To the grave thou hast come and thy saviour in mercy Has gathered thee home. Elegant as it is, this brief inscription omits many of the details and textures of Hannah’s remarkable life. Like the few purchased stones of Brothertown , New York, this stone’s design and inscription were clearly shaped by the constraints of consumer choice. Despite these limitations, a brief consideration of Hannah’s life reveals the cultural nuances of her formulaic gravestone inscription. When contextualized, the seemingly homogenized (i.e., mass-produced and “store bought”) message that marks her grave invokes memories of her unique life history and identity as a Brothertown Indian. Read in isolation and ignorance, however, they suggest that she was no different from any other nineteenth-century Wisconsinite. commemoration in wisconsin 121 Hannah was one of the few Brothertown Indians to experience life on the East Coast and in both Brothertown settlements. She was born in 1767 to Daniel and Mary Potter, both Narragansett Indians living in Charlestown (Love 1899). She married William Dick, another Narragansett Indian, and in Rhode Island they had several children together—of which there was eventually a total of eleven. In 1799 the Dick family moved to Brothertown, Figure 6.1. Hannah Dick’s headstone, Brothertown, Wisconsin. chapter 6 122 New York, where they lived on lot 135. At age forty-seven, Hannah experienced the heartbreak of losing William after nearly thirty years of marriage. She persevered, however, remaining in Brothertown for two more decades before departing for the Wisconsin settlement at age sixty-seven. In 1834 she traveled among one of the earliest groups of settlers. With her daughters Abigail and Thankful and their families, she rode a schooner, The Navigator, from Buffalo to Green Bay (Love 1899:325) before making the southward journey to the new Brothertown. There she spent her remaining years living on lot 2. She died at the ripe age of eighty-eight after witnessing the transformation of the new Brothertown from forest to farmland and experiencing the relief of becoming a US citizen with official land rights. When she died, she knew that the Brothertown community was finally safe from the land struggles that had spurred them to their new home. Hannah may have associated the stone walls that surrounded the small cemetery near the corner of her property with her ancestral homelands on the East Coast. Since it was a family plot, it is possible that she even played a part in its construction. After all, she was known for her adherence to certain traditional practices; for instance, she was one of the last fluent speakers of Algonquian in the entire Brothertown settlement (Heller n.d.). Perhaps it was she who suggested the idea to her family members, likely the people who sought out the fieldstones—much less abundant in this area of Wisconsin compared to reservation lands back east—and constructed the walls. And perhaps it was these memories of Hannah that led her loved ones to choose the epitaph quoted above when marking her grave within those traditional walls. Although metaphors likening death to a homecoming (usually assumed to be in heaven) were common in the late nineteenth century (Tarlow 1999), “home” in this case may have evoked images of the stories that Hannah told of the East Coast. Her stone is the only marker in and around Brothertown to use this metaphor in the 1850s. All other stone inscriptions that liken death to a homebound journey date to the 1860s and later. Half of them mark the graves of Brothertown Indians, the next oldest of which commemorates John Johnson, who died in 1860. Like Hannah, he was born on the East Coast and had the experience of living in each...