Daniel La France
An Indian Boy's Story
Ah-nen-la-de-ni [La France, Daniel]
About the print version
An Indian Boy's Story
Ah-nen-la-de-ni [Daniel La France] Editor anonymous; see editorial note
preceding story
New York City
30 July 1903
The Independent, vol 55; pp. 1780-1787
An Indian Boy's Story
By Ah-nen-la-de-ni
[Ah-nen-la-de-ni, whose American name is Daniel La France, told his own tale
in neat typewritten form, and has been aided only to the extent of some
rewriting and rearrangement. -- EDITOR.]
I was born in Governeur Village, N. Y., in April, 1879, during one of the
periodical wanderings of my family, and my first recollection is concerning a
house in Toronto, Canada, in which I was living with my father and mother,
brother and grandmother. I could not have been much more than three years old at
the time.
My father was a pure-blooded Indian of the Mohawk tribe of the Six Nations,
and our home was in the St. Regis reservation in Franklin County, N. Y., but we
were frequently away from that place because my father was an Indian medicine
man, who made frequent journeys, taking his family with him and selling his
pills and physics in various towns along the border line between Canada and the
United States.
This house in Toronto was winter quarters for us. In the summer time we lived
in a tent. We had the upper part of the house, while some gypsies lived in the
lower part.
All sorts of people came to consult the "Indian doctor," and the gypsies sent
them upstairs to us, and mother received them, and then retired into another
room with my brother and myself. She did not know anything about my father's
medicines, and seemed to hate to touch them. When my father was out mother was
frequently asked to sell the medicines, but she would not, telling the patients
that they must wait until the doctor came home. She was not pure-blooded Indian,
her father being a French Canadian, while her mother, my grandmother, was a
pure-blooded Indian, who lived with us.
What made it all the more strange that mother would have nothing to do with
the medicines was the fact that grandmother was, herself, a doctor of a
different sort than my father. Her remedies were probably the same but in cruder
form. I could have learned much if I had paid attention to her, because as I
grew older she took me about in the woods when she went there to gather herbs,
and she told me what roots and leaves to collect, and how to dry and prepare
them and how to make the extracts and what sicknesses they were good for. But I
was soon tired of such matters, and would stray off by myself picking the berries -- raspberry and blackberry, strawberry and blueberry -- in
their seasons, and hunting the birds and little animals with my bow and arrows.
So I learned very little from all this lore.
My father was rather a striking figure. His hair was long and black, and he
wore a long Prince Albert coat while in the winter quarters, and Indian costume,
fringed and beaded, while in the tent. His medicines were put up in pill boxes
and labeled bottles, and were the results of knowledge that had been handed down
through many generations in our tribe.
My brother and I also wore long hair, and were strange enough in appearance
to attract attention from the white people about us, but mother kept us away
from them as much as possible.
My father was not only a doctor, but also a trapper, fisherman, farmer and
basket maker.
The reservation in Franklin County is a very beautiful place, fronting on the
main St. Lawrence River. Tributaries of the St. Lawrence wander through it, and
its woods still preserve their wild beauty. On this reservation we had our
permanent home in a log house surrounded by land, on which we planted corn,
potatoes and such other vegetables as suited our fancies. The house was more
than fifty years old.
The woods provided my father and grandmother with their herbs and roots, and
they gathered there the materials for basket making. There were also as late as
1880 some beavers, muskrats and minks to be trapped, and pickerel, salmon and
white perch to be caught in the streams. These last sources of revenue for the
Indians no longer exist; the beavers, minks and muskrats are extinct, while the
mills of the ever encroaching white man have filled the streams with sawdust and
banished the fish.
We were generally on the reservation in early spring, planting, fishing,
basket making, gathering herbs and making medicine, and then in the fall, when
our little crop was brought in, we would depart on our tour of the white man's
towns and cities, camping in a tent on the outskirts of some place, selling our
wares, which included bead work that mother and grandmother were clever at
making, and moving on as the fancy took us until cold weather came, when my
father would generally build a little log house in some wood, plastering the
chinks with moss and clay, and there we would abide, warm amid ice and snow,
till it was time to go to the reservation again.
One might imagine that with such a great variety of occupations we would soon
become rich -- especially as we raised much of our own food and seldom had any
rent to pay -- but this was not the case. I do not know how much my father
charged for his treatment of sick people, but his prices were probably moderate,
and as to our trade in baskets, furs and bead work, we were not any better
business people than Indians generally.
Nevertheless, it was a happy life that we led, and lack of money troubled us
little. We were healthy and our wants were few.
Father did not always take his family with him on his expeditions, and as I
grew older I passed a good deal of time on the reservation. Here, tho the people
farmed and dressed somewhat after the fashion of the white man, they still kept
up their ancient tribal ceremonies, laws and customs, and preserved their
language. The general government was in the hands of twelve chiefs, elected for
life on account of supposed merit and ability.
There were four Indian day schools on the reservation, all taught by young
white women. I sometimes went to one of these, but learned practically nothing.
The teachers did not understand our language, and we knew nothing of theirs so
much progress was not possible.
Our lessons consisted of learning to repeat all the English words in the
books that were given us. Thus, after a time, some of us, myself included,
became able to pronounce all the words in the Fifth and Sixth readers, and took
great pride in the exercise. But we did not know what any of the words meant.
Our arithmetic stopped at simple numeration, and the only other exercise we
had was in writing, which, with us, resolved itself into a contest of speed
without regard to the form of letters.
The Indian parents were disgusted with the schools, and did not urge their children to attend, and when the boys and girls did go of their own free will it
was more for sociability and curiosity than from a desire to learn. Many of the
boys and girls were so large that the teachers could not preserve discipline,
and we spent much of our time in the school in drawing pictures of each other
and the teacher, and in exchanging in our own language such remarks as led to a
great deal of fighting when we regained the open air. Often boys went home with
their clothing torn off them in these fights.
Under the circumstances, it is not strange that the attendance at these
schools was poor and irregular, and that on many days the teachers sat alone in
the schoolhouses because there were no scholars. Since that time a great change
has taken place, and there are now good schools on the reservation.
I was an official of one of the schools, to the extent that I chopped wood
for it, but I did not often attend its sessions, and when I was thirteen years
of age, and had been nominally a pupil of the school for six years, I was still
so ignorant of English that I only knew one sentence, which was common property
among us alleged pupils:
"Please, ma'am, can I go out?" pronounced: "Peezumgannigowout!"
When I was thirteen a great change occurred, for the honey-tongued agent of a
new Government contract Indian school appeared on the reservation, drumming up
boys and girls for his institution. He ...
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