Pictured here is my great-great-grandma Oyateotawi. Her name means “Girl of Many Peoples.” Native American genealogy is not easy to trace (they didn’t keep written records), but from what I can find, Oyateotawi is closely related to chiefs Little Crow and Big Thunder. How she ended up at the frontier fort in what is now Sisseton, SD, is not known. She married the fort’s first sergeant, Robert Francis White (Irish-American, b. 1852, St. Louis). He is pictured in the second photo, taken from the fort’s museum in Sisseton. The third photo is of a few of my cousins at the last family reunion. We might not look Native American, but well, like our great-great-grandma, and so many other Americans, we are a people of many nations.
[Tribe: Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate]
Leave a Reply