Agnes Caldwell

Agnes was a Menominee woman of the Bear clan

Biography

Agnes was born about 1891. She passed away after 1933. Agnes was transported by train from the Canton Asylum upon closing to St. Elizabeth's in Washington D. C. and immediately released by Dr. Silk, where she went seems to be unknown, however, the Jun 15, 1934 census from the Menominee Reservation, Keshena, WI, shows her there.

Sources:
-Whitt, Sarah H. “False Promises: Race, Power, and the Chimera of Indian Assimilation, 1879-1934.” University of California, Berkeley, 2020, pp. 101–102. https://escholarship.org/content/qt7fw88672/qt7fw88672_noSplash_b4a...
-Joinson, Carla. Vanished in Hiawatha: The Story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians. University of Nebraska Press, 2016

Agnes is known to have parents Mose (Little) Bear as a father, a mother named Rose, a sister named Josephine Johnson, and children Luke and Madeline (who is suspected to have died young during the incarceration of Agnes. The Menominee reservation in Wisconsin appears to have suffered from an outbreak of illness from 1915-1922 that impacted this family.
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In another instance of forcible long-term confinement, Agnes C. (Menominee) spent seventeen years at Canton, committed to the facility on November 17, 1917, at the age of twenty-six.

As was common on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin in the early twentieth century, three generations of the Bear family lived together. Elders Rose and Mose (Little) Bear spent much of their days with two grandchildren, seven-year-old Madeleine and two-year-old Luke. The youngsters’ mother, Agnes, and her spouse, George Caldwell, had likely grown up together and been married since Agnes was sixteen and George was twenty. Agnes’s siblings and their immediate families lived and worked nearby. Extended and intergenerational Menominee families interacted with one another daily, often sharing homes and other resources.1 In their diagnosis of Agnes Bear Caldwell in 1917, BIA officials read ordinary features of Menominee kinship through a Western biomedical lens. An adult mother, her children, and her spouse living with her parents—in the observers’ estimation—indicated trouble. That Agnes had “always been dependent upon . . . her parents” especially concerned the white agents. They described the woman as “filthy in her habits and utterly incapable of being . . . independent of her mother.”2 Implicitly, they pathologized Caldwell’s extended family. The elderly parents, according to this settler ableist framework, had failed to raise an independently capable daughter and were themselves decreasingly capable of managing her or her young children.3 The agency physician considered Agnes’s spouse, George, as similarly incompetent, describing him as “worthless and contributes very little if anything to support of the family.”4 The configuration and day-to-day life of the BearCaldwell household, in other words, medically justified her institutionalization. In November 1917, she was taken, along with several other Menominee people, to Canton. [2]

The BIA’s narrow focus on Agnes Caldwell and her immediate household members obscured the larger conflicts between U.S. government agents and Menominee Nation members over self-determination, family, and home. Referring to the Native people on the reservation as “my family of 1700 children of every age and temperament,” field matron Mrs. H. P. Marble reported in 1916 that “home life was the crucible of Indian civilization and as such was a legitimate field for government investigation.” Her own investigations of Menominee homes found them wanting. According to Marble, most mothers were “not willfully neglectful of their child’s welfare, but through the mistaken idea of kindness often permit[ted] the child to follow its own inclinations, as to food, habits, etc.” This problem could be corrected when the mother was “impressed with the extent of her own responsibility.” Without such changes, the field matron warned, there would be no “material progress toward intelligent citizenship.”7 As the twentieth century began, many other assimilationist advocates, including social reformers, missionaries, and bureaucrats, similarly judged Native women’s progress according to white settler ideals of family and household.8 Often, nonconformity to this model was read as a biomedical deficit, as when Keshena Agency physician W. R. Bebout diagnosed Agnes Bear Caldwell as defective because he believed she was incapable of being “taught to live right.”9 [2-40]
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Another Version...
...BIA authorities also applied the malleable and racist eugenic medical formula to Agnes Caldwell and her kin. Among the reasons BIA officials justified the young mother’s incarceration in 1917 was that she, her children, and her spouse, lived with her parents. That Agnes Caldwell had “always been dependent upon . . . her parents for their support” especially troubled the white agents. They described her as “filthy in her habits an utterly incapable of being taught to live right and independent of her mother.”56 Implicitly, they pathologized Caldwell’s extended family. The elderly parents, according to this framework, had failed to raise an “independent” daughter and were decreasingly capable of managing her or young children. The agency physician described Agnes Caldwell’s spouse, George, as “worthless and contributes very little if anything to support of the family.”57 Emphasizing possible additional children from the marriage as a “helpless strain of Indian,” he also marked the Caldwell’s living son and daughter as inherently flawed.58 The white U.S. medical model discredited traditional Menominee kinship customs, including multiple generations living together and elders’ central role in childrearing and reciprocal caregiving. The BIA Commissioner complied with the physician’s “expert” recommendation to institutionalize the young mother as way to reduce the “burden” the household faced.59

56. WR Babout to BIA, October 13, 1917, Keshena Agency, Series 722.1, Box 162, RG
75, CCF 1907–39, NARA-DC.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Many scholars have drawn attention to the ways the U.S. government and colonial settlers have especially targeted Indigenous kinship structures. See, for example, Margaret Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (Lincoln, 2014); Piatote, Domestic Subjects; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History Of The United States (Boston, 2014).

Source: Burch, Susan. “Disorderly pasts: Kinship, diagnoses, and remembering in American Indian-U.S. histories.” Journal of Social History, vol. 50, no. 2, 28 Apr. 2016, pp. 362–385, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shw028.
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As her institutional file indicates, Agnes attempted to secure her own release from the asylum on numerous occasions, by corresponding with the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and keeping him informed of her “good health.”(38) As communications from Hummer to Sells indicate, however, Hummer construed Agnes’ many letters to the Commissioner as evidence of her ongoing need for confinement. On October 21, 1919, Hummer wrote:

Sir: -
I have the honor to enclose herewith a letter written to you by Agnes C—, patient. This woman is feeble-minded, as you will readily detect from reading her letter, and wishes to be discharged and allowed to go to her home at the Keshena Agency. Several days ago she received a letter from her husband asking her why she did not come home, as he thought she had been here long enough. It would not prove a surprise to me if it developed that the husband was not mentally alert. It would be highly improper in my opinion to discharge this woman, though she will never be bright, as she experiences great difficulty in getting along under the best of conditions and I am sure that with this husband and several children to look after, she would be immeasurably [sic] worse off than she is here. (39)

Drawing on the notion of heritable feeble-mindedness—the same rationale that served as the basis of the Supreme Court’s 1927 landmark ruling, in Buck v. Bell, that states could perform involuntary sterilization procedures—Hummer characterized Agnes’ family’s collective determination as evidence of mental instability shared between relatives.
(40). After describing a fight between Agnes and another person confined at Canton, Hummer continued, “Agnes has had several fights during her residence here, but ordinarily gets along fairly well. She helps with the dishwashing in the hospital building, but this is under supervision.” He concluded, “Another potent argument against her discharge is that she is well within the child-bearing age and any offspring must be defective.”(41)

Hummer’s final sentence was seemingly an afterthought, but a potent one that captured American anxieties about the correlation between feeblemindedness, femininity, and social degeneracy. Writing of the ways in which diagnoses of “feeblemindedness” were used as a mechanism of controlling female sexualities at the turn of the century Grob explains, “Worries about hereditary feeblemindedness fed into concerns about sexual misconduct…Fears of deteriorating sexual morality and shifting social expectations for women accompanying America’s increasing urbanization and mobile immigrant populations were only exacerbated by the new emphasis on the danger of feebleminded women.”(42) Like many other Indian women at Canton deemed abnormal, first, by virtue of their “race,” Hummer appears to have subjected Agnes to ongoing confinement for the purpose of preventing the birth of Indian children, and this decision was reinforced and perhaps even dictated by Assistant Commissioner E.B. Meritt. As Meritt explained in response to one of Agnes’ numerous letters, “you are advised that the Office does not believe it to be in your best interest to permit you to return to your home at this time. Dr. Hummer has been directed to keep you at Canton indefinitely (emphasis mine).”(43) Years later, under the direction of Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, Dr. Samuel A. Silk would issue a report that would contradict many of Hummer’s “diagnoses,” and order the release of women and men who had been confined at Canton for years on end. In a summary of Silk’s findings, the following was recorded at the top of the report:

(1) AGNES C—. Imprisoned since 1917. Thus described in the medical certificate “admitting” her: “Rather fussy, discontented, irritable, refuses to work at times, limited mentality.” Her record since 1917 is thus given by Dr. Hummer himself: “Usually quiet and well-behaved. Very neat and tidy, no mannerisms, correctly oriented, memory fair, education limited, judgment undeveloped, no delusions or hallucinations but is over-sexed. Mentally she is deficient.” Dr. Silk found no psychosis. "The patient thinks she is well and can take care of herself." (44)

Despite Hummer’s attempts to prevent the birth of Indigenous children, however, the forcible confinement of Indian women at Canton rendered them subject to sexual assault and rape, as Agnes’ pregnancy, which occurred while she was incarcerated, attests. On March 26, 1921, Agnes gave birth to a baby girl, who died six months later. (45) As these records indicate, many of the struggles at Canton were, in fact, struggles over the right to exist as an Indigenous person in the U.S.

In March 1921, four years after her incarceration began, Agnes Caldwell gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Delores. Delores stayed at Canton, although no documents remain that detail the initial months of her short life. A memo to the BIA on October 31, 1921, records that the baby had died of bronco-pneumonia and would be buried at the Canton cemetery the next day. No letters or other expressions from her mother appear in the asylum and Keshena Agency records from this time. In Agnes Caldwell’s life story, the only known materials are a brief report from Hummer and a summary of an interview with Caldwell made by a female staff member at Hummer’s request. In his report, Hummer drew attention to the fallibility of the mother and to his non-Native female staff. He questioned Caldwell’s reliability as a source in the matter of her pregnancy. According to
the superintendent, Caldwell initially claimed that former employee Louis Hewling (who had been identified as sexually harassing her previously) was the child’s father. But, as Hummer argued to the BIA, this particular man had left Canton before she likely became pregnant. Instead, the administrator contended, an incarcerated Native man who was released before Delores’ birth was the likely father.49 Hummer continued, complaining that staff understood that they were responsible for the people under their supervision: Thus their negligence, not his, resulted in Caldwell’s pregnancy and birth. We have no direct testimony from Agnes Caldwell or the other mothers about these experiences. Their silence haunts this chapter of history.(3)

Hummer told the commissioner of Indian Affairs, that Agnes Caldwell, a Menominee patient who had petitioned the commissioner to release her "has a splendid home here...but is discontented and wants to go home and care for her family. this she is mentally unable to do and the great danger of increasing the number of defective offspring should outweigh her wishes."<ref>Joinson, Carla. Vanished in Hiawatha: The Story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians. University of Nebraska Press, 2016</ref>

(38) Agnes frequently used this phrase in her letters to the Commissioner
(39) Harry Hummer to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 21, 1919, RG 75, CCF 1907-1939, box 14, folder 91415, Canton Asylum, NARA-DC.
(40) See: Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles.
(41) Harry Hummer to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 21, 1919, NARA.
(42) Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles,15.
(43) E.B. Meritt to Agnes C., November 24, 1920, RG 75, CCF 1907-1939, box 14, folder 91415, Canton Asylum, NARA-DC.
(44) “Sane Indians Imprisoned at Canton Asylum,” October 2, 1933, RG 75, CCF 1907-1939, box 4, folder 7448, Canton Asylum, NARA-DC.
[1]

Sources:
[1]Whitt, Sarah H. “False Promises: Race, Power, and the Chimera of Indian Assimilation, 1879-1934.” University of California, Berkeley, 2020.
[2] Burch, Susan. Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021 Accessed 12 Aug. 2023
[3] Burch, Susan. “Disorderly pasts: Kinship, diagnoses, and remembering in American Indian-U.S. histories.” Journal of Social History, vol. 50, no. 2, 28 Apr. 2016, pp. 362–385, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shw028.
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(Curator Note: The following is an extraction of the text from Disorderly Pasts: Kinship, diagnoses, and Remembering in American Indian-U.S. Histories by Susan Burch, as published in the Journal of Social History. She tells the story much better than I could. Though the words are by Susan Burch, the life is that of Agnes Caldwell, Menominee Indian, and his extended family, "all were, according to Menominee custom, related".) This article will be placed in the profiles of all 8 extended family members. (note...indicates deleted text))

BIA Retribution, Canton Asylum Complicity
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As snowstorms pummeled Keshena, Wisconsin, in November 1917, tensions were running high on the Menominee reservation... In the face of gross mismanagement and hostility towards their culture and authority, Menominee leaders had launched repeated campaigns to remove the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Keshena superintendent and one of his assistants. They also clashed with the agency doctor.1 At the time, one U.S. inspector observed that the “antagonism and cross-purpose has reached the acute stage that may possibly lead to personal violence or probable tragedy.”2...Still, one can only wonder about the extent to which this community... anticipated the U.S. intervention during the second week of November: a collective dislocation of five members from Menominee Nation to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians.

...For Menominee people, violence and tragedy had long defined relations with settlers. Still, one can only wonder about the extent to which this community of barely more than 1,700 members anticipated the U.S. intervention during the second week of November: a collective dislocation of five members from Menominee Nation land to the Canton Asylum, a U.S. federal psychiatric facility in South Dakota specifically created in 1902 for American Indians.3 ...("actual Menominee names do not appear in this work as a way to honor these ancestors and their descendants").

...By the end of Tuesday, November 6, representatives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) had shown up at several homes, taking away two men and three women who were then loaded on to trains headed to Canton, South Dakota. According to BIA documents, the men referred to as Peter Clafflin and Seymour Wauketch were brothers-in-law. The woman described in documents as Agnes Caldwell, a married mother of two young children, lived with her elderly parents in their home; teenager Christine Amour had attended the Government School with her sister in nearby Shawano; the twenty-two-year-old listed as Susan Wishecoby, daughter of John and Margaret, had grown up surrounded by extended family.4 All were, according to Menominee custom, related.

...No available sources recount the dislocation from Keshena to the Indian Asylum. Most likely they traveled the nearly five hundred miles on the “Milwaukee Road,” the Chicago, Milwaukee, St Paul & Pacific line, which ran across Wisconsin and directly through Canton.5...Precious little is known about this moment in the lives of these five Menominee people. Sources about what followed remain uneven and fragmented. The story of what happened to these Menominee people and to their relatives in November 1917 (and the many months before and after it) exposes contested understandings of kin, diagnoses, and remembering...In particular, their stories vividly reveal the power of relationships and the asylum’s long reach.

...As writer Pemina Yellow Bird (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara) points out in her thoughtful critique of the Canton Asylum in Native history: “First, and most importantly, Native peoples generally do not have a notion of ‘insane’ or ‘mentally ill’ in our cultures. Indeed, I have been unable to locate a Native Nation whose indigenous language has a word for that condition.”

...In a letter to the BIA Commissioner, Agnes Caldwell explained in 1919 that she was writing to “kindly ask you if I could please going home . . . I like to go home to taeke care of my old folks they are to old to work I do the work when I an at home theiry wamet me to go home I would be glad to see my children and my old folks.”22 Like other institutionalized people at Canton, Agnes Caldwell understood that relationships defined worlds. She was a member of Menominee Nation’s Bear clan, and across her lifetime also identified as a daughter, sister, wife, and mother. Her petitions consistently emphasized kin relations as a primary justification for her return to Menominee land. Caldwell assumed others would recognize her family and family obligations. “You must know my pa ...Moses Little Bear,” she wrote. “I am his daughter.”23 “Please let me go,” she repeated

...Acknowledging Indigenous extended family connections—rather than exclusively individual experiences of institutionalization (and ableist medical labeling of individuals)—reveals significant patterns of oppression. Attention to kinship simultaneously reveals opportunities for collective survivance...kin relations remain vital in Native societies.30 Mutual support, generosity and sharing, a belief and practice of interdependence–defining qualities of many Indigenous nations—stem directly from kinship.31 Affinity, relationship, and collective experience drive its meaning. Affirming interdependence and belonging, kin relations nourish survivance.

The man described in U.S. texts as George Caldwell (Menominee Nation), for instance, had complained that his wife Agnes had been held at Canton “long enough.”34 Rose Bear (Menominee Nation), Agnes Caldwell’s mother, sent numerous letters to her daughter, insisting that she needed to return to Keshena.35 Agnes’s sister Josephine Johnson (Menominee Nation) directly petitioned the BIA, claiming that Agnes Caldwell was needed to take care of their mother.36 In these exchanges, Agnes Caldwell’s kin detailed how institutionalization undermined the family’s well-being; they maintained that they understood best how to restore wellness.

So did Agnes Caldwell. As family correspondence described illness sweeping through her house and community in late 1919 and early 1920, (an influenza epidemic swept through the reservation) Caldwell’s insistences intensified. Noting that her mother and husband could no longer provide full care for other family members, she pleaded with U.S. authorities to be allowed to look after her siblings, parents, and children. “We all want to see our children”37 she told the Commissioner, “We all want to see our folks.”38 For Agnes Caldwell, fulfilling her kinship roles, taking care of her elderly parents and sick children, overruled US federal power and its medical labels. In Caldwell’s accounting, institutionalization undermined her health. “I am lonesome. . . . so sad . . . need to go home.”39

Caldwell’s self-assessment, like many others from Canton, challenged the BIA’s oppressive view of American Indian community and extended family. They affirmed that they belonged “at home.” Repeatedly in words and actions they demonstrated that they would never forget their Indigenous homes or their relatives who waited for them there.

As Native American historian Margaret Jacobs explains: "Indigenous communities defined family broadly and designated many caregivers beyond the biological mother and father, particularly grandparents. In many matrilineal Indigenous cultures, a mother’s brother played the fatherly role to his nephews and nieces, and a child might consider all his or her maternal aunts as mothers."41

This bears direct resonance with the people stolen from Keshena. Since their origins, Menominee people have placed strong value on the relationship between a mother’s brother and his nieces and nephews...the reality that Peter Clafflin and Edward Wauketch shared this cultural affinity holds meaning...As but one example: asylum reports detail that Peter Clafflin “helps with untidy patients.” In the male-segregated ward, would he have given care to nephew Edward? Or to another Menominee child incarcerated at Canton, referred to as Earl Mahkimetass.42...We are left only with speculation about whether and how this tradition was born out in the life of the woman referred to as Mary Clafflin Wauketch and her brother Peter Clafflin.

...That more than fifty Indigenous nations had members stolen away to Canton amplifies this story’s complexity.44 So, too, does the sizable presence of certain nationalities. During its thirty-two-year existence, from 1902–1934, the Indian Asylum detained nearly four hundred people. More than one-fourth (at least 105 people) were members of the Great Sioux Nation (including Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples).45 During the same period the BIA incarcerated seventeen Menominee people from Keshena. More often than not, multiple members of Indigenous nations concurrently inhabited the asylum wards...While their individual life stories varied, many if not all of the Native men, women, and children likely knew at least one other person as kin or recognized familial connections among them.

...To return to the opening story: the BIA removed multiple members of the Clafflin-Wauketch extended family to the Indian Asylum: in January 1909, just two months later, BIA agents dislocated an elder, Charles Clafflin, to Canton. His young adult grandson, Edward, was taken in April 1917; Charles Clafflin’s adult son, Peter, and his son-in-law Seymour Wauketch in November 1917; his daughter Mary (Edward’s mother and Seymour’s spouse) was removed to the South Dakota institution in January 1918.53 Part of the “rationale” for each being institutionalized was that they came from a family with presumed inherent mental defects.54 Asylum and Keshena Agency files suggest that Seymour Wauketch may have been placed at Canton as a “benevolent” act—to keep him with his son, Edward.55 The absence of formal white U.S. medical diagnoses for Seymour Wauketch and Peter Clafflin, while certainly not unique at Canton, takes on added potential meaning in the light of settler colonialism, ableism, and Native kinship.

...H. R. Hummer (similarly) invoked eugenic concerns about the broader Bear and Caldwell relatives to support his decision to detain Agnes Caldwell at Canton ultimately for seventeen years. Referring to one note from George Caldwell from October 1919, for example, the Canton administrator suggested to the BIA that Agnes Caldwell’s spouse likely “was not mentally alert” and thus his wife should remain at Canton. Hummer pointedly added that, “Another potent argument against her discharge is that she is well within the child-bearing age and any offspring must be defective.”60 He added examples in a letter shortly thereafter, insisting that Agnes Caldwell would only produce “feeble-minded, epileptic or idiotic children if she were permitted to be at large.”61 Emphasizing Agnes Caldwell’s eugenic threat to broader society, Hummer repeatedly described her as “over sexed. Mentally she is deficient.”62 Discounting her kin’s claims, he insisted that Mrs. Caldwell was “mentally unable to [return home and take care of her family] and the great danger of increasing the number of defective offspring should outweigh her wishes [to return home].”63 Institutionalization, Hummer argued, was best for Agnes, George, their family, and society at large.

...In a similar maneuver, he implied that Susan Wishecoby’s self-advocacy was a sign of “irritability” and “irascible nature probably being permanent.”68 Such “permanent” flaws, Hummer suggested, could endanger society across generations if Wishecoby were released and subsequently had children.69 Menominee and other Native people resisted these pathological labels and the related “treatments” white U.S. medical experts claimed were necessary. Numerous affidavits and letters from Canton’s incarcerated members directly countered the white U.S. dominant story of care, sanctuary, and benevolence that asylum administrators and BIA officials typically conveyed.70 They specifically challenged H. R. Hummer’s depiction that Canton Asylum resembled a safe and loving (white) household. “By rights they call this an Indian Asylum and then why don’t the Indians have it more like their home,” Susan Wishecoby wrote in 1921. “If I would of known I was coming to an Asylum I wouldn’t of come at all . . .”71

...Susan Wishecoby similarly drew attention to staff abuses. In a 1925 letter to Superintendent Hummer, she explained that staff “make most of the trouble for you” and that “I wish you would please learn them to rest us like human beings not like beast to be teasing all the time.”75 Wishecoby and other Native people confronted and challenged white administrators’ fraudulent claims of Canton and its staff as safe and nurturing. Their stories told of malnourished and undernourished people, of people writhing in physical pain as employees watched, of anguish, terror, and the harm of solitary confinement, of sexual violence, abductions, (and) of tuberculosis killing children and adults.76

...Agnes Caldwell, too, identified repeated abuses, if more obliquely. In 1920, she recounted to female staff that two male attendants—Louis Hewling and William Juel—had unlocked and entered the dormitory room she shared with Christine Amour.77 Superintendent Hummer and others accurately assumed that the men had had sexual relations with these incarcerated women. Caldwell and Amour expressed fear when the asylum administrator sought to conduct physical exams on them in the wake of this revelation. At the time, Hummer demanded the men’s resignations but primarily blamed the women for their (perceived) inherent moral deficiencies.78 The Menominee women were moved to a new room and placed under heightened surveillance.

...In 1933, Dr. Samuel Silk of St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, (the other U.S. federal psychiatric facility) reinspected Canton. As was common procedure, he interviewed numerous incarcerated people as well as staff. This time, however, Silk’s conclusions buttressed the BIA’s growing desire to close the facility. Silk’s report affirmed what Native people already lived and knew but added institutional authority to the critique: the Indian Asylum was, according to Silk, a violent and aberrant facility, “a place of padlocks and chamber pots.”81 ...An important but often overlooked part of his expose´, however, was Silk’s rediagnosis of twenty incarcerated people, including, specifically, Agnes Caldwell, and several other Menominee people. According to Silk, a central “problem” was that Canton incarcerated “sane Indians.” To illustrate his point, the psychiatrist drew from Caldwell’s asylum medical files. Since her initial intake form in 1917, these reports described her as “Usually quiet and well behaved. Very neat and tidy, no mannerisms, correctly oriented, memory fair, education limited, judgment un-developed, no delusions or hallucinations, but is over-sexed. Mentally she is deficient.”82 Silk claimed that Caldwell had “no psychosis.”83
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Kin according to Menominee custom, 5 actual family members + 3 extended relations = 8
(parenthetical date indicates date admitted to the Canton Asylum)
Charles Clafflin (1/1909) father of Peter, grandfather of Edward
Peter Clafflin (11/1917) and Seymour Wauketch (11/1917) were brothers-in-law
Mary Clafflin Wauketch (1/1918) sister of Peter Clafflin, wife of Seymour Wauketch, and mother of Edward
Edward Wauketch (4/1917) son of Seymour nephew of Peter Claflin
Agnes Caldwell (11/1917)
Susan Wishcomby (11/1917)
Christine Amour (11/1917)
another Menominee child incarcerated at Canton, Earl Mahkimetass (Mahkitmass) (4/1917 and said to be 14 in 1927 which means he was admitted at 4 years of age, diagnosed with "imbecility"! Records show that he was 21 in 1934 release).

Part of the “rationale” for each being institutionalized was that they came from a family with " presumed inherent mental defects".54

Burch, Susan. “Disorderly pasts: Kinship, diagnoses, and remembering in American Indian-U.S. histories.” Journal of Social History, vol. 50, no. 2, 28 Apr. 2016, pp. 362–385, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shw028. (See the document for end notes)

Her profile is part of the The Canton Asylum One Place Study.

Research Notes:
-husband George remarried in 1924 to Elizabeth
-The Jun 30, 1921 census shows a daughter Lorena born 3/26/1921 to George and Agnes (Agnes was in Canton at the time?)

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Sources:

1911 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPRY-KC5X : Wed Oct 04 09:49:29 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnus Caldwell, 1911, pg. 330/668, line 198-200, Menominee Indians, Keshena Indian School Agency, Wisconsin

1918 Jun 30 - Camp Verde School: 1910-27; Canton Insane Asylum: 1910-22, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155854182?objectPage=887, line 3, Canton Asylum female census

1920 - Camp Verde School: 1910-27; Canton Insane Asylum: 1910-22, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155854182?objectPage=899, line 4, Canton Asylum female census

1920 Jan 30 - "United States Census, 1920", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M6J7-FNW : Fri Dec 22 01:43:11 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1920, pg. 652/1130, line 69 (age 28 = b. 1892), census of the Asylum for Indians Canton SD, Canton Township, Lincoln County, South Dakota

1920 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q5Y7-17PZ : Fri Oct 06 21:13:38 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1920, pg. 15/813, line 119 Canton Asylum, census of the Menominee Indians, Keshena Agency

1921 Jun 30- "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:68Z4-CZQ2 : Sat Oct 07 00:06:24 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1921, pg. 509/522/ line 5, female census of the Canton Insane Asylum

1921 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QR7J-YPT2 : Fri Oct 06 02:41:36 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1921, pg. 127/813, line 122, census of the Menominee Indians, Keshena Agency, Wis. (Lorena listed as a daughter born 3/26/1921?)

1922 - Camp Verde School: 1910-27; Canton Insane Asylum: 1910-22, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155854182?objectPage=1042, line 5, Canton Asylum female census

1923 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q5RF-VKT2 : Fri Oct 06 09:13:50 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Canton Caldwell, 1923, pg. 515/813, line 120 (Canton), census of the Menominee Indians, Keshena Agency, Wis.

1923 Jun 30 - Canton Insane Asylum: 1923-33; Cantonment School, pg. 370/1140: 1910-27, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports 1910 – 1935, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155855298?objectPage=32, line 5, Canton Asylum female census

1924 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q5YD-CT2M : Fri Oct 06 07:22:11 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1924, pg. 665/813, line 121 (at Canton), still shown married to George on June 30 but records indicate George remarried in 1924 to Elizabeth, census of the Menominee Indians, Keshena Agency

1925 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7HCL-VSPZ : Tue Oct 03 12:50:46 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1925, pg. 12/869, line 123, census of the Menominee Indians, Keshena Agency, Wis. (b. 1891 at Canton SD 257769?)

1925 Jun 30 - Canton Insane Asylum: 1923-33; Cantonment School, pg. 370/1140: 1910-27, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports 1910 – 1935, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155855298?objectPage=117, line 7, Canton Asylum female census

1925 - "South Dakota State Census, 1925", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MMWR-H1X : Fri Oct 06 05:13:40 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1925, card #657, pg. 3083/3364, South Dakota State census (by Harry Hummer)

1926 Jun 30 - Canton Insane Asylum: 1923-33; Cantonment School, pg. 370/1140: 1910-27, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports 1910 – 1935, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155855298?objectPage=168, line 8, Canton Asylum female census

1926 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7HWK-52W2 : Tue Oct 03 10:27:28 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1926, pg. 162/869, line 130 (at Canton SD), census of the Menominee Indians, Keshena Agency, Wis.

1926 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7HWK-L16Z : Thu Oct 05 13:44:03 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1926, pg. 323/869, line 124 in Canton SD, census of the Menominee Indians, Keshena Agency, Wis.

1927 Jun 30 - Canton Insane Asylum: 1923-33; Cantonment School, pg. 370/1140: 1910-27, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports 1910 – 1935, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155855298?objectPage=186, line 8, Canton Asylum female census

1928 Jun 30 - Canton Insane Asylum: 1923-33; Cantonment School, pg. 370/1140: 1910-27, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports 1910 – 1935, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155855298?objectPage=211, line 7, Canton Asylum female census

1928 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7H4M-7D2M : Fri Oct 06 16:52:45 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1928, pg. 573/869, line 123 at Canton SD, census of the Menominee Indians, Keshena Agency

1929 Jun 30 - Canton Insane Asylum: 1923-33; Cantonment School, pg. 370/1140: 1910-27, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports 1910 – 1935, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155855298?objectPage=329, line 7, Canton Asylum female census

1929 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QP77-NVBR : Tue Oct 03 23:03:03 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1929, pg. 637/869, line 123 (at Canton SD), census of the Menominee tribe, Menominee Reservation, Keshena Jurisdiction

1930 Apr 1 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QGT5-T3KC : Wed Oct 04 05:33:27 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1930, pg. 15/636, line 136 (at Canton Insane Asylum), census of the Menominee Reservation, Keshena Jurisdiction

1930 Apr 7 - "United States Census, 1930", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XQVC-BM1 : Tue Oct 03 01:17:07 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1930, pg. 610/1062, line 48, the census for the Asylum for Insane Indians (by Harry Hummer), Canton Township, Lincoln County, South Dakota

1930 Jun 30 - Canton Insane Asylum: 1923-33; Cantonment School, pg. 370/1140: 1910-27, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports 1910 – 1935, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155855298?objectPage=351, line 8, Canton Asylum female census

1931 Apr 1 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPR6-9ZSX : Wed Oct 04 05:36:52 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell, 1931, pg. 313/636, , line 128 single, head at Canton Insane Asylum, census of the Menominee Indians, Keshena Agency, Wis.

1931 Jun 30 - Canton Insane Asylum: 1923-33; Cantonment School, pg. 370/1140: 1910-27, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports 1910 – 1935, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155855298?objectPage=371, line 7, Canton Asylum female census

1932 Apr 1 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QLLV-DQ5N : Fri Oct 06 02:09:09 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Bear Caldwell, 1932, pg. 19/545, line 138 (canton Insane Asylum SD, Head, George 139 had remarried and had 3 children since 1924 with Elizabeth), census of the Menominee Reservation, Keshena Agency

1932 Jun 30 - Canton Insane Asylum: 1923-33; Cantonment School, pg. 370/1140: 1910-27, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports 1910 – 1935, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155855298?objectPage=391, line 6, Canton Asylum female census

1933 Apr 1 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPJC-F7GK : Tue Oct 03 06:38:15 UTC 2023), Entry for Bear, 1933, pg. 20/444, line 147 Agnes Bear at Canton Insane Asylum, census of the Menominee Reservation, Keshena Jurisdiction

1933 Jun 30 - Canton Insane Asylum: 1923-33; Cantonment School, pg. 370/1140: 1910-27, Series: Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports 1910 – 1935, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20408 @ https://catalog.archives.gov/id/155855298?objectPage=428, line 7, Canton Asylum female census

1934 Apr 1- "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QGYV-VT2R : Wed Oct 04 01:57:44 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Bear Caldwell, 1934, pg. 21/674, line 150, census of the Menominee Reservation, Keshena Agency

1934 Jun 15 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPTM-JBTQ : Fri Oct 06 08:51:27 UTC 2023), Entry for Agnes Caldwell or Bear, 1934, pg. 492/674, line 146, census of the Menominee Reservation, Keshena Agency