Elizabeth Fe Faribault

Elizabeth was a Dakota woman presumably of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate

Biography
(Curator Note: Below I have extracted from her book titled "Committeed", writings of author Susan Burch, and have used her words to better tell the story than I ever could. I have left the footnotes numbered per the book for reference. Though the words are by Susan Burch, the life is that of Elizabeth Alexis Faribault.)

Saturday, May 29, 1915, began like most other days for Elizabeth and Jesse Faribault. Summer had started off cold and wet, but the land in South Dakota had thawed enough to put seed in the ground.1

The Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota couple prepared for the day: Jesse, heading to work their farmland with eldest son Solomon, left Elizabeth at their home with their two youngest children, Howard and Annie. But when Jesse returned with Solomon at the end of the day, Elizabeth was gone, and his daughter and son were there alone. It is unclear how long it took Elizabeth’s husband to discover that she had been forcibly removed from the Faribaults’ home by representatives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).2

They had taken her to Canton, South Dakota, where the federal government operated a psychiatric institution specifically intended to contain Native Americans.3 Once Jesse learned that Elizabeth was incarcerated at the Indian Asylum, he immediately reached out to kin and others to seek her release. John Noble, a lawyer hired by the family months into her detention, surmised that the Sisseton woman had been institutionalized because of an altercation with a BIA agent earlier in May. As Noble explained to the commissioner of Indian Affairs, Elizabeth had appeared at the local agency office, which was about a mile from her home, “clad only in a ‘camisole’ and did some vulgar talking.”4

According to Jesse, Elizabeth “was only drunk” at the time. Noble challenged the justifications for taking the thirty-two-year-old mother from her home. “There were no known proceedings had to establish insanity in this case,” the legal advocate argued, and Jesse, being away from the house at the time, was unable to prevent the wrongful intrusion into their home and life. Consequently, Faribault’s lawyer reasoned, that Elizabeth should be returned immediately to her family.5

BIA representatives at Sisseton described their confrontations in 1915 with Elizabeth Faribault this way: she was “violently insane” and ran “amuck near [the] agency” but resided “on patented land.” According to a clerk, Faribault had “threaten[ed] to kill” and caused “great anxiety.”6

A telegram from headquarters in Washington, D.C., informed agency officials that medical examinations were required to declare a reservation Indian insane. A swift reply came from Sisseton on May 12: “Agency physician pronounces Elizabeth Faribault allotted Sisseton Indian insane. Wire authority to place her in government or other insane asylum at government expense.”7

That authority was granted the next day. Two weeks later, on May 29, an agency doctor and police officer went to the Faribault home and removed Elizabeth to the federal asylum in Canton. U.S. government reports generated months afterward suggested that the Dakota woman had “hallucinated” and was “delusional probably due to the use of alcohol.”8

No other records remain to explain what did or did not actually occur between May 8 and May 29.9 Faribault’s medical files over the next thirteen years show various diagnoses along with wide-ranging justifications for sustaining her institutionalization: Materially deteriorated. Incapable of looking after herself. Alcoholic. Chronically insane. Duplicitous. Eugenically unfit. Depressed and emotional. Abusive of Asylum privileges. Better off at the institution...

...When Elizabeth Faribault was forcibly removed to a place two hundred miles away from the Sisseton Reservation in 1915, she crossed a threshold into a distinctly institutional space—the Canton Asylum—and into a distinctly non-Native process: institutionalization...

...No medical records remain to describe Elizabeth’s formal admission to Canton. Likely, she and her escorts were met at the Main Building by Asylum staff...

...As the Faribault family and many others experienced it, institutionalization at Canton violated their Native nation’s as well as their individual family’s self-determination.13

...Hospital records created months after her entrance to the Indian Asylum report that Elizabeth Faribault was diagnosed with “Intoxication psychosis.”28...Other pathological labels appear across her medical records, such as “dementia,” “dementia praecox” (schizophrenia), “alcoholic deterioration,” and “possibly trachoma” (an infectious eye disease) that made her “very greatly depressed and emotional.”29 BIA and Asylum representatives regularly invoked these terms as part of their rationale for keeping her separated from her relatives in Sisseton...For Elizabeth Faribault and her kin, pathological diagnoses obscured the violent disturbance of family and community life caused by her sustained exile. In one letter written in 1922 to Commissioner Charles Burke, for example, the Sisseton woman emphatically states that Dr. Hummer had kept her unfairly at Canton. “I’ve been staying here in Asylum long enough.” At home, she pointed out, she could tend to her mother and her children, care that benefited the whole family.30 The details about Faribault’s diagnosis, and her own assertion that being home with her family would best support their collective well-being, point to radically different understandings of health...As Elizabeth Faribault and the many others detained at Canton experienced it, settler cultural values permeated medicalized judgments of them...

...In the fall of 1926, eleven years into her detainment, Elizabeth Faribault gave birth to a girl, whom she named Cora Winona. At the time of delivery, Superintendent Hummer explained the breach of Asylum policy to his supervisors as an indication of her mother’s inherent defects. “Her statement to the effect that she would not have gotten into this condition if I had permitted her to return to her home and people is a fair index of the character of her mentality,” he told the commissioner of Indian Affairs.47 Despite demands from Elizabeth’s mother, Mary Alexis (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota), that her kin be discharged, both her daughter and granddaughter remained at Canton...

...We know little about the lives of mother and child over the next two years.

Brief notes suggest daily activities inside the Indian Asylum: Elizabeth dressing and feeding her daughter, and brushing her hair. The elder Faribault also performed work not long after giving birth, cleaning the ward in addition to providing childcare. As Cora began walking, the pair sometimes spent time on the grounds, within the shadow of their locked dormitory. Conversations, likely in Dakota, threaded across their waking hours. At night the mother and daughter slept together in Elizabeth’s single bed, pulling closer to one another in the cold winter months. Their patterned routine ended abruptly eighteen months later. In March 1928, a staff member discovered Elizabeth Faribault’s lifeless body on the ward, the cause of her death clouded in uncertainty. Cora Winona, then a toddler, remained at Canton for two more years...

...As with Cora Winona Faribault, the people around whom this story grows had many mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and cousins as well as siblings and children. These kin relations did not and do not share connections... Cora Winona Faribault was among the few infants to survive the Asylum, in large part because of kinship obligations. In the wake of Elizabeth’s death, Lizzie Red Owl, a thirty-year-old Oglala Lakota woman, parented Cora, providing daily care and attempting to shield the little girl from institutional harms...

Two years after the death of her mother, Cora Winona Faribault was transferred to the Good Shepherd Orphanage in Fort Defiance, Arizona. The four-year-old would come of age among many Native children (mostly from Diné Nation) and under the firm supervision of Christian missionaries.63 Like many of her female peers, Cora Winona Faribault spent much of her youth in American Indian boarding schools and working in domestic trades, labor directly connected to educational policies and expectations. Faribault’s time
in school ended early when her pregnancy was discovered by administrators...The teenager spent the following year, 1945–46, as a “resident” in the Phoenix Florence Crittenton Home. Part of a national network established by Christian missionary-reformers, the Crittenton Homes provided shelter, vocational training, and maternity and child care primarily for unwed mothers and other so-called fallen women.64 According to relatives, Cora Winona initially attempted to keep her firstborn child, but after months of struggle trying to secure work, childcare, and housing, she returned to the Phoenix Home. An employee apparently counseled her to complete paperwork relinquishing her parental rights. For several years afterward, her son lived in foster care until, at age five, he was adopted by a white family in Scottsdale.65 As with thousands of other Indigenous and non-Indigenous children separated from their birth families between World War II and the late 1960s, Cora Winona Faribault’s eldest childhad no contact with his birth mother or her other children.66...

As Elizabeth and Cora Winona Faribault lived it, locked wards of a psychiatric asylum, mission classrooms, reservations, and allotments, and Crittenton’s dormitories all shared the underlying feature of involuntary containment and were experienced as parts of broader institutional interventions to dismantle Native families.67...

According to descendants of Elizabeth Faribault, multiple removals simultaneously mark ruptures and starting points in their family history. As one relative explained, Elizabeth’s parents were members of the Sisseton (“people of the marsh”) and Wahpeton (“people of Lake Traverse”) Band of Dakota Nation.9 For generations, their home had been in what today is Minnesota. Born in 1882, Elizabeth was the firstborn child of Zihkanakoyake (also called Henry Alexis in U.S. documents) and Manzakoyakesuim (also known as Mary Alexis).10 Like many Dakota people in the late nineteenth century, Zihkanakoyake and Manzakoyakesuim crossed Minnesota and South and North Dakota as part of an exodus forced by the U.S. government. Wars and treaties contributed to further splintering.

Some of Elizabeth’s extended Alexis family fled to Canada; those who returned had to relocate to reservations in South and North Dakota. Zihkanakoyake and Manzakoyakesuim were among those who were displaced to Spirit Lake. Later, Manzakyakesium moved with her children to Lake Traverse.11...Little is known about Elizabeth’s early years. She clearly grew up among other Dakota people, absorbing daily lessons from elders and other kin. Her immediate relatives communicated exclusively in the Dakota language and appear to have held tightly to Sisseton-Wahpeton lifeways. Her family’s aversion to Euro-American cultural assimilation was typical. The local U.S. Indian agent in the late 1870s, J. G. Hamilton, for example, had expressed alarm by how tenaciously women maintained Dakota culture and identity.12 In this context, one can imagine some of the contours of daily life: helping and arguing with younger siblings; learning to cook, sew, garden; spending time with elders and with peers; listening to stories; yearning, struggling, belonging, and coming of age.13 The children of Zihkanakoyake and Manzakoyakesuim almost certainly were known by Dakota names, which meant that Elizabeth had multiple names across her childhood and young adulthood. These ways of identifying Elizabeth and her siblings were never recorded or preserved by U.S. officials.14...

At the turn of the twentieth century, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth was listed in U.S. rolls as the wife of Jesse Faribault, a member of a prominent Sisseton family. Like many relatives in his generation, Jesse spent most of his life on the Sisseton Reservation, often working as a farm laborer. Both Jesse and Elizabeth came of age at a time of considerable transformation among the Sisseton Band. Increasing land thefts by white settlers, unsuccessful military and political battles with the U.S. government, and the cumulative effect of disease, starvation, and displacement exacted heavy tolls on Dakota people.

The first reservation partitioned under the General Allotment Act of 1867, Lake Traverse (Sisseton)—where the Faribaults lived—was known for its resistance to U.S. assimilation.15 Missionaries and educational reformers had campaigned since the 1870s to place American Indian children in schools away from their home communities as an intentional effort to eradicate Native cultures.16 Defying the mounting pressure to submit to boardingschools, Sisseton relatives often kept children, especially girls, at home.17...Neither Jesse nor Elizabeth had attended boarding or day schools, although most of their younger siblings had. U.S. census rolls and anecdotal evidence suggest that the couple primarily spoke Dakota. Tied closely to their Sisseton
community, the Faribaults would not have needed to learn much written or spoken English.18...In the first fifteen years of marriage, Elizabeth and Jesse had six children, two of whom died in infancy.19 The couple lived in a three-bedroom home on the Sisseton Reservation. During the day, Elizabeth managed the house and mothered their young children. Meantime, Jesse worked their fields, described by one observer as “one of the nicest forty acres of wheat this part of the country and a nice garden, consisting of corn, potatoes, beans and other garden truck too many to mention.”20

The Faribaults lived in a world where the battles between Sisseton members and the U.S. government could swiftly shift from national to personal, distant to everyday, quiet to loud. In the 1880s, the U.S. government began criminalizing features of American Indian cultures.21 By 1913, the United States, through its Indian agent at Sisseton, abolished the tribal government.22 The BIA superintendent there, Eugene D. Mossman, sought to limit dancing, communalism, and other distinctive qualities of Dakota life.23 Tensions had long simmered between BIA agents and Sisseton members. Contests over authority, citizenship, and land sometimes erupted into open conflict. For example, in 1914, representatives of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Bands went to Washington, D.C., to challenge U.S. theft of their land and treaty violations.24...Archival documents detail that Elizabeth Faribault also directly challenged BIA representatives, engaging in yelling matches and disrupting their work on the reservation. The clerk in charge asserted that Faribault’s pattern of behavior indicated a mental disorder; the only solution, he insisted, was to remove her to a government medical facility...

For the Alexis and Faribault families, as with other people institutionalized at the Indian Asylum and their kin, displacement to Canton, South Dakota, was a violation of home and homeland—and therefore well-being...Institutionalization eviscerated Native ways of being, separating individuals from their families and communities and restricting access to the physical and spiritual worlds that nourished them. “I am having a hard time last three years with children and also she want to come back now,” a distraught Jesse Faribault explained to Commissioner Sells in 1918. “She like to see her children and also the children want to have they mother come back.”35 Also writing to the BIA, Elizabeth’s mother, Mary Alexis, explained, “I have a daughter name Elizabeth Fairbault who was sent to Canton Insane Institution, Canton, S.D.” She added, “I am a woman of 66 years and I need her at home to help me out, so if you please help me get her back as soon as possible.”36 Her daughter agreed. In one of her own written petitions to BIA commissioners, Elizabeth lamented, “I’ve often wished I was home and taking care of my mother and also my children.”37 For years, Jesse repeatedly insisted that Elizabeth could manage and be supported well by her kin, noting that a reunion with her children “would help her” and underscoring the urgent action needed: his wife’s immediate return to them.39 In a similar 1926 petition on Elizabeth’s behalf, her mother described a second visit with her daughter, asserting that Elizabeth had “acted and talked all right” and should be brought back to the family.40

In this 1922 three-page handwritten letter, Elizabeth Fe Alexis (Faribault) sought assistance from the BIA commissioner for her release. “I’ve often wished I was home and taking care of my mother and also my children,” she explained. Instead, she was forced to take care of Superintendent Hummer’s family, “and he is paying me not very much.” Coerced labor, including domestic work like Faribault provided, was common at Canton Asylum and other institutions. Photograph by Susan Burch and used with permission from Elizabeth Faribault’s granddaughters and the concurrence of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Tribal Historic Preservation Office.

Across the many years of Elizabeth Faribault’s detention, Superintendent Hummer offered widely varied justifications for keeping the Sisseton woman at Canton. “Personally I feel that danger would attend her release that she is incapable of looking after herself, let alone looking after her mother,” the doctor informed Assistant Commissioner E. B. Merritt. He later claimed that Faribault had recently sustained an infection in her right eye (“possibly trachoma”), which made her “very greatly depressed and emotional” about the possibility of “total blindness.” Discharge from Canton, Hummer suggested, could harm her whole family by exposing them to a contagious disease as well as having to care indefinitely for a mentally unstable person.40 On another occasion, he assured the BIA that Elizabeth had “practically no chance for ultimate recovery and this is about as good a home as she could possibly find.” Longstanding battles with the extended Faribault family over
her institutionalization also became a justification: “On many occasions,”

Hummer reminded the commissioner, Faribault and her relatives had written to them both, and every time the “results has always been to keep her here.”41 Inferring that these repeated efforts lacked credibility and perhaps even reflected inherent deviance within the family, Hummer concluded his critique of Faribault by recommending her continued detention. The federal office—following its usual practice—upheld the doctor’s advice to keep Elizabeth Faribault at Canton.42

Facing mounting challenges from Elizabeth’s husband, the Asylum superintendent pivoted, now offering a diagnostic assessment of Jesse Faribault. “The husband impressed me as being either very ignorant or possibly imbecilic,” Hummer opined to the BIA in 1918, raising doubts that Elizabeth would be “properly taken care of at home.”43 Extending eugenic reasoning, the Asylum administrator warned that the couple also might produce more children. “In all probability, the offspring from such a union would be defective and the entire number become charges upon your Office,” he told the commissioner. Hummer and the BIA concluded that Elizabeth must remain incarcerated because of Jesse’s presumed defectiveness as a father and husband.

Elizabeth Faribault repeatedly pleaded to be discharged. For Faribault, “working for the doctar’s folks” and the daily interactions with the Hummers inside their home contributed to her own suffering. (Curator Note: Its worth pointing out that despite all of Elizabeth's supposed shortcomings, it was she whom Dr. Hummer selectd to tak ecare ofhis home and children!)...

...On a mild winter evening in January 1920, Elizabeth Faribault escaped from Canton. Having permission to walk the Asylum grounds, the SissetonWahpeton woman probably had spent time beforehand exploring the perimeter of the campus, gazing at the open expanse beyond the gates. Upon leaving the grounds, she headed east as the stars rose in the night sky. Staff informed Superintendent Hummer the next morning, and a search began. His report to the commissioner fused a diagnostic process with a resolution to the new context. Assuring him that Faribault’s condition had been “fairly comfortable” before she “left without permission,” Hummer then offered a different treatment: if the Dakota woman reached her home, and if her family wanted to “keep her,” he would recommend that Faribault be “discharged” from the institution that she had already left.75 The commissioner supported this plan.76 We can only wonder what Elizabeth thought about as she ran, walked, hid, slept, woke, and distanced herself from the Indian Insane Asylum during the next three days.77 Her descendants understand Faribault’s act as resistance, escaping from the Asylum and institutionalization and returning to her home and family.

After covering twenty miles, apparently all on foot, Faribault was apprehended. Superintendent Hummer personally drove to Alvord, Iowa, to retrieve her. It is unknown whether Jesse Faribault or her children ever knew that Elizabeth had escaped or stayed at large for days. In a subsequent report to the BIA, Hummer now invoked her failed escape as justification for keeping her institutionalized, concluding, “It is much better for Elizabeth that she remain here.”78 Faribault vigorously disagreed. In her own letters to the BIA then and for years after, she argued again that she should be with her family
in Sisseton.79 Ultimately, a return to her family was not to be.

...Elizabeth Alexis Faribault began her seventh year of incarceration, in 1922, with a letter to David Mazakute, the adult son of a prominent Dakota leader. “My Dear friend Hello,” she began. Drawing on her writing lessons from Kampeska, Faribault, in halting English, informed Mazakute that she “will write” or “tell you every thing” and that she hoped that he “gets the picture.” The letter suggests that the two had corresponded previously, although no other copies of their exchanges remain in the archives. Into her nonstandard English, Faribault inserted Dakota. Previously, speaking in Dakota had enabled her and Kampeska (Elizabeth Alexis and Nellie Kampeska, her Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota, kin, who in 1917, as a student at the Pipestone Indian Boarding School, was transferred to Canton Asylum. For a discussion of this relationship see "Committed" by Susam Burch) to exchange information without staff understanding or intervening. Writing in Dakota circumvented Hummer’s authority at the same time it reaffirmed Faribault’s kin connections beyond the Asylum. She cautioned Mazakute that “mis de iwahasni”(“I do not laugh/this is not funny”) and alluded to barriers, departures, losses, and hopes. Fears of being erased from memory during her lifetime punctuate the letter: “nobody even thought of me or remembered me,” she lamented.53 Repeatedly calling him “koda,” she claimed the right as kin to be with her tribe.54 As a form of kinship, “koda” entails obligations and interdependence.55 Invoking the cultural ritual of shaking hands, she exhorted Mazakute to remember her to others on the outside, also offering to him her own extended hand of friendship. Affirming, perhaps asserting, her existence within her broader tribal community, Elizabeth Alexis Faribault emphatically reiterated and closed her note with the phrase “he miye”—“it is me.”56

It appears that this letter never reached its intended recipient but remained in Dr. Hummer’s files. Six months after Faribault wrote it, Hummer still had the letter. After additional communication written by Faribault, her family, and other advocates intensified their demands for her release, the superintendent sent Mazakute’s letter to BIA Commissioner Burke in June 1922 (the year that her husband Jessie divorced her and which thereafter she referred to herself as Elizabeth Alexis) as an “index of her mentality.”57 Hummer discounted Faribault’s written correspondence as an incoherent rant, evidence of mental disorder...

...In 1926, almost exactly five years after Elizabeth Faribault’s unsuccessful escape from the Asylum, her mother set out on another arduous trip from Sisseton, South Dakota, to Canton. Mary Alexis probably camped on the Asylum grounds upon her arrival there, as was commonplace when Native relatives came to see their loved ones. The remaining documents do not confirm whether she knew or even suspected that her daughter was pregnant. Their meeting would have left little doubt: Elizabeth was near the end of her third trimester.
No staff reports or letters detail their conversation. It is unknown whether Elizabeth Faribault had told her mother the circumstances of her pregnancy. We are left to imagine the questions that hovered between them, spoken or unspoken—about the baby; about Elizabeth; about their daily lives, their future. Both Mary and Elizabeth experienced the piercing inability to protect their children. The destructive force of institutionalization weighed heavily on the family.

...A few weeks after Mary Alexis returned home, the Sisseton Agency received a monthly report about Elizabeth Faribault. The staff forwarded it to her mother. On the small slip of paper, dated October 1, 1926, Dr. Hummer had left the mimeographed description of Elizabeth’s diagnosis as “unchanged” but had added “in bed.” In the “remarks” section, he maintained the same refrain as previous updates: she was generally clean, seldom sick, and assisted with work at the bungalow (the superintendent’s family cottage on the Asylum grounds). In the right margin, he wrote simply, “had a daughter.”18 A few days earlier, in the afternoon of September 28, Elizabeth had given birth to a girl, whom she named Cora Winona. In the following days, Asylum correspondence to the BIA claimed that both mother and child were “doing fairly well.”19

...Faribault’s family understood the situation in starkly different terms. Mary Alexis recognized Elizabeth’s extended exile and unplanned pregnancy as a violation of her daughter and their family.20 Outraged by her daughter’s circumstances...Elizabeth Faribault’s Sisseton kin demanded an intervention. Congressman Johnson complied, asking the BIA to investigate and report back to him.23

In written exchanges, her advocates explained that the birth of Elizabeth’s child made Mary “desire her release more than ever.”24 Drawing attention to the violation—of Elizabeth, her family, and her Sisseton community—the letter continued, emphasizing that Mary did not feel that “her daughter has been treated right and is very anxious that something be done for her . . .release.”25 According to a related institutional report from the time, Elizabeth Faribault held Harry Hummer directly accountable for her condition, blaming the superintendent for not allowing her to be with her family at home.26

...By the time Elizabeth Faribault entered the Indian Asylum in 1915, fellow Sisseton-Wahpeton member George Leo Cleveland Marlow had been detained there for nearly a decade. The age peers who had grown up in close proximity on the Sisseton Reservation likely would have remembered one another, shared news of their families back home, and recognized the rolling hills, lakes, farmsteads, and clapboard houses of each other’s
memories. Over Faribault’s and Marlow’s shared detention, other SissetonWahpeton people were confined to the Asylum as well.35 Between 1902 and 1934— Canton’s formal existence—more than one-fourth of the nearly four hundred institutionalized people were members of the Great Sioux Nation.36 Elizabeth Faribault and the other 105 Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people would find familiar faces, hear their Indigenous languages spoken by others, and be recognized while on the inside.37...

...There are more questions than answers about what happened to Elizabeth Faribault at the end of her life. Early on Friday, March 2, 1928, an employee had observed her rise and begin her daily routine, briefly leaving and then returning to her room to tend to her daughter, Cora Winona, who shared her bed. It remains unclear whether Faribault spoke to attendant Katie Knox that chilly morning while the staff member monitored the locked ward, but Knox claimed that she did not express any complaints or appear unwell. Several hours later, Knox circled back past Faribault’s room and found the forty-six-year-old Dakota woman’s lifeless body. Acknowledging no prior illnesses, Superintendent Hummer informed the BIA that Elizabeth Faribault must have succumbed to “heart failure.”59

Archived sources from the Asylum to the Sisseton Reservation superintendent imply that Faribault’s body may have been returned to northeast South Dakota. However, her descendants have never been able to locate their relative. Granddaughter Faith O’Neil insists that Elizabeth Faribault never left Canton...

"I think about my grandmother a lot. She was afraid that nobody would care about her. . . . She probably thought during her life that nobody would care when she was gone because she already wasn’t valued at Canton. . . . Her family cared and tried to get her out, but since they couldn’t, she worried that she never mattered, that she wouldn’t matter. . . . I want her to know that I won’t ever forget her. It’s more than that: I’ll always remember her. I know she remembers me, too."

—Faith O’Neil, reflecting on her grandmother, Elizabeth Alexis Faribault

The years of Harry Hummer’s proximity to Elizabeth Faribault, his knowledge of her, and his claims on her and on her behalf outraged her descendant.

There isn’t a word in English yet that is awful enough to describe him and what he did,... I think you used my grandmother like a slave and kept her from her own family and her own people,” she yelled out loud, hoping her message would carry to the late superintendent. She persisted, anger mounting. “Her name was Elizabeth Alexis Faribault...

Source: BURCH, SUSAN. Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions. University of North Carolina Press, 2021, https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/76551/97988.... Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
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Research Notes:
-Elizabeth's parents were members of the Sisseton-Wahpeton band of the Dakota Nation
-Elizabeth's birth is unknown... based on the 1910 census is 23, on the 1920 census she is 40! born July 1992 per (3) Burch, Susan. “‘Dislocated Histories’: The Canton Asylum for Insane Indians.” Women, Gender, and Families of Color, vol. 2, no. 2, 2014, pp. 141–62. JSTOR Accessed 12 Aug. 2023.
-the couple (Elizabeth's parents) had parted ways. Father Zihkanakoyake remained at Spirit Lake, mother Manzakoyakesuim moved to and remained at the Sisseton Reservation.
-The first reservation partitioned under the General Allotment Act of 1867, Lake Traverse (Sisseton), where the Faribaults lived, was known for resisting U.S. assimilation (fn. 15 Lawson). Neither Jesse nor Elizabeth had attended boarding schools, although most of their younger siblings had. U.S. census rolls and anecdotal evidence suggest that the couple primarily spoke Dakota.
-six children born within 15 years of marriage, two died in infancy
-was politically active anti-BIA, challenged representatives [2-]
-Daisy Alexis (sister?), Feldman C. Alexis (neice of who?
-There is no record that shows she was buried in the Hiawatha Cemetery although descendants continue to memorialize here annually at the cemetery.

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Sources:

1897 Sep 13 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7D16-CQ3Z : Sat Oct 07 00:16:21 UTC 2023), Entry for Elizabeth Alexis, 1897, pg. 655/828, line 11, daughter age 14 of Mary age 39 (census of the Sisseton-Wahpeton)

1910 May 10 - "United States Census, 1910", database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MPX8-QX7 : Thu Oct 05 09:01:28 UTC 2023), Entry for Jessie Faribault and Elisabeth Faribault, 1910, pg. 664/1059, Agency, Roberts, South Dakota, United States
Age 23

1920 Jan 23 - "United States Census, 1920", database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M6JS-VLK : Thu Oct 05 10:16:19 UTC 2023), Entry for Mary Alexis and Elizibeth Alexis, 1920, pg. 237/1140, line 12, Lee Township, Roberts, South Dakota, United States
Age 40

1921 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7ZMF-3SW2 : Wed Oct 04 07:51:38 UTC 2023), Entry for Elizabeth Alexis Faribault, 1921, pg. 328/737, line