O-Zoush-Quah 'Maggie' Hale

O-Zoush-Quah was a Potawatomi healer

Biography
Her calculated birth date of 1861 is based on the 1940 census which identifies her as 79 then.

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

(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.)

In a posed black-and-white photograph, probably taken in a studio in Holton, Kansas, during the early 1900s, the family of O-Zoush-Quah (Prairie Band Potawatomi) and Nash-Wa-Took (Prairie Band Potawatomi) stands solemnly in a semicircle.1 Flanking the couple are their four daughters; their young son sits on a small stool in front...

The decision to visually document their immediate family together and O-Zoush-Quah dressed in her finery directly challenged the efforts pressing in on their household. The BIA already had insisted that the two older daughters attend the United States Indian Industrial Training School in Lawrence, Kansas.3 Shack-To-Quah and Ta-Com-Sa-Quah (or Nettie and Anna, as they increasingly were called by agency officials and subsequent generations of the family) bridged their physical distance from home by writing letters.

Within a few years of the family portrait, in 1908, the BIA removed O-ZoushQuah from her home and placed her in the Indian Asylum. For decades after, the Potawatomi healer’s kin, like so many families, regularly and unsuccessfully sought their loved one’s return. Daughter Nettie Hale Tork regularly petitioned the BIA on behalf of her mother, asking, “How long she compelled to stay?” Pointedly, she added that she felt “no pleasure . . . to think of her being up there,” noting that the short monthly reports on her mother left her doubtful that O-Zoush-Quah was receiving adequate care.4 Nettie asserted familial authority, cautioning staff to limit beadworking and instead to offer her mother some quilting pieces to sew as a more comforting activity.

Ways for O-Zoush-Quah to pass the time until their reunion was a pressing concern of Nettie, who realized that her mother knew “enough to want to come home.”5 Younger sister Anna’s impending graduation from the Indian Industrial Training School in May 1909 added urgency: “I would like very much to take mother to see sis graduate,” Nettie told the superintendent. In closing, she appealed to Dr. Hummer’s generosity: “Trusting and praying she will be home soon.”6

Over the many years of O-Zoush-Quah’s detention, her Potawatomi family directly linked her well-being with their own. Nettie and her sisters understood institutionalization as the main cause of unwellness for the family, insisting that their mother be reunited with her home and kin on the outside.7 Their claims, as with many others from inside and outside of Canton, refuted the BIA’s oppressive view of American Indian homes and families as inherently inferior. “I can manage her better than anyone,” Tork informed Canton staff overseeing her mother.8 Consistently, O-ZoushQuah’s children affirmed that all their relatives belonged with them and not under the management of the Asylum’s superintendent or in a federal institution. Repeatedly in words and actions, incarcerated members demonstrated that they, too, would never forget their Indigenous homes or their relatives waiting for them there.

Outside the Indian Asylum, O-Zoush-Quah’s younger children matured into adulthood. Many started families of their own. Their kinship adapted and continued, sometimes on paths increasingly distant from isolated members, sometimes circling back and intersecting with shifting memories, spaces, and presence.9 Threading across the years was the family’s insistence that O-Zoush-Quah was not forgotten...

Enforced dislocation and its wake of trauma eroded O-Zoush-Quah’s family ties. Various scholars have described this broad phenomenon as “doing time on the outside”: the material and relational harms inflicted by incarceration on generations of kin and communities far beyond brick-andmortar prisons.12 O-Zoush-Quah’s family had no idea how long she would be detained. They resented the pathological labels attached to the medicine woman and the authority others claimed in the name of her care. O-ZoushQuah and her kin also shared frustration and hurt caused by their inability to protect one another from institutionalization’s reach. Those in kinship with O-Zoush-Quah or any of the other hundreds of people detained at Canton experienced displacements to the Asylum in both direct and indirect ways.13

During O-Zoush-Quah’s confinement, and for decades after, her family members—like many others separated by the Indian Asylum—struggled, adapted, hoped for, lost, and claimed one another.14...

For O-Zoush-Quah... the autumn of 1933 began unremarkably. (She) spent most of their days surrounded by other detained people in relentless hours of hallways, enclosed porches, dining halls, and dormitories. In early September, the elderly O-Zoush-Quah met briefly with Dr. Samuel Silk, a psychiatrist from St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., who had come to inspect the Asylum for a second time.80... Consulting O-Zoush-Quah’s fragmented medical files would have yielded letters from her daughters repeatedly seeking her release. In one exchange prompted by her kin in 1930, the BIA superintendent at the Haskell Institute advocated that O-Zoush-Quah be transferred to a facility in Topeka, Kansas, so that her family could visit with her. Nearby in the folder would have been Superintendent Hummer’s recommendation (with BIA endorsement) against the transfer.81 Vague descriptions from staff reports—“does beadwork” and “needs supervision of some sort”—may have prompted additional questions for the woman.

O-Zoush-Quah (was) among the many unnamed people Silk referenced in his subsequent report to the BIA. “Some of them never had any schooling, can neither read nor write,” the doctor noted by way of contrasting white settler society’s cultural norms with Indigenous ones. The inspector recommended that upward of half of Canton’s detained population could be discharged. He concluded that the others, to use the parlance of O-Zoush-Quah’s medical file, “needed supervision of some sort” It is doubtful that O-Zoush-Quah, or any of the others confined at Canton Asylum were apprised of Silk’s report or the plans to bring about their collective dislocation to Washington. 2 The Washington Post described the seventy-one American Indians being sent to St. Elizabeths as being “freed.”93

News of the Indian Asylum’s closing glossed over the reality that institutionalization would continue for many people held in its locked wards. Some may not have been aware or understood that they were being transported to another psychiatric facility hundreds of miles away, but these realities became swiftly apparent. As evening approached, staff from St. Elizabeths Hospital escorted the Prairie Band Potawatomi woman, along with sixty-(eight) others, out of the buildings. Women wrapped in blankets, bars on train windows, and fragmented exchanges with those being removed jumbled together in subsequent accounts of the night. Later, as the train hurtled eastward, people spent hours grouped together in isolated carriages under the guarded supervision of hospital staff—continued institutionalization in mobile form. We know nothing about the Indigenous group’s conversations, questions, or imaginings that filled the two days before they arrived in Washington and were consigned to the locked wards of another federal psychiatric hospital.97

During her intake, O-Zoush-Quah stared blankly at hospital staff.4 Her responses to their line of questions confounded the interviewers. She mumbled, perhaps in Potawatomi, which employees described as “unintelligible.”5 Personnel recorded that the woman before them disclosed hearing “voices talking to her but will not give any ideas as to what they say.”6 Frustration surfaced. When asked “how are you?” O-Zoush-Quah responded pointedly, “Old, no good, can’t get out.”7

Eight decades later, O-Zoush-Quah’s grandson Francis Jensen (KitchKum-Me) sat in his living room in Holton, Kansas, looking at family portraits adorning the walls. Born in 1923 in the house that had belonged to O-Zoush-Quah, he had grown up on the Potawatomi Reservation.8 Studying a painted photograph on the wall near him, Jensen described his grandmother as “a pretty lady with her dark hair parted slightly to the right and brushed neatly behind her ears. The picture, her deep brown eyes look at me winsomely and the suggestion of a smile curves her lips.” Her dress also stood out to him. “A white brooch trimmed with silver holds the high collar of her white blouse. A long narrow scarf embroidered with beads and a geometric design encircles her neck.”9 O-Zoush-Quah’s descendant, like others of his generation, came of age under her sepia likeness. In his mind’s eye, Jensen had continued to hold her in a moment of beauty, in a time when she was among her people. Meeting the framed gaze of his grandmother, the ninety-one-year-old man pondered in a soft voice “what Grandmother had done to be sent away.”10

“I wonder what her life was like,” Jensen mused while looking at her portrait. The retired barber knew that his grandmother was medicine, someone from whom others had sought blessings and healing. Physically uprooted from her Indigenous world and deprived of virtually all vestiges of Potawatomi lifeways, O-Zoush-Quah experienced daily harm in the name of Western medical care... 1 Describing her as “excited most of the time” and “very cross amongst other people,” hospital attendants had viewed her struggles through a pathological lens and imposed amplified isolation in response.12 During November and December 1941, staff forcibly secluded the octogenarian for an average of fifteen hours almost every day.13

When news arrived from St. Elizabeths that O-Zoush-Quah had died, her family made plans for her return to the Potawatomi Reservation. According to one relative, she was laid to rest in July 1943 at the “family burial ground in a wooded area about an eighth of a mile from her home.”17 O-Zoush-Quah’s daughter Julia Darling lived on the property at the time of O-Zoush-Quah’s funeral. Like many of her extended family, O-Zoush-Quah had followed the Drum Religion, and the community honored the Potawatomi healer with a vigil. “The Drum service lasted all night and until the late afternoon of the next day,” Francis Jensen later recalled. O-Zoush-Quah’s grandson remembered the “hypnotic drumbeats” that echoed across the area, vibrating across his body even as he drifted into sleep.18 In Jensen’s world, his ancestor remained both absent and present, surfacing partly and poignantly in memories, photographs, and healing feathers that he received and passed on to the next generation. For O-Zoush-Quah’s kin as for many others, inheritances—imposed, dislocated,
and claimed—lace together across place, time, and people.

“the problem was never the person—O-Zoush-Quah—or being Potawatomi.”33 In the name of
Western medicine and care,... the BIA had taken O-Zoush-Quah away from her family and tribe.

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:
-transferred to St. Elizabeth's Hospital Washington D.C. December 20, 1933
-the number of children of O-Zoush-Quah is unknown, it appears she may have had as many as 5-6 daughters and 1-3 sons, records are inconsistent with respect to the number in the household during the census. On NO census does her husband Nash-Wa-Took appear?
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1891 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPQH-696X : Fri Oct 06 09:47:29 UTC 2023), Entry for Blank Blank, pg. 19/617, line 116-120, Prairie Band Potawatomi, Potawatomi Indian Agency (Kansas)

1893 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7BSJ-MP2M : Fri Oct 06 22:26:36 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zhowsh-Quah, 1893, pg. 114/617, lines 120-125,

1895 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7B3D-BCT2 : Fri Oct 06 00:18:13 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zawsh-Quah, 1895, pg. 170/617, line

1896 Aug 18 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7BST-98PZ : Fri Oct 06 10:51:29 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zowst Quah, 1896, pg. 244/617, lines 122-128, Potawatomie and Gt Nemaha, Prairie Band Potawatomie

1897 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7BSJ-GCN2 : Fri Oct 06 08:29:11 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zowsh-Quah, 1897, pg.395/670, lines 126-133,

1900 Jun 28 - "United States Census, 1900", database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MST4-8WR : Thu Oct 05 19:01:33 UTC 2023), Entry for O Zowsh Quah and Shuck To Quah, 1900, pg. 370/937, lines 17-20, Pottawatomie Indian Reservation, ED 157, Jackson, Kansas, United States

1902 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7B9P-XW6Z : Wed Oct 04 23:41:43 UTC 2023), Entry for Rebecca, 1902, pg. 570/617, lines 121-127, Potawatomi and Gr Nemaha Agency, Kansaas

1903 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WMJW-Q8T2 : Thu Oct 05 18:25:36 UTC 2023), Entry for O Zouch Quah, pg. 16/697, lines 116-123

Curator Note: husband Nash-wa-Took not shown

1905 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WMNG-RCN2 : Fri Oct 06 23:26:29 UTC 2023), Entry for , 1905, pg. 78/697, line 115-120, Praririe Band Potawatomi, Hoyt, KS

1907 Jun 20 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WMNP-166Z : Wed Oct 04 23:33:10 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zowsh-Quah, 1907, pg. 136/697, line 155

(Curator Note: see line 102 for Nettie Tork, daughter)

1911 Jum 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WMJW-QHW2 : Wed Oct 04 18:40:53 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zowsh-Quah, pg. 261/697,

Not sure who these children are?

1912 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WMN1-N9PZ : Wed Oct 04 04:14:44 UTC 2023), Entry for , 1912, pg. 304/697, line 112

1913 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WMJS-ZQZM : Thu Oct 05 14:27:22 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zowsh-Quah, 1913, pg. 350/697, line 115-124,

1915 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WMN1-BG6Z : Thu Oct 05 12:57:54 UTC 2023), Entry for , 1915, pg. 461/697, lines 127-136,

1917 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QGR2-JKXX : Wed Oct 04 15:38:48 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zowah-Quah, pg. 578/697, lines 479-480

1918 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QLBX-MHTM : Wed Oct 04 00:41:01 UTC 2023), Entry for Hale pg. 628/697, lines 475-476,

1920 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QP3Y-MQNH : Fri Oct 06 14:15:43 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zowsh-Quah pg.

1922 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPMC-8QJJ : Wed Oct 04 20:56:08 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zowsh-Quah, 1922, pg. 110/590, 161-165

1923 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7NF4-1DPZ : Wed Oct 04 06:30:08 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zowsh-Quah, 1923, pg. 212/590, lines 161-165,

1924 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QG2P-2VZK : Fri Oct 06 15:56:47 UTC 2023), Entry for William Hale. pg. 311/590, lines 159-163,

1926 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7NXR-NT2M : Tue Oct 03 17:08:33 UTC 2023), Entry for O-Zowah-Quah, 1926, pg. 551/590, lines 157-163, census of the Potawatomi Indians, Potawatomi Agnecy, KS.

1927 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QGYQ-QG59 : Fri Oct 06 17:58:55 UTC 2023), Entry for William Hale, 1927, pg. 18/675, lines 152-158, Potawatomi, Potawatomi Agency

1928 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QLGR-9DRD : Fri Oct 06 09:58:59 UTC 2023), Entry for O Sowsh Quah, 1928, pg. 108/675, lines 152-158,

1929 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QG2S-JTJS : Fri Oct 06 01:02:01 UTC 2023), Entry for O Zowsh Quah, 1929, pg. 203/675, lines 189-193

1940 Jan1 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QLLS-B6GC : Fri Oct 06 23:37:17 UTC 2023), Entry for O Zosh Qua, 1940, pg. 471/556, line 231, census of Potawatomi 1940 (shows O-Zoush-Quah resident in St. Elizabeth's, Washington D.C.)