Wo-pi-ur-cu-ne-get 'Jane' Burch

Jane was a Southern Ute woman (Mouache band)

The Southern Ute (Kapuuta-wa Moghwachi Núuchi-u) Indian Reservation is near Ignacio, Colorado. The present-day Southern Ute Indian Reservation is a remnant of a much larger territory. The aboriginal domain of the Utes included the mountainous areas in eastern Utah, Colorado, and northern New Mexico. During the sixteenth century, the Utes were comprised of a confederation of seven bands. Two of those bands, the Mouache and Capote, make up the present-day Southern Utes. The Weeminuche band, now called the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, occupies a neighboring reservation, and the remaining bands are located on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation of eastern Utah.

Biography:
Jane was born to parents Robert and Mary Burch c. 1881 on the Southern Ute Reservation, La Plata County, Colorado.

Excerpts from "Committed" by Susan Burch, professor of American Studies at Middlebury College
"The women referred to as Jane and Susan Burch, the eldest daughters of Steve and Ruth Bent Burch, came of age as focused attacks on Southern Ute Indian Tribe families and self-determination intensified.11 According to U.S. government documents from 1900, the parents had held out against some assimilationist efforts, residing in a wickee-up (teepee) and speaking only Shoshoni. Federal pressures mounted, and within a decade, the younger Burch children had been taken to boarding schools. In contrast, Susan and Jane remained on the reservation and near their parents. For them and for many other Southern Ute people, family was the center around which daily life moved. Often together, the sisters had helped tend to their younger siblings, shared the work of gathering and preparing meals, listened to elders’ stories, and started their own families.12

"In 1910, BIA representatives honed their attention on the elder Burch siblings. In letters to the commissioner, Agent Charles Werner emphasized that Jane had born a child out of wedlock and that the baby had died within the month. The child’s father, the agent continued, was “a partly demented un-allotted Ute from Navajo Springs, who wandered over here some time ago returned again to Navajo Springs, Agency.”13 Jane’s status agitated the agent: she had “good” allotted land “valued at $1500” but was, in his estimation, irresponsible. As an unmarried mother, she challenged mainstream white cultural norms. Her child’s death and her sexual relations with a man judged “partly demented and unallotted” were viewed as evidence of incompetence and as a threat to broader settler society.

"Kinship ties undergirded Werner’s concern... Specifically pairing Jane and Susan, the BIA representative asserted that they evidenced “insanity to some extent.” Their offspring further cemented his judgment: “I did not realize the consequences of letting these two women remain at large until those children were born.” He closed his letter with a plea: “Could not they be removed to the Canton Insane Asylum?”15 Over the next two years, Agent Werner sought to institutionalize the sisters. In 1912, his request was granted. Jane and Susan Burch were forcibly dislocated to Canton that fall.16

"The collective removal of Susan and Jane Burch was unexceptional. BIA officials frequently ordered Native relatives to be institutionalized at the same time or sometimes within one or two years of a family member’s initial incarceration. References to multiple sets of institutionalized parents, siblings, and spouses appear frequently in reports and medical files and in officials’ correspondence. These recognized kinship connections appear to have contributed at least in part to many peoples’ placement and retention at the institution."

• BURCH, SUSAN. “Erase and Replace.” Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions, University of North Carolina Press, 2021, pp. 39–52. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469663364_burch.8. Accessed 10 Jan. 2024.

Jane and her sister Susan were both forceably committed to the Canton Asylum on October 3, 1912. Both sisters died in the Asylum (see Susan Burch @ Saw-wa-pe-get 'Susan' Burch).

• Joinson, Carla. Vanished in Hiawatha: The Story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians. University of Nebraska Press, 2016.

Jane was interred in the asylum Hiawatha cemetery in, according to Dr. L.L. Culp letter on February 17, 1934, tier 5 plot 23.

• Culp, L.L. L.L. Culp to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, February 17, 1934, RG 75, CCF 1907-1939, box 4, folder 7448-150 Part 2, Canton Asylum, NARA-DC.

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

Research Notes:
"Repeatedly, government representatives referred to Susan and Jane collectively, their status as sisters compounding the justifications for removing each of them. Emphasizing their shared experience of pregnancies and loss of infants, agents projected the eugenic idea that the Burch sisters both carried and transmitted hereditary flaws. In this judgment, Susan’s and Jane’s children became evidence of their mothers’ inherent defectiveness and social threat. Jane’s relationships outside of marriage, understood by Superintendent Werner as a moral failing, also tainted Susan, even as a married spouse. The prospect of growing generations in this family motivated Werner’s medicalized intervention. As he explained to Superintendent Hummer in 1912, Susan was “about to become a mother for the third time,” and he believed that “it [was] deplorable that such conditions
should exist.”33 Pregnancy—previous, current, and future—was among the reasons why the Burch sisters had to be removed to the Indian Asylum.

"The larger project of elimination hung over the birth of Susan’s daughter on the inside of the institution. None of the staff at Canton or at the Colorado Agency expected the baby to survive. When she did, the Colorado agent advocated that she stay at the Indian Asylum or be transferred to an orphanage or similar institution, not sent to her family. That the child ultimately was discharged from Canton was unusual, but her family’s fight to salvage their home, as well as the damage wrought by removals and deaths on the inside, were common. A presumption that institutionalized people and their relatives on the outside could not sustain settler forms of families permeates BIA and Indian Asylum records. This viewpoint encouraged agents and others to remove adults like the Burch sisters. Many younger people, including little children, also were ensnared in this practice."

• BURCH, SUSAN. “Erase and Replace.” Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions, University of North Carolina Press, 2021, pp. 39–52. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469663364_burch.8. Accessed 10 Jan. 2024.

-the fact that Jane appears intermittently as a member of the family and as a head may be tied only to whether she had children and could easily have been the Agency superintendent's efforts to display her as insane. She is referred to as "insane" as early as the Jan 30, 1901 census and numerous times between then and 1912 when she was admitted to the Canton Asylum.
__________
Sources:

1892 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WN4X-9QPZ : Wed Oct 04 15:12:49 UTC 2023), Entry for Ruth Bent, 1890, pg. 469/508, line 133-138, census of the Southern Utes (Moaches), Southern Ute Agency, Colorado

1894 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KX6-6C3Z : Wed Oct 04 06:21:29 UTC 2023), Entry for Peachig A Vity Ruth Bent, 1897, pg. 62/576, line 136-142, census of the Southern Ute Indians, Southern Ute Agency, Colo.

1895 Feb 20 - "United States Bureau of Land Management Tract Books, 1800-c. 1955", database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6NKZ-H2YH : 28 October 2022), Jane Burch, 1895, pg. 96/222, line 5-7, United States Bureau of Land Tract Books, 1800-c. 1955

1895 Jul 31 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KFH-VBPZ : Thu Oct 05 09:37:54 UTC 2023), Entry for Wo Pi Ur Cu Na Get Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 112/576, line 135-141, census of the Southern Ute Indians (Moaches)

1897 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KC4-8BZM : Thu Oct 05 09:45:22 UTC 2023), Entry for Wo-Pi-Ur-Cu-Ne-Get Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 181/576, line 265-272, census of the Allotted Southern Ute Indians, Ignacio Sub-Agency, Colorado

1898 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KFH-Z32M : Wed Oct 04 23:58:02 UTC 2023), Entry for Wo-Pi-Ur-Cu-Ne-Get Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 241/576, line 244-251, census of the Allotted Southern Ute, Southern Ute Sub-Agency, Colorado

1899 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KCS-JYMM : Thu Oct 05 02:06:20 UTC 2023), Entry for Wo Pi Ur Cu Ne Get Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 284/576, line 235-243, census of the Allotted Southern Ute Indians, Ignacio sub-Agency, Colorado

1900 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KXK-K7ZM : Thu Oct 05 01:38:19 UTC 2023), Entry for Wo-Pi-Ur-Cu-Ne-Get Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 322/576, line 280, census of the Allotted Southern Ute, Ignacio Sub-Agency, Colorado

1900 Jun 7 - "United States Census, 1900", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MSRJ-YW5 : Thu Oct 05 04:47:43 UTC 2023), Entry for Robert Burch and Mary Burch, 1900, pg. 896/935, line 21-29, census of Southern Ute Reservation, La Plata County, Inagico sub-Agency, Colorado

1901 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:49P6-9TPZ : Thu Oct 05 09:25:02 UTC 2023), Entry for Phillipe James Allen, 1901, pg. 51/323, line 1-2 (Jane is already being referred to as Insane), census of the Southern Ute Indians, Southern Ute Agency, Colo.

1901 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KK6-KCN2 : Wed Oct 04 16:38:29 UTC 2023), Entry for Wo-Pi-Ur-Cu-Ne-Get Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 381/576, line 274 (head, alone), census of the Southern Ute Indians, Ignacio sub-Agency, Colorado

1902 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KFD-4FMM : Wed Oct 04 05:47:08 UTC 2023), Entry for Wo-I-Ur-Cu-Ne-Get Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 428/576, line 275 (age 21 = b. 1881), census of the Southern Ute Indians, Ignacio Sub-Agency, Colorado

1903 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KFZ-ZS2M : Wed Oct 04 21:39:25 UTC 2023), Entry for Wo-Pi-Ur-Cu-Ne-Get Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 449/576, line 271, census of the Southern Ute Indians, Ignacio Sub-Agency, Colorado

1904 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KFS-SLMM : Thu Oct 05 00:07:23 UTC 2023), Entry for Wo-Pi-Ur-Cu-Ne-Get Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 497/576, line 283, census of the Southern Ute Indians, Ignacio Sub-Agency, Colorado

1905 Dec 12 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4K22-KTN2 : Fri Oct 06 11:10:25 UTC 2023), Entry for Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 518/576, line 257, census of the Southern Ute Indians, Southern Ute Agency, Ignacio, Colorado

1906 Jul 1 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KF4-GJT2 : Thu Oct 05 06:39:11 UTC 2023), Entry for Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 537/576, line 256, census of the Southern Ute Indians, Southern Ute Agency, Ignacio, Colorado

1908 Jul 1 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4KFS-7G3Z : Wed Oct 04 04:51:28 UTC 2023), Entry for Jane Burch, 1897, pg. 560/576, line 10-20, census of the Southern Ute Indians, Southern Ute Agency, Colorado

1912 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:43VK-PJ2M : Tue Oct 03 23:54:21 UTC 2023), Entry for Wopiwicunaget Jane Insane Burch, 1912, pg. 73/323, line 4 (Note: lines 5-6 refer to Ada's two sons?)

1912 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:43VK-PJ2M : Tue Oct 03 23:54:21 UTC 2023), Entry for Phillipi James Allen, 1912, pg. 73/323, line 1 (Note: lines 4-6 refer to head Jane and sons Harry 8 and Ernest 5, previously identified as sons of sister Ada?). census of the Southern Ute Indians, Southern Ute Agency, Col.

1913 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:43P9-1XN2 : Tue Oct 03 14:52:42 UTC 2023), Entry for Phillipe James Allen, 1913, pg. 96/323, line 4-6 (Jane marked Insane), census of the Southern Ute Indians, Southern Ute Agency, Colo.

1915 Jun 30 - "United States, Native American, Census Rolls, 1885-1940", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4952-7D3Z : Thu Oct 05 08:41:28 UTC 2023), Entry for Phillipe James Allen, 1915, pg. 144/323, line 3 (Insane!), census of the Southern Ute Indians, Southern Ute Agency, Colo.

1916 Feb 1 - Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/14491725/jane-burch: accessed 10 January 2024), memorial page for Jane Burch (unknown–1 Feb 1916), Find a Grave Memorial ID 14491725, citing Hiawatha Asylum Cemetery, Canton, Lincoln County, South Dakota, USA; Maintained by Graveaddiction (contributor 46528400).

Hilton, M. (Ed.). (2023, July 10). Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians Historical Marker. Historical Marker. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=183486 Photo by Ruth VanSteenwyk, July 10, 2023, courtesy of HMdb.org

Louise McIntosh 4-12-15 · Jane Burch 2-1-16 · Dasue 5-20-16