SASWE
img705.imageshack.us/img705/1003/saswedeloriam.jpgSaswe married a prominent woman of the Blackfeet Sioux band,
Shihasapawin--or Blackfeet Woman.
She was the daughter of Bear Foot, a famous chief, and sister of the famous chief Mad Bear and his brothers, Walks in the Wind and Tiger. Marrying into a band so far away guaranteed that no close blood relationship existed between the couple. It also meant that Saswe and his family would often travel up and down the Missouri so that his wife could spend time with her family. They had six children:
Tusunkeoyedutawin (Alice), Tunkanicagewin (Anna), Wakancekiyewin (Sarah), Tipi Sapa(Philip, my grandfather), Ziwina (Carrie), and Tusunkawakanwin (Euphrasia). Three of the children, Alice, Sarah, and Philip, were born on the Grand River in northern South Dakota, suggesting that Saswe's band quite frequently visited the Hunkpaps and Blackfeet Sioux.
Since Saswe was a prosperous medicine man, he had two other wives,
Tatedutawin and Apetuicagapinwin, by whom he had seven other children who were listed in the Yankton Mission register. Inquiring among the many people descended from Saswe, I was told that he had twenty-two children, eighteen girls and four boys. Perhaps only those children who lived near him on the Yankton Reservation and were baptized by the Episcopal missionary had their names and birth places recorded.
Finally Saswe himself agreed to be baptized, and 1873 he not only became a Christian but also formally married Sihasapawin, the Blackfeet Sioux woman, according to the white man's way. He stopped living with the other two wives, one of whom went back to her people at Crow Creek, where most of the Yanktonais were now settle.
TIPI SAPA
PHILIP JOSEPH DELORIA
In 1875, Tipi Sapa had married
Annie Brunot. He had every reason to believe that he was headed down a road of relative happiness. They had a boy,
Francis Philip, in November 1876, a month after Saswe died, and in 1879 Annie gave birth to a little girl who lived about ten days. Tragically, Annie died about a month later from complications of childbirth. Shortly after Annie died, the Bishop sent Philip and his little boy to Rosebud, where Philip was to teach at St. Mary's School. Then the people of Band Eight re-elected him as chief because his knowledge of white society was needed by them in their dealing with the government.
Since he could not, on principle, turn down the position of chief of the band, Tipi Sapa took on a crushing burden of both church and tribal work. He had to teach school, take care of his small son, and make the long journey back to the Yankton reservation to attend council meetings and listen to the people's complaints about the government. This trip would have been close to one hundred miles from Rosebud--much farther from other reservations--by horse and buggy. Bishop Hare expected Philip to devote all of his time and energies to church work and must not have been very happy when Philip agreed to become chief.
In 1881 Philip married again to provide a home for his little boy.
Jennie Lamont, a mixed-blood woman from the White Swan settlement at Yankton, became his second wife. Tragically, their happiness was disrupted in 1883 when Francis Philip died at the age of six, probably from tuberculosis. Jennie and Philip had two girls,
Minerva, born in 1884, and Lyma, born in 1887. When Philip was transferred to Standing Rock, he acted first as a Helper, a layman's office created by Bishop Hare to give some status to influential men who helped with church work. Then he was ordained as a deacon, the first step toward becoming a priest and regular clergyman.
Again the same tragic pattern of death occurred. Jennie died shortly after giving birth to their second child. Philip was once again a widower with small children to support.
In 1888 he married my grandmother, Mary Sully Bordeaux. She had a background almost as strange as Philip's.
In 1875,
Alfred Sully, then a captain in the regular Army, was assigned to Fort Pierre for the winter. A lusty Irish bachelor, Sully lost no time in taking an Indian wife for his time on the frontier.
Sully chose a young Yankton girl named Pehandutawin. By mid-1858 she bore him a daughter, my grandmother
Akicitawin-"Soldier woman." A biography of Sully, written by Langdon Sully, his grandson, conveniently omitted Sully's dalliance with Pehandutawin, although he chose to reproduce a painting Sully had done of her and another Sioux girl, with the enigmatic comment that Sully's later white wife refused to allow him to hang the portrait in their home.
Mary Sully had already experienced tragedy in her life. She married a prosperous mixed-blood rancher named John Bordeaux and they had a nice ranch on what is now the Rosebud Reservation. They had two daughters, Annie and Rose. One day John took his family to Valentine, Nebraska, where he sold some cattle. They went into the hotel dining room to celebrate their first big success in the ranching business. While they were eating, some drunken cowboys came out of a saloon down the street and began shooting their pistols indiscriminately at signs and windows. A stray shot went through the window of the hotel dining room and killed John Bordeaux. In an instant, Mary was widowed with two small daughters and little else. The money went to bury John.Mary's mother, Pehandutawin, had taken the name Susan and married Peter LeGrand. LeGrand was a headman of the Half-Breed Band and represented Philip when he was unable to attend council meetings because of church business. So Philip and Mary had known each other since childhood. They were soon considering marriage since both needed a spouse to assist with the raising of their children. They were married within the year, and my aunt Ella was born in 1889.Mary and Philip had a son,
Philip Ulysses, in 1893 and another daughter, Susan Mabel, in 1896. As the centruies changed, Philip suffered almost wholesale loss of his older relatives. his Aunt Julia, Saswe's sister, died in 1897; his mother died in 1899; Dennis Grey Horn, his cousin and Julia's son, died in 1895; his sister Alice died in 1898; his sister Anna died in 1900; his sister Carrie died in 1901; and a nephew, George died in 1899. With the loss of eight close relatives, all of them living at the White Swan community on the Yankton reservation, Philip seemed to be constantly on the road returning to Yankton to hold family funerals.
In 1900, Mary shortly thereafter discovered that she was pregnant again. My father, Vine Deloria, was born in October 1901.
Philip Ulysses seemed to fade away with a disease that simply took the weight, color, and energy away from him. No one knew what ailed him neither white nor Indian doctors could halt his decline. He died in August 1902.
Mary died in 1915 of liver disease after a long illness. My grandfather mourned for a long time over her loss, but was faced with immediate problem of how to raise a teenaged son. Within a week of my grondmother's death, Philip contacted Bishop Beecher of Nebraska and arranged to have my father admitted to a diocsan school, Kearney Military Academ in Kearny, Nebraska. My father arrived by train a few days later, still in shock from the loss of his mother and unable to speak much English.
Tipi Sapa married again after my grandmother died to escape the loneliness of any empty house. His fourth wife, Julia, took good care of him.
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I n 1927, Philip-Tipi Sapa, had a massive stroke and in three years he had died. During his life time Tipi Sapa had worked for the Yankton people on such legal affairs as the Black Hills Claim and the Pipestone Quarry along with others such as R. T. Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, and A.C. Smith.
He was a well known priest of the Episcopal church along with Luke Walker, Baptiste Lambert and Amos Ross. These men made up the "Big Four" and were regarded by the Sioux Episcopalians as their most important spiritual leaders. It is said that these men always appeared together at church meetings, partially for protection from the many people who would be requesting favors and partly to emphasize the the bishop and other church officials that the Sioux people were united behind them.
Philip, David Tatiyopa, and Baptiste Lambert were founders of the Planting Society, whose purpose was to encourage the people to settle down and begin to farm. In today's politically correct atmosphere such a goal would be considered a negative development since the contemporary style is to pretend that all our ancestors resisted the man's culture and maintained their old traditions. That view is largely false. With all of the game gone there was no other alternative but to farm or starve.