Monuments, Memory, and the Making of History

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In June of 1845, Oke-We-Me (Soaring Eagle Woman) Petit-Loup was interred in the Montmartre cemetery. Only twenty-seven-years old and still mourning the recent loss of her toddler, the Sauk woman succumbed to an illness while she and a group of Iowa relatives were visiting Paris. As the coffin descended into the tomb, her husband Petit-Loup expressed his certainty that his beloved would rest well in the French soil, despite being over 4,000 miles from their home in the Missouri Country. Moved by the family’s tragedy, supporters attending the funeral pledged to raise a monument to Oke-We-Me’s memory. By August, they had collected enough money to pay for a gravestone. But, a century-and-a-half later, there is neither monument nor record of Oke-We-Me’s location in the grand cemetery.

While the story of Madame Petit-Loup (c1818-1845) is little known, this absence is not just due to a missing monument. More generally, there is scant record of the American Indian people who began travelling to Europe at the same time that Europeans travelled to the Americas. When these histories are recounted, the focus has often centered on spectacle and ethnography, as with accounts of the shows led by George Catlin and Buffalo Bill, or articles on display at the Quai Branly Museum. A recent exhibition at Versailles, “1725. Des Alliés Amérindiens À La Cour de Louis XV,” which highlights the visit of five American Indian diplomats in 1725, also recognizes that current-day French audiences are largely unaware of the histories prompting these events. The exhibit also implies that the 1725 Franco-American exchange was exceptional, and it avoids explaining the larger political contexts and family connections that have long brought French and Indigenous American people together, or asking why these histories are not more readily recalled.

This talk will connect 1725 to 1845 by placing the Sauk and Iowa Petit-Loup family within a larger narrative of colonialism, imperial expansion, and American Indian history, and will consider what it would take to remember Oke-We-Me today.

Part of the series Monuments, Memory, and the Making of History

From monuments and museums to oral histories and digital archives, acts of commemoration are never neutral. They reflect power, silence, resistance, and the ongoing negotiation of historical narratives. This series interrogates whose memories are preserved, whose are marginalized, and how public remembrance can both reinforce and challenge dominant accounts of Empire and nation building.

Speaker

Christen Mucher is Associate Professor of American studies at Smith College. She specializes in early American studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and early archaeology and anthropology. Her research centers on past-making, historiography, gaps in the archive, and archival theory in the Americas. She has a particular interest in Indigenous histories of the Ohio and Mexico valleys and museum collections in Haiti, the United States, Mexico and France.

Mucher's monograph, Before American History: Indigenous Dispossession and National Mythmaking (UVA 2022), addresses archaeology, history writing and Indigenous dispossession in Mexico and the United States during the late colonial and early national periods (1780s–1840s). The collection she co-edited with Gesa Mackenthun, (UAP 2021) includes her essay on historical demography, genomics, and "ancient Americans."  Her co-translation and critical edition of , the first Haitian novel, was published by NYU Press in 2015. The novel was written by Haitian author Émeric Bergeaud and originally appeared in French in 1859. The second edition is available from the Digital Library of the Caribbean. Her article “Collecting Native America: John Lloyd Stephens and the Rhetorics of Archaeological Value” was published in 2018 in the Journal of Transnational American Studies. 

Mucher’s research has been generously supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Newberry Library, the New-York Historical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.

Reid Hall, the Columbia Global Paris Center, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination are not responsible for the views and opinions expressed by their speakers and guests.

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