- Catherine Van Susteren: We would like you to join us in welcoming our guest speaker for today. Linda Waggoner is our speaker. She is an independent scholar and specialist in Great Lakes Metis history and Winnebago culture and genealogy. She's the author of "Fire Light: The Life of Angel DeCora, Winnebago Artist." Please join us in welcoming Linda Waggoner. Thank you. 
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- Linda Waggoner: Okay. Can you hear me now? 
- Yes. 

- Waggoner: The title of this talk is specific to Madison: "This is the Home of My Spirit." So this is kind of a new angle for me on telling the story of Angel DeCora. Angel DeCora Dietz is her married name. She was born in 1868 or 1869, on a Nebraska reservation in a traditional wigwam. She was Ho-Chunk and I will probably call her Winnebago just because that's the name used at the time. 

There is more than one reason, though, that she said that this is the home of her spirit, which I want to talk about later. But I'm going to start out... just playing this little short slide show that I made that will just give you the images without all the talk so you can kind of enjoy them without me giving you the facts on them. And then I'll give you a longer slide show. I'm shamelessly going to read you a little bit from the book at the beginning, sorry for that. 

Several people wrote eulogies for Angel after her death. So this is the end, the prologue. "Wisconsin historian Louise Phelps Kellogg emphasized Angel's ancestry explaining the DeCora family had stood preeminent for nearly two centuries, furnishing chiefs, statesman, warriors, and philosophers to the Indian race. 

Gray-headed DeCora or the War Eagle, said Kellogg, was a model of tribal honor and dignity and for years held his people in the past of rectitude and of alliance with the United States government. Kellogg commended Angel’s involvement with the Society of American Indians, which was the group photo you saw near the end, and her work at Carlisle Indian School developing native ornamental designs and preserving some that were in danger of extinction. Kellogg also noted, Mrs. 

Dietz had a very attractive personality. Her bright face, her warm humor, her simple breeding, her well-chosen dress all marked her as an American lady of both the primitive and modern type. She insisted that Angel's enthusiasm for her people and for her work was unbounded. Truly, hers was a noble life, she wrote, nobly lived the gift of the Winnebago people to America. Kellogg also recalled Angel's presence at the Madison Women's club she attended with Marie Baldwin in 1914. 

And she attended that because the Society of American Indians, a national Pan-American Indian group, had a conference here in October, and she was a founding member of that group which started in 1911. When the chairwoman introduced Angel to the audience as a descendant of glory of the morning and a daughter of the Aborigines of Wisconsin, Angel responded with emphasis and earnestness, I am not ashamed of my ancestry. 

Someone in the audience reminded Angel that Madison's four lake area was her ancestral home. Angel, who had never before visited the place where Oliver and-- and their children celebrated the city's first Fourth of July responded with emotion, “This is the home of my spirit.” Oops, something's going backwards on me. So one of the reasons that this was the home of her spirit was, of course, the Winnebago Indians lived around here. 

But another reason that might be of interest to you is that Oliver -- was one of the people who supposedly celebrated Madison's first Fourth of July, was actually her grandfather, great grandfather, excuse me. And there were just about four Winnebago Metis people and their French Canadian husbands who were here before anyone else was here. So I don't know when she said this is the home of my spirit if she was also referring to that event. So now I'll just show you some slides.