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JANUARY 8:

1838 Amherstburg Ontario - Edward Theller 1804-1859 fires on Fort Malden from vessel 'Anne', while Thomas Sutherland occupies Bois Blanc Island; US sympathizers of rebels called Hunter's Lodges 

January 8, 1996: The last native speaker of the Catawba language, Red Thunder Cloud, dies today in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is 76 years old.
 
 

BACKGROUND:

>From www.dickshovel.com/RedCloud.html 
 

Red Thunder Cloud, 76, Dies... by David Stout 
reprinted w/o permission from the 1.14.96 New York Times 
 

Red Thunder Cloud, a member of the Catawba Nation who was steeped in the history of the American Indians, died Monday in Worcester, Mass. He was the last human link to the ancient language of his people.

Thunder Cloud, who was 76, died in St. Vincent's Hospital after a stroke, friends said Thunder Cloud was also known as Carlos Westez and lived in Northbridge, Mass. He was a storyteller and earned money from selling his own line of teas from herbs that he collected in the woods around his home.

"It's always sad when the last living speaker of a language dies," Carl Teeter, emeritus professor of linguistics at Harvard University, said on Friday. "There were once 500 languages in North America. About a hundred are still spoken, and half of them are spoken by older people." Dr. Teeter said the Catawba language, like others, had died off because of prejudice. Not so long ago, he said, Americans who spoke Indian languages "weren't treated too well."

Dr. Teeter described Catawba, an oral language with no written form, as related to the Sioux family of languages. He said the similarity indicated that there may have been considerable movement among Indian tribes hundreds of years ago.

In the 1940's, Thunder Cloud made a complete recording of all he knew of the Catawba language for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. About that time, he also recorded some ancient Catawba songs for the Smithsonian Institution. Derek Jordan of Putney, Vt., a friend of Thunder Cloud's, recorded two albums of Catawba songs and legends by Thunder Cloud in 1990.

Mr. Jordan said Thunder Cloud had learned Catawba as a boy from his grandfather, Strong Eagle, and from tribal elders. Eventually, there were only two Catawba speakers left: Thunder Cloud and a woman, who died about 40 years ago.

Foxx Ayers of Columbia, S.C., a Catawba and friend of Thunder Cloud, recalled on Friday that he resisted his grandmother's efforts to teach him the language because he feared he would be ridiculed. "I wish now that I'd learned," said. Ayers, 71.

Mr. Ayers recalled one happy experiment with the language. One day years ago, he was visiting Thunder Cloud, who used to sell pottery made by Mr. Ayer's wife, Sarah, who is also a Catawba. Mr. Ayers's arms were full of pottery when he found his way blocked by Thunder Cloud's dog. The dog responded only to commands in Catawba. So Ayers tried one phrase he had heard Thunder Cloud use (roughly "Swie hay, tanty," or "Move, dog"), and the dog obeyed.

Alice Kasakoff, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina, said the conversion of many Catawbas after visits by Mormon missionaries to their enclave in South Carolina may have hastened the decline of the Indian language.

Estimates of the number of living Catawbas range from several hundred to more than 1,000. The nation's headquarters is in Rock Hill, S.C.

In its scarcity of close relationships, Thunder Cloud's life seemed to foreshadow the passing of the language only he spoke. Mr. Ayers said he recalled that Thunder Cloud was married for a time to a Blackfeet woman, but that the union dissolved.

Lenora Pena of Center Falls, R.I., who described herself as Thunder Cloud's closest friend, said he prayed each night in Catawba.

Thunder Cloud left no known survivors. Ms. Pena said that Thunder Cloud had a sister but that they had lost track of each other many years ago.
 

*****
 

There is no disrespect towards Red Thunder Cloud or the Catawba people intended by the editor in posting the following.  However, in researching Red Thunder Cloud's life, it quickly became abundantly clear that he has been the subject of controversy.
 

>From http://www.charlotte.com/observer/0505thundercloud.htm

Booster of Catawba language not Indian?
Imposter did good, anthropologist writes 

By DAVID PERLMUTT 
 

When the man known as Red Thunder Cloud died in 1996, his passing was widely lamented for taking the language of the S.C.-based Catawba Indians to the grave.

The New York Times said he was "the last human link to the ancient language of his people."

Atlantic Monthly: "To a certain extent the Catawbas died with Red Thunder Cloud."

And the Times of London: "Another Red Indian language was buried yesterday, with the funeral in Massachusetts of Red Thunder Cloud." Now a long-held suspicion about Chief Cloud is out in the open. Not only was he not a member of the Catawba tribe, he wasn't a Native American. He was black and a descendant on his mother's side of a prominent Baltimore family.

So writes Smithsonian anthropologist and ethnologist Ives Goddard in an article to be released today by the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.

Red Thunder Cloud told people his real name was Carlos Ashibie Hawk Westez, the son of a Catawba mother and a Honduran father. And since 1938, when he wrote noted anthropologist Frank Speck that he was "a 16-year-old Catawba Indian," he lived his life as a Catawba until he died, perhaps knowing as much of the tribe's language as anybody.

But Goddard, driven by curiosity about the chief's claims, discovered his real name was Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West.

His maternal grandfather was William Ashbie Hawkins, one of Baltimore's first black lawyers, and his father was Cromwell West, a Newport, R.I., druggist. Goddard drew his conclusions after searching birth and death certificates, and census and work records in Newport. No one knows why he created the elaborate deception.

"He lived a masquerade, but in a sense really did become the last speaker of the Catawba language," Goddard said in an interview. "Why I think this is a great story is that he decided as a teen-ager not to be black for whatever reasons. He couldn't pass himself as white, so he became a Catawba. He learned their language from the last speakers and became a very significant person in his little niche.

"He went to the Catawbas in South Carolina and helped them with their language program. Everybody who met him liked him. He didn't deny his own heritage, just reinvented it into Indians."

The Catawba tribe today has about 2,600 members, about 1,200 of whom live around the reservation in York County, S.C. The tribe's language began to fade when Mormon missionaries came to the reservation near Fort Mill, S.C., in the late 1800s to convert Catawbas. It further declined when Catawbas began marrying outside the tribe.

In his 1938 letter to Speck, Thunder Cloud claimed he was raised among the Narragansett Indians in Rhode Island, and was living with the Shinnecock Indians on Long Island, N.Y.

He reported he planned to visit "my home down on the Catawba reservation" in South Carolina. He wrote the Catawba language was still alive and "there are two others who still speak the language down to Catawba." He signed the letter "Chief Red Thunder Cloud."

Linguist Frank Seibert learned of Thunder Cloud when he visited the reservation in 1941 and met with him in New York a month later. "Seibert often recalled his surprise on being approached by what appeared to be a young black man wrapped Indian-style in a blanket," Goddard wrote. Thunder Cloud told Seibert and others his grandmother, Ada McMechen Hawkins, was Catawba and he learned the language from his grandfather, "William Ashibie Hawk," whom he called Strong Eagle.

He visited the Catawba reservation for two weeks in 1944 and spent six months there the following year.

Gilbert Blue, the Catawba's chief for 27 years, remembers Red Thunder Cloud lived with Blue's grandfather, Sam Blue, generally recognized as the last person fluent in the tribal tongue.

The two fished and hunted together, and sat - usually with Sam Blue's sister, Sally Gordon - and discussed the language.

Gilbert Blue couldn't be reached this week, but told The Observer in 1996 he didn't know of any of Thunder Cloud's ancestry on the tribal rolls. Until his death, Thunder Cloud made his living as a Catawba singer, dancer and storyteller, traveling the country and Europe with a dance troupe. He also sold a line of herbal teas, using recipes he learned from other American Indians.

UNCCharlotte English professor Blair Rudes, a Catawba expert who is finishing a paper on Thunder Cloud, said he was adept at learning languages, "but was a speaker of the Catawba as a second language. He was a very good speaker, but many of his pronunciations were awkward and contained errors. Because he outlived Sam Blue, one could say he took fluency with him."

Still, Gilbert Blue cringed when he read that Thunder Cloud's death meant the death of the Catawba language. In the 1996 interview, he said, "Our language is well-recorded, and we're beginning to teach language classes" at the reservation near Fort Mill.

Before he died in 1959, Sam Blue told anthropologist William Sturtevant that he doubted Thunder Cloud was Indian.

"His successful lifelong masquerade puts him in a class with the Englishman who was the Ojibway Grey Owl and the African American who was the Blackfoot Buffalo Child Long Dance, both the subject of films," Goddard wrote.

"But Red Thunder Cloud's accomplishment in becoming a speaker of Catawba puts him outside the class of ordinary impostors. His work was not insignificant."