Literacy, Toys, and Social Roles: Childrearing and Subject Making on the 19th Century Wisconsin Frontier

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The "lead rush" initiated a mass migration of Euro-American miners, military officers, and government agents to the southwestern Wisconsin territory during the first half of the nineteenth century. Likely implementing prospecting methods developed by indigenous Meskwaki and Ho-Chunk peoples, multiethnic mining communities emerged in areas such as Gratiots Grove. Several of these populations included Euro-American women and children. These women were often responsible for instructing and enforcing what was viewed as proper behaviors and performance in their children, a task often employed through guided practice with appropriate forms of material culture. This paper will specifically explore educational materials associated with Sarah and Henry Gratiot and their affluent Euro-American family who were commissioned by the United States government as agents to the Ho-Chunk nation from 1825 to 1836. Presence of educational materials and toys suggests that the Gratiot children were taught culturally appropriate forms of play and social engagement that were used to invoke and maintain familial, communal, and national bonds through shared communicative and habitual practices. These objects also visually separated the Gratiot family from the larger mining and indigenous communities of the surrounding area and associated the family with emerging conceptions of whiteness and prosperity in the United States.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25603