LaPorte visitor explores his Lakota, French roots

By Cherry Sokoloski
North Forty News

Brinks family are honorary Lakota

For Owen Cuny, returning to his family's old stomping grounds in LaPorte has special significance.

Cuny, a resident of Rapid City, S.D., and member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, has found ancestral roots going back 150 years in this community along the Cache la Poudre River. His history is also the history of LaPorte, where French-Canadian fur trappers mingled with - and often married - members of the Lakota tribe.

The 69-year-old Cuny, a retired substance abuse counselor who worked on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in South Dakota, discovered LaPorte in 2000, through a friend who also had ancestors here. Since then, he has made frequent trips to the area, exploring much of the river and also dipping a fishing line in its waters.

"I feel a spiritual connection to the land," he said.

Cuny has learned much about his ancestry through Rose Brinks and her book, "The History of the Bingham Hill Cemetery," which is filled with her research about early LaPorte pioneers. The cemetery was set aside as a burial ground in the 1860s.

For Native Americans, remembering and honoring ancestors is very important. Cuny has four ancestors buried in the cemetery, and he enjoys visiting their graves.

"It gives me a special feeling when I'm here - all those ghosts from the past," he said. "We're proud of our ancestry, both French and Lakota."

It's not difficult to find the graves of Cuny's ancestors, especially the two going back the furthest. His great-grandfather was Alphonse LaRocque, the only French-Canadian buried in the Bingham Hill Cemetery. His great-great grandmother was Jennie McGaa Brown, who was half Lakota and half white. Her wedding took place on the farm homesteaded by John Provost and Ben Claymore, which is now home to the Brinks family.

Brown's son, William Denver McGaa, was the first child, white or Native American, born in the frontier town of Denver.

The demographics of LaPorte changed drastically in the 1870s. LaRocque and McGaa Brown were the last of Cuny's ancestors to live in the community, because in 1878, all Native Americans in this area were removed - by government edict - to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Some think the uprooting of Native people was a punishment for the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, where Gen. George Armstrong Custer was killed.

In the 1878 removal order, white men who were married to Lakota women had the option of going to the reservation. Almost all of them left with their wives and spent the rest of their lives in South Dakota.

That explains why LaRocque was the only French-Canadian buried in LaPorte. He was married to a full-blooded Lakota woman but died in 1877, a year before the exodus. Jennie McGaa Brown also died before the removal, in early 1878.

Cuny has great sympathy for the plight of the Lakota who had to move from their homes in LaPorte. "They had a good life here," he noted. "They had houses, livestock and the river. They could make a living. On the reservation, they had to rely on the government."

Down through the generations, Cuny's lineage became predominantly Lakota. His two grandmothers were full-blooded Lakota, and one of them, Josephine, refused to live in a house. She slept in a tent throughout her life.

Cuny's family members were no strangers to the scourges of discrimination and unfair treatment. His parents went to Indian schools, his father to a government boarding school and his mother to a mission school on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

"Children were mistreated at those schools," Cuny noted, and his father ran away several times. He was jailed at the school at age 11 and was not allowed to go home for the summer.

Cuny was raised in Butte, Mont., where his father was a miner. There was plenty of discrimination in Butte. The majority of residents, he said, "looked down on any race that wasn't white."

Through her research, Brinks knows the genealogy of many of the families represented in the Bingham Hill Cemetery. She has shared this knowledge with visitors like Cuny over the years.

"I think it is awesome that Rose has taken care of the cemetery all these years," he said.

For Cuny, discovering LaPorte was "a window that opened to me" for connecting with his ancestors.

"I can put myself back there in time. This was my Tiyospaye," he said. That's the Lakota word for "family."