Laura Cornelius Kellogg (September 10, 1880 – 1947) was an Oneida leader, author, orator, activist and visionary. Kellogg, a descendant of distinguished Oneida leaders, was a founder of the Society of American Indians. Kellogg was an advocate for the renaissance and sovereignty of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, and fought for communal tribal lands, tribal autonomy and self-government. Popularly known as "Indian Princess Wynnogene," Kellogg was the voice of the Oneidas and Haudenosaunee people in national and international forums. During the 1920s and 1930s, Kellogg and her husband, Orrin J. Kellogg, pursued land claims in New York on behalf of the Six Nations people. Kellogg's "Lolomi Plan" was a Progressive Era alternative to Bureau of Indian Affairs control emphasizing indigenous American self-sufficiency, cooperative labor and organization, and capitalization of labor. According to historian Laurence Hauptman, "Kellogg helped transform the modern Iroquois, not back into their ancient League, but into major actors, activists and litigants in the modern world of the 20th century Indian politics."
Early life
Laura Cornelius Kellogg was born on the Oneida Indian Reservation at Green Bay, Wisconsin, one of five children of Adam Poe and Celicia Bread Cornelius. Her surviving siblings were Chester Poe Cornelius, Alice Cornelius, and Frank Ford Cornelius. Kellogg came from a distinguished lineage of Indian tribal leaders, which is said to have contributed a great deal to her racial pride of the Oneida heritage. Her paternal grandfather was John Cornelius, Oneida chief and brother of Jacob Cornelius, chief of the Orchard faction of Oneidas. Her maternal grandfather was Chief Daniel Bread, who helped find land for his people after the Oneidas were forcibly removed from New York State to Wisconsin in the early nineteenth century. Kellogg was also related to Elijah Skenandore, a prominent political figurehead for the Oneida in the nineteenth century, who was well known for his oratorical skills.
Unlike many of her contemporaries on the reservation, Cornelius managed to avoid the usual educational route to distant Indian Eastern boarding schools at Carlisle and Hampton. She attended Grafton Hall, a private finishing school administered by the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The school was within 60 miles of her home at Seymour, Wisconsin, and provided a setting that included mostly non-Indian women. Cornelius attributed her education to both her "time spent at the soup kettle on the reservation" as well as institutes of higher learning. This experience left Cornelius feeling more enlightened and enabled her to "appreciate the real values of truth." In 1898, Kellogg graduated with honors. Her graduation essay, "The Romans of America," compared the Iroquois Confederacy to the ancient Roman Empire. Her pride in her Iroquois roots provided her with a strong measure of self-confidence. After Kellogg graduated in 1898, she spent two years traveling around Europe. She later went on to study at Stanford, Barnard College, Columbia, Cornell, and The University of Wisconsin.
"Minnie", as she was known to her friends, taught briefly at the Oneida Indian Boarding School in Oneida, Wisconsin, as well as at the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, from 1903 to 1905. On May 12, 1903, some 80 miles southeast of Riverside, the Bureau of Indian Affairs evicted a community of Cupeño Indians from their traditional home on the Warner Springs Ranch. Kellogg was reported to have played a crucial role in persuading the Cupeño not to resist relocation to the Pala Reservation, 40 miles away. California newspapers dubbed her "An Indian Heroine" and "The Indian Joan of Arc" for her conciliatory speech reported to have prevented an uprising. The eviction of the Warner Ranch Indians was reported as the crowning crime of the white men against the California Indians who had lawful title to their lands. That year, Kellogg published her only surviving poem, "A Tribute to the Future of My Race," which she recited during the commencement exercises at Sherman Institute. This poem reflects on contact and the relations between European and indigenous people, noting "Every human heart is human." Of Europeans, she writes kindly and with hope "Ye spring from noble warrior blood, as brave as Saxon, Roman, Greek, a race of kingly men, May your careers be as complete as the arches of your mater halls."
In 1902, early literary ambitions led to the publication of two stories "The Legend of the Bean" and "The Sacrifice of the White Dog" in a publication of the Episcopal Church Mission to the Oneidas. In 1903, Kellogg said, "Perhaps it seems strange to an outsider, for I know the ideas that prevail in regards to Indian life, but to do something great when I grew up was impressed upon me from my cradle from my parents, and I've no other ambition and I have known no other ambition."
Between 1898 and 1910 Kellogg continued her education, traveling for two years in Europe and studying at Stanford University, Barnard College, the New York School of Philanthropy, Cornell University, and the University of Wisconsin. At Barnard, she wrote a short story for the college's literary magazine and was mentioned in the college yearbook. Kellogg never finished her education at any of the aforementioned institutions but is still considered by historians to be "among the very best educated [among] Native American women" in her time.
Princess Wynnogene
Kellogg was the voice of the Oneidas and the Six Nations of the Iroquois on the national and international scene. In 1908, Kellogg embarked on a two-year European journey. In England, she immediately made an impression on British society and the international press. "Wherever she has gone, society has simply 'ovated' her, and were she to remain in England long, she would doubtless be the leader of the circle all her own." While in London, Kellogg requested in a letter to the U.S. Department of the Interior that she be presented at Court. The request was denied, evidently because the American ambassador was disinclined. In 1909, called "Princess Neoskalita" by the Los Angeles Times, Kellogg said she "did not consider her education complete until she had some knowledge of the social life, the art and literature of the French and English." Kellogg also wanted to forge connections and begin a movement in America to work to reorganize Indian affairs. The Des Moines Daily News reported that Kellogg was in London "attempting to set on foot a movement for the improvement her tribe, the Iroquois."
While touring Europe, Kellogg developed a particular interest in the Garden city movement of urban planning in England, Germany and France, and visioned the model adapted to reservations to generate Oneida economic self-sufficiency and tribal self-governance. Kellogg would pursue these goals the rest of her life.
Early newspapers dubbed Kellogg "Princess Neoskalita" and "The Indian Joan of Arc." Later press articles billed Kellogg "Indian Princess Wynnogene." "Wynnogene, a real Indian princess, has gone to Washington to be the Joan of Arc for her people. With the Lolomi movement, of which she is the founder, she proposes to lead 300,000 Indians out of what she calls "the bondage of bureaucracy into the self-respect of complete self-government." The Syracuse Herald billed her the "Fighting Squaw of the Six Nations."
By 1911, the national press compared Cornelius and other early leaders of the Society of American Indians to Booker T. Washington in their calls for self-help and the uplift of the "Indian race." As one of the founders of the Society of American Indians, Kellogg asked the leadership to make a commitment to Indian self-sufficiency and independence. While her message did not prove to be overwhelmingly popular, Kellogg did find a constituency among the Iroquois people. After the Society's Columbus meeting in 1911, the New York Tribune hailed Cornelius as a scholar, a social worker, "one of the moving spirits in the new American Indian Association," and "a woman of rare intellectual gifts."
In 1919, Kellogg appeared before the League of Nations calling for justice for American Indians. "You Americans have rescued distracted Belgium from the atrocity of the Hun, you have poured money and sympathy into starving Poland, you have sent your armies into riotous Russia. Through all the world you are mighty righter of wrongs, the savior of oppressed peoples. And in your midst a people have cried in vain."
The Washington Herald published an interview with Kellogg where she supported women's suffrage, emphasizing Iroquois women's equality of civic powers with the men. Female leaders among the Oneida were not uncommon. "It is a cause of astonishment to us that you white women are only now, in this twentieth century, claiming what has been the Indian woman's privilege as far back as history traces." The Iroquois had a communal system of land distribution and the tribe gave tracts to clans for further distribution among households for cultivation. Clan Mothers decided any and all issues involving territory, including where a community was to be built and how land was to be used. Since land tracts were the concern of the women, it was the women's job to cultivate food and not the men, The Clan Mothers' Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans. Food from such lands, called kěndiǔ"gwǎ'ge' hodi'yěn'tho, would be used at festivals and large council gatherings.
Anthropologist William N. Fenton observed Iroquois leadership: "The prophet who would succeed among the Iroquois must speak in ancient tongues, he must use the old words, and he must relate his program to the old ways. He is a conservator at the same time he is a reformer. All of the Iroquois reformers have been traditionalists. This is one of the reasons that the Iroquois culture has endured so long."
Orrin J. Kellogg On April 22, 1912, Laura Cornelius married Orrin J. Kellogg, an attorney of distant Seneca ancestry. Kellogg's husband supported her work but maintained a low profile; one newspaper wrote the best description of Orrin Kellogg would be "as the husband of Mrs. Kellogg."
Shortly after their marriage, Laura Cornelius Kellogg's loyalty to the Oneida tribe came into question. In a local newspaper called the Tulsa Daily World, an anonymous member of the Oneida tribe described Laura Cornelius Kellogg as a "ready borrower" with the "habit of making little touches wherever she finds any of her people". This accusation alluded to Mrs. Kellogg's history of using other people's money to fund her projects. Kellogg's projects were often thought to be very risky and her critics described them as "self-serving". As a result, both of the Kelloggs were arrested with the charges of "Pretense of Indian Agents with intent to invest Indian funds". The charges against Laura Cornelius Kellogg and her husband were eventually dropped; however, because of her actions, Kellogg was removed from the Society of American Indians (SAI). Reportedly, Kellogg thought her removal was "an injustice and humiliation". Deeply hurt, Kellogg never forgave the SAI.
Kellogg's reputation was not completely ruined. After writing Our Democracy and the American Indian, Kellogg was once again recognized as a "leading crusader for Indian rights".
Kellogg's Thesis Kellogg argued for the value of an "American Indian" identity linked to traditional knowledge of the elders. In 1911, Kellogg declared before the Inaugural Conference of the Society of American Indians,