By Tom Ganser
Correspondent
On Feb. 2, Karyn Saemann opened the Spring 2015 Fairhaven Lecture Series with a lecture entitled “Stockbridge Indian Electa Quinney: Wisconsin’s First Public School Teacher.”
Saemann is the author “Electa Quinney: Stockbridge Teacher,” a 2014 Wisconsin Historical Society Press Badger Biography for young readers.
“I have been tremendously privileged over the past four years to learn and write about Electa Quinney, and share that story today with you,” Saemann said.
Born in New York in 1807, Electa’s father and grandfather were Stockbridge Indian chiefs.
Electa moved to the Fox River area near Kaukauna in 1828 with her family and other members of her tribe. Saemann pointed out that in 1828, based on inventories of wolves and population figures for Wisconsin at that time, “there were more wolves than people.”
In 1828 Electa became Wisconsin’s “very first public school teacher” when she began teaching in a one-room log schoolhouse on the banks of the Fox River.
Electa was paid by the public funds of the Stockbridge Indian tribe, not as part of tuition paid by the parents of children attending a private school.
The tribe had decided to use community resources “to pay a teacher to educate all of the children in our community, whether or not their families can afford to send them to school.
“The Stockbridge Indians in 1828 were very far ahead of the educational curve in Wisconsin and nationally,” Saemann commented.
One of Electa’s former students recorded that Electa’s school was “modeled after the best public schools of New England.”
Saemann said that this was a “tremendous compliment at the time for an Indian teacher in the woods of Wisconsin (who) taught math, reading, public speaking, geography and spelling, and began each day with a prayer.”
Four years later and continuing until 1836, Electa taught at a school in Smithfield. She then moved to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma with her first husband, Daniel Adams, a Mohawk Indian and a Methodist minister, and their three boys.
Electa return to Wisconsin after her first and second husbands died, to live near Lake Winnebago on a farmstead she inherited.
Breaking rank with some Stockbridge Indians, Electa became an American citizen when she was 71, four years before her death in 1882.
“She was an independent woman,” Saemann said. “She made her down decisions and that’s certainly another hallmark of Electa. She did what worked best for her at the time.”
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