By Dawn Walschinski – Kalihwisaks
It took 15 years for Roberta “Bobbie” Capasso to finish her book “Sky Woman Lives in Me” though the process may have started when she was seven-years-old.
“When I was about seven I saw a picture of my great-great-grandmother on display. Elizabeth Hill Huff Denny, in the Milwaukee Public Museum with a bunch of black and white pictures of other Indians. I didn’t know what tribe, I didn’t know who she was, I didn’t know why it was on display … but I kept thinking about that particular picture. I didn’t know at the time that we were related,” said Bobbie.
She saw the same picture on her sister’s wall in 2000 and asked her where she got it.
“That’s your great-great-grandmother, Bobbie. Didn’t you know that?” she said.
Bobbie began researching the life story of her great-grandmother Sophia Huff Powless and her sister Lilly who as teenagers were taken from their mother and sent to Carlisle Boarding School in Pennsylvania.
“They were taken away … because their mother, Elizabeth, refused to assimilate,” said Bobbie.
Sophia was sent from Carlisle to work as a servant for a Quaker family in New Jersey where she lived for 10 years.
“When I was a little girl hearing that, I didn’t understand why my great -grandmother had to live with Quakers, that was her family now, and it bothered me,” said Bobbie. “Part of the money she earned from there would go back to Carlisle.”
After 11 years away from home, Sophia returned to Oneida for a summer visit, but instead fell in love and married Theodore Hyson Powless. Her employer traveled by train to get Sophia to come back to New Jersey, but she refused.
Capasso’s husband Charles “Chick” Capasso says Bobbie put a lot of shoe leather into her research. For example, the couple traveled to New Jersey to try and find the house where her great-grandmother had worked.
“She just goes though the phone book and whatnot and looks for Tomlinsons,” he said. “We walked up to this man outside a Victorian house, and lo and behold, his mother was a Tomlinson who lived a mile away from the same house where Sophia spent 10 years. This guy’s mother was still alive.”
Bobbie was able to find the house and take a tour.
“That was the moment where it all became tangible,” said Chick. “She walked these floors, she walked in this house, she spent 10 years in this house.”
Bobbie went through a lot of archives and did a lot of research to complete her book.
“I’m glad I did it. I thought it would never end … I thought I was giving birth to an elephant,” said Bobbie.
Through the process, she was able to reflect on her own experiences growing up without knowledge of her culture and history.
“I didn’t know I was Indian. I would hear ‘you’re Oneida, Bobbie,’ but what’s that? Nothing was handed down, it was taboo from the elders,” said Bobbie. “I didn’t know anything about my Oneida heritage, my language, my culture, and that I wasn’t allowed to learn that, I really got mad. I got mad that they took away Elizabeth Hill’s kids.”
Bobbie wanted to share her family’s story so it wouldn’t be forgotten.
“I wanted people to know this story. This is not a known story here in America,” said Bobbie.
Bobbie’s book Sky Woman Lives in Me can be ordered from Lulu.com in hard or soft cover or as an eBook or on Amazon.com.
