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life | angel de cora
TEXT BY JENNIFER TOBIAS
Artist, designer, writer, and educator Angel De Cora (1871–1919) sought to integrate Na- tive American heritage into the contempo- rary design practices of her day, especially in the field of publishing. Declaring in 1911 that the “Indian’s artistic conception is well worth recognition,” she believed that “designing is the best channel in which to convey the native qualities of the Indian’s decorative talent.”
De Cora, born Hinook-Mahiwi-Kalinaka, “fleecy cloud floating in place” or “woman coming on the clouds in glory,” belonged to a prominent Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) family in Nebraska. They raised her to have “the general bearing of a well-counseled Indian child,” steeped in her family’s traditions. She recalled, “A very promising career must have been laid out for me by my grandparents, but a strange white man interrupted it.”
ANGEL DE CORA Title page and lettering for Natalie Curtis, The Indians’ Book, 1907. When De Cora presented a sample of her lettering design to the publisher, the in-house designer said, “Get
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Lured by the anonymous man’s promise of a trip on a train, De Cora was stolen from her family and brought to the Hampton Institute in Virginia. The school, founded
to teach practical arts to emancipated African Americans, expanded its mission to forcefully assimilate Native children.
De Cora went on to study at Smith College and then joined a new commer- cial art program at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia. She studied with the illustra- tor Howard Pyle before ultimately rejecting his pedagogy. “I am an Indian,” a colleague recalled her saying. “I don’t want to draw just like a white man.”
In 1906, De Cora accepted a mandate to reconceive the art program at the Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Her conditions: “I shall not be expected to teach in the white man’s way but shall be given complete liberty to develop the art
that girl to do all the lettering in the book and you will have something unlike anything that’s ever been done with the alphabet before.” Drawings by Native artists represent each chapter’s culture.