Joseph Napoleon Bourassa

Interpreter, writer and a contested political life

Joseph Napoleon Bourassa left more than a name on treaty records. He compiled Potawatomi vocabulary and wrote an account of the chief Wah-bahn-se for an English-language newspaper. Those works preserve two forms of his labour: translating words and carrying a remembered life into print.

Born in Michigan on March 19, 1810, Joseph was a son of Daniel Bourassa II and Theotis Pisange. His education took him from Carey Mission near Niles in southwestern Michigan to study in New York and then to Choctaw Academy in Kentucky. He became an English teacher and an interpreter. The tribal account places him in removal negotiations in 1837 and later among the Potawatomi communities established west of the Mississippi.

Education offered him access to institutions that were also instruments of pressure on Native communities. The Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s historical account describes Choctaw Academy’s assimilationist purpose and explains how Bourassa’s language skills helped him represent Potawatomi interests in dealings with the United States. His family experienced the losses that followed forced removal from Indiana.

His vocabulary dates to 1843. The manuscript held by the Smithsonian is a later copy, made circa 1890, rather than the original physical manuscript. The Smithsonian traces the original to the collection of philologist John Brown Dunbar and tentatively attributes its own copy and annotations to librarian Wilberforce Eames. That chain of copying matters: Bourassa’s linguistic work continued to be consulted after his death, even though the surviving object is not necessarily in his hand.

In March 1857 the Kansas City Enterprise published his account of Wah-bahn-se in two instalments. Bourassa wrote from within the community he described, referring to national customs and recounting stories told by the chief. His narrative includes hunting, warfare, captivity, diplomacy and personal conduct. It is not a uniformly flattering portrait: alongside courage and political skill, it recounts killings and violent reprisals. Bourassa was the writer and transmitter of those accounts.

The newspaper announced that the account came from a larger work on Indian customs intended for publication by Harper. The Kansas Historical Society’s later editors found no evidence that the proposed book appeared.

Bourassa also served in the treaty and governmental structures that shaped Potawatomi landholding. Tribal history places him in the 1846 negotiations and on the business committee involved in the decisions of the 1860s. Those responsibilities were contested. The Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s discussion contrasts communal landholding with individual allotments and reports historian William Unrau’s criticism of government-backed leadership and railroad interests. His mixed ancestry and Western education helped shape both his access to authority and disputes over that authority.

His family life included four marriages: to Memetikosiwike, Mahnees, Mary Nadeau and Elizabeth Curley. Mary McDowell was an adopted daughter, a distinction preserved in the tribal account. Although allotted land in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, Joseph remained in Kansas. The Citizen Potawatomi account records that he died of pneumonia at his sister’s home in St. Marys, Kansas, on October 29, 1877.

The family account preserves his mother’s names as Theotis or Theotiste Pisange, also Aranwaiske. It names Joseph, Josephine, May, James, Mary, Lucille and Adamantine among his children, without resolving every repeated-name identity. The tribal-history summary also describes his English, French and Potawatomi language skills, his signing of the 1846 treaty, and service as a community representative and healer.

The burial listing places Joseph Napoleon Bourassa at Mount Calvary Cemetery, Saint Marys, Pottawatomie County, Kansas, United States.