Born: 1855 in Canada, probably at Odanak or Durham
Annie Fuller
Ne-Do-Ba (Friends)
Died: January 16, 1903
Married: Silas Fuller
Children:Clara Maudie Fuller
Ann Jane Paul Denis Fuller was an Abenaki basket maker, and may have been a grand daughter of Mitchell Sabattis. She also worked as a photographer's and artist's model known as Falling Star.
She had a cabin and a seasonal shop at Rainbow Lake, selling baskets to tourists from Paul Smith's Hotel. 1
Plattsburgh Republican, January 24, 1903
The granddaughter of Sebatis, [sic] the famous Adirondack guide and Abeneki [sic] Indian, has died at her home at Luzerne. “Falling Star,” or Mrs. Annie Fuller, was her name. As an artists' model she was well known in New York, her unusual type of beauty making her a favorite subject.
Glens Falls Morning Star, January 22, 1903
Falling Star in Abenaka Costume, c. 1900
Courtesy of the Adirondack Experience
Death of "Falling Star"
The Well-Known Indian,
Occurred Monday at Luzerne
A Luzerne dispatch to the New York Sun gives the following sketch of this well known person:
Mrs. Annie Fuller, better known as "Falling Star," the noted Abenaki Indian beauty, died here Monday night. "Falling Star" was a favorite model for the artists of New York City, and was considered by them as a most perfect type of Indian beauty. She was in great demand for portraits and Indian life scenes. There is a fine bust of her at the museum of natural history in New York by Casper Magee. She was well known at the sportsmen's exhibits, and in her tepee was a most successful saleswoman. As a basket maker she was an expert. She was frequently invited by the society people in New York to attend their social teas, and in her Indian costume was the attraction.
She was the granddaughter of Sebatis, the well known Adirondack guide, a chief who boasted of his white friends, and so well known by hunters that a mountain of the Adirondacks was named for him, also a station and post office on the Adirondack railroad.
"Falling Star" never fully recovered from a railroad accident of last year, since which time she had been a cripple, though able to use her hands, and continued to weave her exquisite baskets. She was the sole support of an aged mother.
New York Times, April 30, 1899
INDIAN WOMAN IN NEW YORK
Life as Hard for Her as Any Other Business Woman in the City.
FALLING STAR IS A MODEL
She Poses in Costume and Likes to Make Money, but Would Rather Live in the Woods—Early Days.
To be an Indian woman in New York does not mean any more than to be any other kind of a woman. There is no more romance about it, no fresh air and green fields, not much more than traditions of these things. There are the same noisy streets for the Indian as for all other women; the same conditions surround her, and though she may make sweet-grass baskets, string quaint Indian beads and make moccasins, she does it in the same spirit that other women teach or play the keys of the typewriter or do any of the thousand and one things that the 10,000 women said to be supporting themselves in New York are doing, and for the same reason to earn money for herself and the members of her family dependent upon her. When the Indian woman comes to New York she takes up the white woman's burden, not as Kipling tells the white man to take up his burden, but in another and more limited sense, but just as real a burden. Romance is delightful and the word Indian suggests delightful possibilities of canoes and tents and a. happy dolce far niente life in the open air when it is always Summer. But the dolce far niente disappears with the inrush of civilization.
So when a reporter went to call upon Falling Star the other day it was to call upon a regular business woman, though one whose business is not so overcrowded as some other lines of women's employment. It was at the basement door of an apartment house, in a clean and pleasant part of West Twenty-fifth Street, that the reporter knocked, and after a few moments a musical voice called in answer:
"Who's there?"
"It's I," said the reporter.
"Wait a minute," said the voice, which was that of Falling Star, " and I will get the key."
Then the door was opened by a sweet faced woman, in a black gown cut out a little at the throat and with half long sleeves, a very comfortable and hygienic gown for housework, for it was Monday, and Falling Star had been engaged, like all other good housekeepers, in doing her week's laundry work.
It was a pleasant little room, that front room with a scent of sweet grass pervading it: a little open trunk showing all sorts of bright colored splints that Falling Star uses for her basket work, while big baskets stood around and smaller ones hung upon the wall. There were strings of Indian beads hanging over the bureau, mountain greens decorating the door and other parts of the room and the part of Falling Star's Indian dress that she calls her overskirt, which is a strictly modern and civilized name for the strips of leather hung with big beads of Green and blue and brass, which is such a characteristic part of an Indian costume, and which certainly is an overskirt, though that is a prosaic name for it.
Falling Star's little apartment has one peculiarity, which she explained. She has only one key for the front and rear doors, so if she is in the back part of it and has the key there, if a caller comes to the front door she has to bring the key in, and then while the key is in the front part of the house if the milkman happens to come, it is necessary to run out to the back part of the house with it. This is inconvenient, and it explains why visitors have to be kept waiting sometimes.
This is Falling Star's Winter home. In the Summer she goes back to Rainbow Lake, where she has a cabin about four miles from Paul Smith's, and there she makes and sells her baskets and her bead work and dresses in a regular Indian costume, made for comfort, out of corduroy, which is less characteristic than the buckskin suit it replaces, though ornamented with beadwork in good colors, with a regard for effect. Falling Star has not had enough acquaintance with metropolitan milliners and modistes to have fashion take the place of a natural eye for color.
To say that Falling Star's particular line of business is not so overcrowded as some other lines of women's work is certainly true of the basket and bead work, but it may not be entirely so of her chief profession in New York, which is that of a model; the words "artist's model" appear on her business cards. She has posed in her Indian costume at the Art League. at the Academy of Design, at Chase's School, and recently at the Museum of Natural History, where, in the anthropological department, there is to be a figure of Falling Star, Alauks Pe-net-la, the Abenaki Indian woman, sitting on a log making baskets, and the figure will wear one of Falling Star's real buckskin costumes, which the Museum is to buy.
"But I only posed for the head and the hand and the foot." says Falling Star, in speaking of it. "A white woman is going to pose for the rest of the body. I wouldn't .do that; you couldn't get me to for all New York. I wouldn't do it if I starved. And no Indian woman would. No Indian man would either. They wanted some Indian men at Chase's School at one time, and they asked if I knew of any. I did; I knew two young men. They were not of my tribe, but they were Indians, and they went up there to pose. They told them the first time to go and get ready for the nude.
"Nude?' said they to me, “what does that word mean?
“It means that you are to pose without your clothes,” I said.
”No,” they answered, we wouldn't do that if they would give us all the world.” And they wouldn't."
"It was a good while ago," Falling Star went on in telling the history of her life and how she came to be a business woman in New York, "that my family left Canada and came down to the Adirondacks, not far from Paul Smith's, in a canoe. I was a little girl then. We came all the way by water, stopping at night and camping along the rivers and lakes, and along Lake Champlain until we came down into the mountains where we intended to stop. We were the first of the Indians to come down. We settled there and built a log house for Winter and made baskets and moccasins and gloves and mittens just about as we do still, though there were no sweet-grass baskets then.
"We knew the sweet grass in Canada, the old people used to gather it, and we have some strands of it now that my great-great-grandmother had. We liked it for the odor, which it kept for a long time, though we did not know about making it into baskets then. I had one brother and two sisters. One sister died a long time ago. And I had a little daughter who lived to be fourteen, when she died, and I have been very sad ever since. I was left a widow when she was only ten months old. We call Lake Lucerne our real home, and we have a cabin there, and we shall always go back. for there we have a lot in the cemetery where the members of our family are buried.
"It was not until three years ago that I came to New York for the Commercial Fair. Then some artists asked me to pose for them, so I have been here Winters ever since. And I like to be in New York because I can get work and send all the money I do not need for living home. But I would so much rather be back in the woods.
"My mother has been back this Winter visiting her old home, for the first time in twenty-five or thirty years. That is a log cabin just outside the reservation in Canada, where she was born, and where I was born. Her sisters live there now, all alone, and make baskets and have a little farm. I have somewhere the first doll that I ever had there. It was made by my great-grandmother of corn husks with the corn silk for hair. My first real doll my great-grandmother brought me from Saratoga. That was a great place for Indians, and one time she came home and she had something in the bosom of her dress and when she took it out it was a wax doll with real hair for me. I was the only child that had that kind and every one came to see it. I named It Molly Louise after my mother's sister, because I thought a great deal of her. I don't think I named my first doll; only called it Kujokon, which is the Indian word for doll."
Falling Star has some interesting treasures besides the strands of sweet grass that her great-great-grandmother plaited and the little old husk doll, but she does not keep them in New York. The one that she prizes most is the board that she was strapped upon when she was a mite of an Indian baby. It is a tapering piece of board with a. little foot-piece at one end and an arch of wood to protect the head at the other end, while the back is elaborately carved, the work of Falling Star's father, in designs of Indians and moose and bears. On the board the baby was strapped, wearing a little blanket slip with holes cut for head and arms and a rabbit skin underneath for a bed. Then there are strings of wampum that she wears with her Indian costume, and a necklace of Buffalo calves' teeth that is very old. These she would not part with for any money. There is a headdress with not two beads alike in it, a bead belt and other interesting parts of the costume, but these are not such treasures.
Next Winter Falling Star probably will stay in the woods, for she has been asked to go to the Paris Expositition, and there will be a great quantity of Indian work to get ready for the trip.
External link:
Footnotes:
1. Melissa Otis, Rural Indigenousness, p. 186
