Ancestors

Elizabeth (LaMere) Decora was a Native American and member of the Ho-Chunk tribe.

Biography

Mrs. David (LaMere) DeCora was born about 1845 and died in the late 1880s.

"Catherine Armel, Oliver’s first born, married Oliver Lamere, a Frenchman from Canada who located first at Lake Koshkonong. When the Winnebagoes went to Long Prairie, he went with them, making several trips to Wisconsin, finally locating in the vicinity of Madison, where he died. He had three sons, Moses, Joseph, and Frank, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary. Elizabeth was the mother of Angel Decora." (Jipson, 256)

"[Angel DeCora's] mother was a member of the LaMere family, also prominent among the Winnebago, and had been educated at a convent. After the death of both her parents in the late 1880's, Angel was watched over by her uncle who was a LaMere." (McAnulty, 144)

Angel DeCora says in her autobiography: " I was born in a wigwam, of Indian parents. ... My mother, in her childhood, had had a little training in a convent, but when she married my father she gave up all her foreign training and made a good, industrious Indian wife. During the summers we lived on the Reservation, my mother cultivating her garden and my father playing the chief's son."

Mrs. DeCora (LaMere) was the aunt of Radin's translator, Oliver LaMere, who therefore shared grandparents with Angel DeCora. (McAnulty, 144)

Sources

• Sarah McAnulty, "Angel DeCora: American Indian Artist and Educator," Nebraska History, 57 (1976): 142-199.
• "Angel DeCora— An Autobiography," The Red Man, 3, #7 (March 1911): 279-285.
• Norton William Jipson, Story of the Winnebagoes (Chicago: The Chicago Historical Society, 1923). This is an unpublished typescript.

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