Jessie Louise Donaldson-Anne Banks Papers, 1922-1985

Jessica Louise Donaldson Schultz Graham was born in Minnesota on August 17, 1887. She received her BA from the University of Minnesota in 1913. From 1915-1918, she taught in rural schools in Gallatin County, Montana. From 1918 to 1929, she taught at Montana State College (now Montana State University, Bozeman) in the English Department as an Instructor, Assistant Professor and was Acting Head of the Department during 1923-1924. During her time there, she directed a pageant of the Gallatin Valley in 1919 and in 1927, the production "The Masque of the Absaroka" depicting the Crow Indian cosmogony that involved Native Americans, students and townspeople. Interested in furthering programs for women students, she helped found Cap and Gown (the precursor to Mortar Board), the Women's Athletic Association and most notably the Spurs, for which she wrote the initiation ritual. She resigned from the college in 1929 and earned her MA in Anthropology from the University of California in 1930. In 1931, she married James Willard Schultz, noted for his books about the Blackfeet Indians, with whom she co-authored the book "The Sun God's Children" (a story of the Blackfeet) and started a career as a worker at the Blackfeet Indian Reservation at Browning, Montana. There she became the Community Worker under the WPA from 1937 to 1941. She helped to establish a craft shop at St. Mary, Montana for Blackfeet that featured their native costumes, equipment and tools. These craft industries eventually became a cooperative that substantially raised the income of the Blackfeet. She fostered the careers of individual Indian artists and was instrumental in the establishment of the Plains Indian Museum in Browning. She started a lending library and did social welfare work among the members of the tribe. From 1941 to 1953, she served the same type of position with the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming for the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes. The cooperative movement she started was embraced by many Northern Plains Indians and still functions across many reservations of the west. Following the death of James Willard Schultz in 1947 and Jessie's retirement in 1953, she married Harry L. Graham and moved to California where she continued to work on fictional and factual writings about Native Americans of North America. Her published works appeared in Ladies Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion, Popular Mechanics, Montana the Magazine of Western History, and various educational journals. She worked extensively on a primer series about Native Americans for young school children that was never published. She continued to visit Montana and the Blackfeet [Sisika (Blackfoot), Kainah (Blood) and Peigan] of Montana and Canada during the summer months. In 1961, she was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Montana State University. In the late 1960s, she donated her collection of Indian artifacts, photographs, and James Willard Schultz papers to the Museum of the Rockies. (The papers and photographs are located in Collection #10, Special Collections). In the early 1970s, the Museum of the Rockies arranged for her to tape record her autobiography. Jessica wrote a rough draft from the transcriptions of these tapes and Anne Banks (Museum volunteer) edited and created an autobiography from that material which was never published. In 1974-1975, she established the James Willard Schultz Indian Heritage Award for Indian students of Montana which was administered by the Museum of the Rockies. Jessica Donaldson Schultz Graham died on June 30, 1976.