Dakota Images: Rosebud Yellow Robe
by Katherine J. Mehrer
South Dakota History, volume 35 number 3 (2005)
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.
An early advocate for the study of American Indian cultures, Rosebud Yellow Robe used her writings, lectures, and day camps to teach thousands about the lives of Plains Indians.
Yellow Robe was bom in Rapid City, South Dakota, on 26 February 1907 to Chauncey and Uly Yellow Robe, descendants of the Lakota Sioux leaders Iron Plume and Sitting Bull. Her father, one of the first students to attend Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, spent his lifetime as an educator who sought to bridge Indian and non-Indian cultures.
Rosebud Yellow Robe began her education in a one-room schoolhouse and in the 1920s became one of the first American Indian students to attend the University of South Dakota. In college, she impressed her classmates and others with her performances of traditional Indian dances for the annual student stage production. She received national attention, including an invitation to star in a Cécile B. De Mille film production, when she placed a headdress on President Calvin Coolidge during a ceremony inducting him into the Sioux tribe in 1927, Later that year, she left South Dakota to pursue a theatrical career in New York City. There she met and married a theatrical manager, Arthur de Cinq Mars, known professionally as Arthur Seymour, and they had a daughter. Rosebud Tachcawin.
Beginning in the late 1930s, Yellow Robe became director of the Indian Village, a children's educational and recreational day camp at Jones Beach on Long Island. For twenty years she taught schoolchildren about the realities of Plains Indian life through traditional stories, crafts, games, and songs. She reached people outside the New York area through her books. Album of the American Indian and Tonweya and the Eagles and Other Lakota Indian Tales, her original scripts delivered on CBS National Radio, and her regular appearances on an NBC-TV children's show and the Boh Montgomery Presents series.
In 1951, following the death of her first husband, she married Alfred A. Frantz, a former classmate at the University of South Dakota. She remained active in American Indian causes throughout her life and was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of South Dakota in May 1989. Rosebud Yellow Robe died 5 October 1992.
