Keewaydinoquay Margaret Peschel

[WINative]

Here's a Mary Geniusz biography likely written by her daughter Wendy Geniusz.

https://notablefolkloristsofcolor.org/portfolio/mary-siisip-geniusz/

[Sparks]

This is the brother of Mary Lynn Shomperlen (Robert) Geniusz, so her parents were George and Mollie Shomperlen.
https://www.jsonline.com/obituaries/pwix0563482

Clicking your link only redirects me to https://www.jsonline.com/ — However, I found a similar obituary:

https://www.echovita.com/us/obituaries/wi/south-milwaukee/russell-george-shomperlen-16886394

Russell George Shomperlen Obituary
He was predeceased by : his parents, George Shomperlen and Mollie Shomperlen; his son Jon Russell Shomperlen; his sisters, Sue Leather and Mary Lynn Geniusz (Robert) …

I think this is a case of mistaken identity. I cannot find anything anywhere to support your claim that Mary Lynn [Shomperlen] (Robert) Geniusz is the same person as Mary Siisip Geniusz.

[WINative]

I am not sure if you answered your own question by seeing the obituary but here is another obituary for Mary Lynn Shomperlen's husband Robert Geniusz'z mother- Lucille Geniusz and clearly supports my last post of Mary Lynn Shomperlen's family.

Here is the copy in case people cannot view it again.

eniusz, Lucille (Nee Sipowicz) 99 years young, born June 6, 1910, in Sokolka (Russian occupied Poland). Christmas Eve 1916, fled disorder of WWI with her beloved mother Michaelina (1881 - 1937) and dear brother Zigmunt (1903 - ?) to join her father Michael (1878 - 1952), who had immigrated to Detroit 6 years earlier. . Swept off her feet in 1937 by Edward Stanley Geniusz (1913 - 2001), she married and settled in Milwaukee. Became the loving mother of Edward Tom Geniusz, Edwardine Michelle (Allen K.) Charnow, and Robert Myles (Mary Lynn Shomperlen) Geniusz. Later the delighted and loving grandmother of Wendy Makoons (Errol) Geniusz and Annmarie Fay Geniusz (husband Stephen Bockhold).

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/jsonline/name/lucille-geniusz-obituary?id=3194775

[Diana]

Mary Lynn Shomperlen Geniusz is white. Looked at her parents especially the mother. All Dutch in the Canadian census and her grandparents are buried at The Pas, Flin Flon-Northwest Census Division, Manitoba, Canada. This this was taken from Find a grave. Again I went back several generations and all white and German, England and
Dutch.

Here's a Mary Geniusz biography likely written by her daughter Wendy Geniusz.

https://notablefolkloristsofcolor.org/portfolio/mary-siisip-geniusz/

[WINative]

Thanks Diana I suspected it since they were spawned from a notorious fraud in Margaret Peschel and makes sense they would try to do the same things. It does in fact look like Peschel created her own tribe based on her fantasy.
I looked at Margaret Cook Peschel's family also on FamilySearch.org and indeed all her family are from England and most were recent immigrants. If you can post more of those records I would appreciate it since that's all anyone wants to see for proof is their census, marriage, and death records.

[Sparks]

Mary Lynn Shomperlen Geniusz is white. Looked at her parents especially the mother. All Dutch in the Canadian census and her grandparents are buried at The Pas, Flin Flon-Northwest Census Division, Manitoba, Canada. This this was taken from Find a grave. Again I went back several generations and all white and German, England and Dutch.

This is all so confusing by now. Dutch, German, English, what about the Polish connection? According to WINative's link Mary Lynn Shomperlen Geniusz's mother was "Geniusz, Lucille (Nee Sipowicz) … born June 6, 1910, in Sokolka (Russian occupied Poland)". But according to the biography linked to, written by Wendy Makoons Geniusz, Mary Siisip Geniusz's "mother was born at the Pas in Manitoba". Is this a blatant lie, then?

This statement from the obituary supports WINative's claim that the two Marys are one and the same person: "Later the delighted and loving grandmother of Wendy Makoons (Errol) Geniusz".

[cellophane]

Mary Sisiip Geniusz also went earlier by the spelling Mary Seeseep Geniusz:
https://www.neiupeacefire.org/copy-of-the-children
The only other reference that spelling turned out was a visit to Greenland in 2017, part of an "Ice Wisdom" gathering.

Wendy's book, Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings, says this:

https://books.google.com/books?id=__ChEAAAQBAJ&lpg=PR12&pg=PR11

The late Keewaydinoquay, a mashkikiwikwe (medicine woman) and ethnobotanist, was one of my first teachers of anishinaabe-gikendaasowin (anishinaabe knowledge). She identified herself as ajijaak (Crane) Clan. She led Midewiwin ceremonies and trained oshkaabewisag (apprentices) to continue her work as a medicine woman and spiritual leader. Keewaydinoquay was born in 1918 (Tanner, pers. comm.).¹ She said that she spent much of her childhood in an anishinaabe village on Cat Head Bay, which is on the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan (Tanner, pers. comm.; M. Geniusz, pers. comm.). At approximately nine years old, she was apprenticed to Nodjimahkwe, a well-respected mashkikiwikwe in her village (Keewaydinoquay 1989a). As a child, she was one of only five children in her village who was not taken away to boarding school, giving her the opportunity to visit with and learn from all the elders in the village, many of whom greatly missed their own grandchildren away at school. She says that by the time she realized the great extent of knowledge that these elders and Nodjimahkwe had taught her, it was too late to thank them. She decided that sharing this knowledge with others would be the next best thing, and so she spent much of her life doing that (Keewaydinoquay 1991a). She founded the Miniss Kitigan Drum, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching anishinaabe culture, in one effort to preserve and teach this knowledge. Keewaydinoquay was also an ethnobotanist and taught courses, beginning in 1981, on philosophy and ethnobotany at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (Keewaydinoquay n.d.a). She held several formal academic degrees, including a Bachelor of Science degree from Central Michigan University, which she received in 1944, and a Master of Science in Biology degree from Central Michigan University, which she received in 1977 (Keewaydinoquay n.d.c). She also completed the coursework for a Ph.D. in biology with an emphasis in ethnobotany at the University of Michigan, but she was unable to complete the required exams to begin writing her dissertation (W. Geniusz 2005, 193).

¹ This date comes from a letter that Keewaydinoquay's mother wrote as the date of Keewaydinoquay's birth in a letter she wrote to her own father, Keewaydinoquay's grandfather (Tanner, October 14, 2004). A copy of this letter is in the possession of Helen Hornbeck Tanner.

Wendy Geniusz then talks about the biography of her mother (Mary Geniusz), but I can't quite tell when she speaks of her mother and when she speaks of herself in the third person.

[WINative]

The Margaret Cook Peschel story gets much crazier. This is excepts from the attached pdf about Robert Gordon Wasson who appropriated the psilocybin mushrooms from Maria Sabina a Mazatec Indigenous woman under funding from the CIA which later illegally tested psychedelic drugs on military and prisoners.

https://fungimag.com/winter-2015-articles/V8I4_Wasson_LR.pdf

In 1957, Wall Street banker Gordon Wasson wrote a feature article for Life magazine about eating psilocybin-containing mushrooms in Mexico, thus inaugurating a global interest in magic mushrooms, so-called.
Because of his devotion to entheogens and also because he was known to have rather loose purse strings, he attracted acolytes not only among ordinary folks in search of a high, but also among scholars. Enter a woman from northern Michigan named Margaret Peschel. (AKA Keewaydioquay)
In 1976, Gordon visited her on Garden Island in Lake Michigan, where she had been living a hermitlike existence. The next year he visited her again. This time she gave him several dried Amanita muscaria to eat.
Probably due to his wealth, Wasson had a certain amount of clout at Harvard University, and in 1978 he helped Kee get a book entitled Puhpowee for the People published under the auspices of Harvard’s Botanical Museum. She published a second book called Muskwedo about mushrooms.
In 1978, she claimed to have eaten this mighty mushroom for shamanic purposes for the past fifty years, which, if true, means that she would have begun eating it at age nine.
Wasson got Kee a gig at a 1978 conference on psychoactive drugs in San Francisco, where she told a rapt audience that the sacred quality of A. muscaria.

[cellophane]

The Margaret Cook Peschel story gets much crazier. This is excepts from the attached pdf about Robert Gordon Wasson

Wow, a well-researched paper... In sum, she made up stories about traditional usage, and her own lifelong usage of mushrooms — which don't grow there. She attached to them songs recorded in Siberia. She knew how to manipulate Wasson and get over his skepticism and feed him what he wanted to hear.

[Sparks]

Wasson … in 1978 he helped Kee get a book entitled Puhpowee for the People published under the auspices of Harvard’s Botanical Museum.

I found a 1998 edition of this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Puhpohwee-People-Narrative-Account-Ahnishinaabeg/dp/1879528185/

Puhpohwee for the People: A Narrative Account of Some Uses of Fungi Among the Ahnishinaabeg
Hardcover – January 1, 1998 — by Keewaydinoquay (Author), Keewaydinoquay Peschel (Author)
5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars    5 ratings   See all formats and editions
Keewaydinoquay is an Ahnishinaabe herbalist & shaman who, in her childhood, was apprenticed to the famous Ahnishinaabe herbalist, Nodjimahkwe, thus falling heir to the traditional knowledge of the plant world among her people. The native peoples of America actually believe that there is an herb to meet every possible need. The word PUH-POH-WEE is an old Algonkian term that means "to swell up in stature suddenly & silently from an unseen source of power." It is particularly suitable when referring to fungi. The Ahnishinaabeg can find a potential PUH-POH-WEE in their ancient cultural heritage. This is a book about the harmony of tribal life in which Keewaydinoquay weaves the medicinal uses of fungi with tales from her own life. Keewaydinoquay is well-known in medicinal circles & tribal organizations in the Lake Michigan & Lake Superior area, also having connections with institutions interested in the anthropology & history of that area."

The Margaret Cook Peschel story gets much crazier.

I certainly agree! Now I hope that a competent scholar will review all her writings for the obvious falsehoods, e.g. this one:

Kee’s writings suggest that red-capped A. muscaria —A. muscaria var. muscaria — virtually blanket Ojibwe country, but the opposite is true: they hardly occur there at all. In western or southeastern North America, yes; but not in northern Michigan. It would appear that Kee had read ethnographic studies like Waldemar Bogaras’ The Chukchi of Northeastern Asia and borrowed information from those studies without bothering to consult any distribution maps (or their equivalent) that might display the locations of several varieties of A. muscaria.

You might wonder where she obtained the dried specimens she gave to Wasson. Probable answer: either from one of the doubtless many dealers in psychotropic substances who would have hung out on the Ann Arbor campus in the 1970s or maybe from a West Coast acquaintance via the U.S. Postal Service. She would not have collected those specimens on Garden Island, however.

Since Wasson found the use of A. muscaria in virtually every nook and cranny in the historical woodwork, Kee would have been only too glad to inform him that the Ojibwe used the mushroom, too. For what better way to gain the attention of the Shining-From-Afar-Man than to seize upon the supreme object of his interest and inform him that your own people also believe in the potency of that mushroom, indeed drink the urine of its partakers? In fact, Wasson got Kee a gig at a 1978 conference on psychoactive drugs in San Francisco, where she told a rapt audience that the sacred quality of A. muscaria is passed on through urine, a drink of choice among her own people.

My boldings. Quote from: https://fungimag.com/winter-2015-articles/V8I4_Wasson_LR.pdf.

I read that book decades ago, and many other anthropological articles and books from Siberia about active ingredients of Amanita muscaria being distributed to other people via urine (and even to reindeer eating snow that had been urinated upon).

I include a couple of lexical articles for background information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Gordon_Wasson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Bogoraz

[WINative]

Robert Gordon Wasson had also manipulated Maria Sabina and stole the secret of their mushroom ceremony. Which was also manipulated by the CIA for their own purposes. A trail of liars and manipulators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Gordon_Wasson

It was the curandera María Sabina who both allowed the Wassons to participate in the ritual and who taught them about the uses and effects of the mushroom, after Wasson lied to her about being worried about the whereabouts and wellbeing of his son, as the ritual was traditionally used to locate missing people and important items.[12] Sabina let him take her picture on the condition that he keep it private, but Wasson nonetheless published the photo along with Sabina's name and the name of the community where she lived.[13] Though he faced no consequences for his deceptions, and indeed, profited greatly from the knowledge he gained from her, Sabina was subsequently ostracised from her community as a result of his actions, and her house was burned down after she was briefly jailed, her son murdered, and she eventually died in poverty

Wasson's 1956 expedition was funded[8] by the CIA's MK-Ultra subproject 58, as was revealed by documents[5] obtained by John Marks[16] under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents state that Wasson was an "unwitting" participant in the project.[5]

The funding was provided under the cover name of the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research (credited by Wasson at the end of his subsequent Life piece about the expedition).

[Diana]

Sparks, I have no idea what you're talking about. I only looked at Mary Lynn Shomperlen. She married a man by the name of Geniusz. I didn't look at his side of the family, only hers. There is no Polish heritage that I  could see. Her mother's maiden name is Blain. I think you're confused

Mary Lynn Shomperlen Geniusz is white. Looked at her parents especially the mother. All Dutch in the Canadian census and her grandparents are buried at The Pas, Flin Flon-Northwest Census Division, Manitoba, Canada. This this was taken from Find a grave. Again I went back several generations and all white and German, England and Dutch.

This is all so confusing by now. Dutch, German, English, what about the Polish connection? According to WINative's link Mary Lynn Shomperlen Geniusz's mother was "Geniusz, Lucille (Nee Sipowicz) … born June 6, 1910, in Sokolka (Russian occupied Poland)". But according to the biography linked to, written by Wendy Makoons Geniusz, Mary Siisip Geniusz's "mother was born at the Pas in Manitoba". Is this a blatant lie, then?

This statement from the obituary supports WINative's claim that the two Marys are one and the same person: "Later the delighted and loving grandmother of Wendy Makoons (Errol) Geniusz".

[WINative]

Sparks-Lucille Geniusz was the mother of Mary Shomperlen's husband Robert Geniusz and also Wendy Geniusz's grandmother. I just used her obituary to verify it is the same Mary Geniusz and her maiden name since you questioned a mistaken identity.

Mary Lynn Shomperlen Geniusz is white. Looked at her parents especially the mother. All Dutch in the Canadian census and her grandparents are buried at The Pas, Flin Flon-Northwest Census Division, Manitoba, Canada. This this was taken from Find a grave. Again I went back several generations and all white and German, England and Dutch.

This is all so confusing by now. Dutch, German, English, what about the Polish connection? According to WINative's link Mary Lynn Shomperlen Geniusz's mother was "Geniusz, Lucille (Nee Sipowicz) … born June 6, 1910, in Sokolka (Russian occupied Poland)". But according to the biography linked to, written by Wendy Makoons Geniusz, Mary Siisip Geniusz's "mother was born at the Pas in Manitoba". Is this a blatant lie, then?

This statement from the obituary supports WINative's claim that the two Marys are one and the same person: "Later the delighted and loving grandmother of Wendy Makoons (Errol) Geniusz".

[educatedindian]

Since Peschel passed 25 years ago, the main thing to look at is how her distortions or falsehoods have been passed on. Miniss Kitigan Drum don't seem very active. The most recent mention I found of them is for 2018 and records in 2014 show zero income.

http://www.nonprofitfacts.com/MI/Miniss-Kitigan-Drum-Inc.html

I did find a mention of them clearing nature paths, but not much else. Of course I'm not in the local area, so those who are likely know much better what they're up to.

Geniusz certainly needs to continue to be looked at, and Peschel's works in ethnobotany need to be at least reexamined if not dumped.

[WINative]

I agree, but also think some of the concerning things about Peschel is that she is still viewed as an Ojibwe or Anishinaabe elder and medicine woman or expert on plants. You google her name and she is still widely respected and should be publicly outed as a fraud, even if it took 25 years. People are still citing her work, and there is a plaque in her honor on the UW-Milwaukee campus and this also concerns the idea of universities continuing to hire Frauds, particularly at UW-Milwaukee. Her protege Wendy Keewaydinoquay Geniusz also needs to be exposed.