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Wood Mountain

Biographies

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Wanbli Sunpagewin
(Crossed Eagle Quills / Julia Lethbridge)

1866-1956

    In 1877 Wanbli Sunpagewin came with her parents to Canada after the battle at the Little Bighorn. She was eleven years old at the time. Four years later she went to Batoche with her parents, Mato Luta and Tasunke Topa Naunkewin, and in 1885 she accompanied her mother to the Qu'Appelle valley.
    In the late 1880's she married Charles Lethbridge, a land surveyor. They lived at Regina for a few years. Then he moved away, leaving her and the children behind. In 1906, after she agreed to send her oldest son William to the Lebret Industrial School, she moved to the Lakota camp at Moose Jaw with her two youngest sons, Peter and Jim and her daughter Kate. At Moose Jaw Julia worked as a domestic and sold beadwork.

Wanbli Sunpagewin

     She was a prolific beadworker and often incorporated an eagle, a family symbol into the pieces she made. Her father, Mato Luta, had been an eagle catcher when he was a young man.
    About 1914 Julia and her family moved to Wood Mountain. The first winter they lived in a tent and the next summer they built a house on the reserve, where they were registered as part of the band.
    Julia always kept a few horses for riding or driving. Her grandson Leonard remembers how she would saddle her favorite horse, Babe and head for the berry patch in the summer.
    Julia lived on the reserve until she was ninety years old.  In the summer of 1956 she went to live with one of her daughters at Standing Buffalo Reserve near Fort Qu'Appelle. A few months later she died there.


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