Woman Walks Ahead: Brooklyn’s Catherine Weldon’s adventures with Sitting Bull

Jessica Chastain stars in Woman Walks Ahead

June 27, 2018 By Peter Stamelman Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Susanna White. Photo by Sven Arnstein

Share this:

On March 31 of this year, Green-Wood Cemetery celebrated Women’s History Month by hosting a special trolley tour called “Women Who Walked Ahead.” The tour included the graves of notable women from Brooklyn, including that of Catherine Weldon.

Weldon, born Susanna Carolina Faesch in Basel, Switzerland, moved with her mother to America in 1852, settling in Brooklyn. In 1866, she married Dr. Bernhard Claudius Schlatter, a physician and a fellow Swiss. However, the marriage was an unhappy union and in June of 1876, she ran away with a married man, Christopher Stevenson.

In early 1877, she gave birth to a son she named Christie. But the relationship with Stevenson did not last, for he would soon abandon her to return to his wife. Carolina was forced to return to Brooklyn to live with her mother and stepfather.

It was during this period that she became committed to the cause of Native Americans. She had encountered an Iroquois bead seller on a Brooklyn street and, fascinated by his dress and the handicrafts he was selling, she invited him back to her apartment for tea. Shortly thereafter, in 1887, upon the death of her mother, she inherited some money, which provided her with the means to pursue her passion for art, in particular painting.

It was also at this time that she changed her name to Caroline Weldon. In the summer of 1889, she traveled to the Dakota Territory to fulfill her dream of living among the Sioux. By now she had joined the National Indian Defense Association. She hoped to aid the Sioux in their struggle against the Dawes Act, the U.S. government’s attempt to expropriate vast swathes of the Great Sioux Reservation for the purpose of opening it up to white settlement.

To this end, she befriended Sitting Bull, who was the leader of the traditionalist faction among the Sioux; in the course of painting his portrait, she also became his secretary, interpreter and advocate. By now she and Christie were living at Sitting Bull’s compound at Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Because of her confrontations with the U.S. Indian agent James McLaughlin a smear campaign was initiated and she was reviled by the general public and vilified in the national press.

In 1890, when the Ghost Dance Movement swept through the Indian reservations of the West, she denounced it and warned Sitting Bull that it would give the government an excuse to harm him and to summon the military to destroy the Sioux Nation. But Sitting Bull ignored her, and she and her now-ailing son left the reservation. The subsequent events of Sitting Bull’s murder and the Wounded Knee Massacre in December of 1890 proved her predictions right. Weldon eventually returned to Brooklyn, where she died in March of 1921.

Now a new film about these events, “Woman Walks Ahead,” starring Jessica Chastain as Catherine Weldon, is opening this Friday. The English director, Susanna White, sat down with the Brooklyn Eagle to discuss the making of the film. White is an acclaimed film and TV director, whose impressive credits include 2010’s “Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang” and 2016’s “Our Kind of Traitor.” In addition, she has directed episodes of “Boardwalk Empire,” “Masters of Sex” and “Generation Kill.”

Michael Greyeyes as Sitting Bull and Jessica Chastain as Catherine Weldon

Brooklyn Eagle: What was the genesis of the film? How did you get involved?

Susanna White: It was given to me about three years ago. I had changed agents and moved to CAA and Hylda Queally, who is Jessica’s agent at CAA, gave it to me to read. It was originally written fourteen years ago for Ed Zwick to direct. I think it was the second screenplay Steven Knight ever wrote. [Note: Knight is the screenwriter of such noteworthy films as “Dirty Pretty Things,” “Eastern Promises” and “Locke,” which he also directed.] I immediately loved the script. I’d grown up in South London, in a little semi-detached house, with those gray London skies and I’d sit with my dad on a Saturday afternoon watching Westerns on the television. The sense of scale in those Westerns, with their big skies and their epic landscapes were absolutely amazing to me. Plus the kind of stylization of those films, the composition, starting with John Ford’s films, then moving on to Sergio Leone. Watching those Westerns was one of the things that really made me want to make films. But there was also a disconnect because, while I loved the physical setting of those films, it was a man’s world. If women were present, they were there to be defended. And the Native Americans depicted in these films were really ciphers. What I loved about the “Woman Walks Ahead” screenplay was that it turned these conventions on their head. For one thing, it had such a strong female presence in it. And Sitting Bull was shown as this sophisticated, spiritual, intelligent person. It was exciting to see this inversion of the Western genre that Steven pulled off.

Eagle: In making the film, you have been very conscious of the physical environment of the West. There are shots of lizards, insects, horses rearing. Was all this physicality in the script or was it something you brought?

SW: I brought that to it. Another influence on me were those Australian films of the 1980’s, such as “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and “Walkabout,” this idea of the land, the earth, I wanted it to be a character in the film. This sense of the timeless eternity of the land — that it was there before us and will be there after us. I wanted the sense of the landscape to have a huge presence in the film, so that you understand the absurdity of people wanting to own it. As Sitting Bull says to Catherine in the film, “You think you can own the land and the sky as well?” So I wanted to question the government’s attempts to parcel it up. I wanted to show how the Lakota lived in harmony with nature. As Sitting Bull tells Catherine, when the Sioux killed buffalo, every part of it was used by the community, unlike the indiscriminate slaughter of the whites. So nature plays a major role in the film.

Eagle: How much rehearsal time did you have?

SW: Not a lot. Jessica had just come off another film, so I didn’t have a lot of time with her. I did rehearse a lot with Michael [Greyeyes, the Native-American actor who plays Sitting Bull] before Jessica got there. And he was, of course, a lot less experienced with movies of this scale than she was. So I rehearsed quite a bit with Michael, [laughing] with me playing Catherine Weldon. And then when Sam Rockwell arrived, we all rehearsed together.

Jessica Chastain as Catherine Weldon. Photo credit: Mac Simonson (A24)

Jessica Chastain as Catherine Weldon

Eagle: Did you feel as if you were making a Western? Were there genre conventions you felt you had to obey?

SW: Yes, I did. Mike Ely, who was the director of photography on the film and with whom I’ve worked for 20 years, and I wanted to use some of those conventions of the John Ford Western, where you have this enormous sky and people are very small in the frame. And some of the scenes we modeled on Sergio Leone’s low-angle shots of the hats and the shadows they cast over the face. But, equally, Nick Roeg [director of “Walkabout”] was an influence in terms of the landscape buzzing with insect life. I think the big element that distinguishes it from other Westerns is that when you have violence in the film — for example when Catherine set upon it’s not by the Indians but by the white community that resents her presence. And you feel the impact of that violence when she’s spat at and stoned and with what happens to Sitting Bull at the end of the film, you feel the consequences of that violence.

Eagle: You were working on such a larger canvas than that of your previous films. What were some of the unexpected physical factors you had to deal with?

SW: Well, definitely the weather. We shot in New Mexico and sometimes we’d have to stop because of thunderstorms and dust storms, which were particularly hard on Jessica because she’s so fair. I mean I’ve shot in hostile conditions before; I shot in Namibia when I was making “Generation Kill,” so I was used to shooting in the desert. But I think the particular challenge with this was that we had to shoot the film in 31 days so there was no margin for error. We had a very tight budget. So when we would have to stop for three hours because of a thunderstorm, which really hit us hard. But it was great to be on location, and have the scope of it and for the film to be on that scale.

Eagle: How did you decide on Jessica’s accent? It’s certainly not a Brooklyn accent.

SW: That was something that she very much wanted to do. She worked very specifically with our voice coach and wanted to do this very particular New York accent, with just the hint of her European background. She really worked at it.

“Woman Walks Ahead” opens this Friday in New York and Los Angeles.