In 1931, she sent a photograph of herself and a quilt she made to Franklin D. Roosevelt, which was featured in volume 15 of the series Handbook of North American Indians published in 1978 by the Smithsonian.

Pem-i-tha-ah-kwa,[1] Pem-me-tha-ah-quah,[2] or Pen-e-thah-ah-quah,[3] (meaning flying past) was born probably in 1879 or 1880,[4] on the Mexican Kickapoo Reservation in Indian Territory to parents who were from Mexico.

Pushed southward from conflict with other tribes and settlers, by the 1830s one group had settled in Kansas, while the larger traditional faction lived in camps and moved often, ranging from Missouri to western Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

[9][10] Conflicts escalated after the establishment in 1836 of the Republic of Texas and the American Civil War, forcing the majority of the Kickapoo south into Mexico, where they settled in the state of Coahuila.

[3][4] She completed her education in 1905 and returned to Indian Territory, where she first was employed as a domestic worker in the home of Thomas Wildcat Alford.

[20][Notes 2] Edward Warren Sawyer [fr] an American artist working in Paris,[22] visited the Kickapoo in 1912, on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution.

[26][27] When Dixon arrived at the Kickapoo agency, in Shawnee, Oklahoma, an interpreter explained the reason for the "Expedition of Citizenship" and the tribe refused to participate.

[28] Having signed many agreements in the past with the government, which had caused them regret, tribal officials based their reluctance on a lack of understanding of the purpose.

A stout woman, Kickapoo, is dressed in a plain dark blouse, a full-length skirt, and over her left-shoulder is draped an American flag which cascades to the floor.

[32] The 1913 photograph taken by the Wannamaker Expedition, served as inspiration for one of the pieces in artist Annu Palakunnathu Matthew's series An Indian from India, which compares the effect of imperialism upon Native Americans and South Asians.