Sitting Bull

War for Paha Sapa (Black Hills)

Paha Sapa

In 1872, rumors abounded that there was gold in the Black Hills. Miners, wagon trains, and cavalry led by General George Armstrong Custer beat a trail known as Thieves’ Road to the area. Custer was also knows as Squaw Killer because of his massacre of Black Kettle and his people on the Washita river in 1868.

Paha Sapa was sacred to the indigenous people. In the summer they went there to commune with the Great Spirit and seek visions. This was the center of the world, the point from which the hoop of the world bent in four directions.

Just four years before, in the Treaty of 1868, that land had been given to the Sioux forever. Now the government tried to get the Black Hills through treaty, but the Sioux refused. The Peace Commissioners then recommended that Congress decide on a “fair equivalent value” and present it to the Indians as “finality.”

The United States offered the Sioux six million dollars for the Black Hills. The Sioux rejected the offer for good reason: just one Black Hills mine would eventually yield five hundred million dollars. By February 1876, the War Department authorized General Sheridan to begin military actions against the “hostile Sioux,” including Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

Crazy Horse joined forces with Sitting Bull; they made their camps on the banks of the Little Big Horn. There were ten thousand people with three to four thousand warriors, their camps spreading for three miles. On June 24, 1876 General George Armstrong Custer came looking for the Sioux. He had split his forces into three columns. The Sioux, defending their women and children along the Little Big Horn, wiped out Custer and over 180 of his men. It was the worst military defeat that the U.S. government had ever suffered in the wars with the native peoples.

The whites viewed the defeat as a massacre. More soldiers hunted down the Sioux. For over a year Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse kept the soldiers at bay. Finally, Sitting Bull took his people to Canada while Crazy Horse continued to fight. In 1877, after a long winter, the United States offered Crazy Horse and his people a reservation in the Powder River country, the most precious of territory to the Sioux. Crazy Horse brought his people to the fort and waited for the promised territory. After four months he decided to take the land and marches his people to the Powder River.

Eight companies of soldiers rode out and arrested him. During the arrest procedure, Crazy Horse balked at the prison cell after he saw men in chains. Glad for an excuse to kill him, one of the soldiers ran his bayonet through Crazy Horse’s stomach

The Sioux mourned his death for weeks. His parents finally took his bones and heart and buried them in a desolate spot on their trek to Canada, near a creek called Wounded Knee. The U.S. military had never defeated Crazy Horse in battle.

More and more whites flooded into Sioux and Cheyenne territory, and the U.S. government tried to wrest more and more land from the tribes. In 1889, they “legally” stole land out in the middle of the Sioux reservation. The state was set for the end of the frontier and the way of life the native populations had known for millennia.

That end came in 1890 at Wounded Knee. It was the final large-scale military massacre committed by the whites against the indigenous. Many more deaths of native peoples would follow due to poverty, despair, injustice, but not until the 1970s would the big guns again be fired on the Sioux.

 

http://www.georgearmstrongcuster.com/

http://www.hanksville.org/daniel/misc/Custer.html

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/knee.htm

 

 

Pine Ridge Reservation, 1890

Ghost Dance

Wovoka

This generation of Sioux are seeing the end of life as their ancestors knew it!  The buffalo and antelope herds are gone. The life of roaming and hunting is as dead as the thousands of warriors buried beneath the white man’s railroads and mines and corn fields.  In the midst of this ending rises a new beginning—a religious ferment called the ghost dance.  A Paiute named Wovoka claims to be the Messiah.  He prophesies that by next spring all the whites will be gone and in their place new sweet grass will sprout and all the natives who have ever lived will return to life.  The people grasp at this hope and begin to dance the ghost dance in larger and larger numbers. The whites are afraid and they call out the army for protection. The army decides that Sitting Bull is behind this ghost dance phenomenon, even though he is not. They send forty-three Indian policemen to arrest him. In the ensuing melee Sitting Bull is shot.

 

Bill Zimmerman, Airlift to Wounded Knee, 46-47

 

http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/wovoka.htm

http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/eight/gdmessg.htm

 

 


The Wild West, 1885

Sitting Bull with Wild Bill Cody

Sitting Bull is the symbol of native resistance. He continually defends his culture from white attack. He is the leader who subjected the U.S. Army to its worst defeat in the “Indian Wars.”

He joins the Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West Show. Although he is greeted by boos and catcalls, by the end of the show he has won them over, and they pay him for autographed pictures. But Sitting Bull is poor, he saves nothing of what he earns. He is continually pressing coins into the hands of the ragged and hungry white kids who seem to be at every stop on the circuit.

As a Sioux chief he is responsible for the welfare of his people, which means giving away what he has so that no one will go hungry. He cannot understand how white people can neglect their poor.

He tells Annie Oakley: The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.

 

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 338

 

http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/sittingbull.htm   

http://www.sittingbull.org/

 

The Cheyenne Fight Back


Chief Black Kettle

In 1851, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Sioux, Crow, and other tribes met with U.S. representatives at Fort Laramie. The United States wanted access to indigenous lands for roads, forts, and telegraph lines. The tribes granted the access, while not giving up their right to fish, hunt, or roam over the same lands.

Gold had been discovered in California in 1848, and again in the Colorado Territory ten years later. Thousands of miners came to Pikes Peak, building the village of Denver City in the process.

In 1860, the United States was on the brink of a civil war. The war slowed down the westward march of the whites, but did not stop it. That same year the first pony express rider reached California. The U.S. Congress also passed the Pre-emption Bill, which provided free land to settlers in western territories. Before the year was out a man named Spencer invented the repeating rifle.

In 1864, Black Kettle, a Cheyenne chief, heard of white soldiers killing Cheyenne without provocation. Black Kettle wanted “to be peaceable and friendly and keep my tribe so.” He always camped under the American flag that Colonel Greenwood had given him for protection.

The cavalry raids continued. Officers under the command of Colonel Chivington were ordered to “kill Cheyenne whenever and wherever found.” Clashes increased and the younger Cheyenne leaders, members of the Hotamitanio, or Dog Soldier Society, wanted to fight back.

After the Sand Creek Massacre the Cheyenne and the Sioux united to keep the whites out of the Powder River country. They called themselves The People, the last hope to save their ancestral hunting grounds. They were led by Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Dull Knife, and Roman Nose.

In the summer of 1865, a few months after the end of the Civil War, General Patrick Connor invaded the Powder River territory with four columns of troops. Conner built a fort and named it after himself; later it would be called Fort Reno.  Connor in 1863, had surrounded a camp of Paiute and massacred 278 of them. On this mission he was heard to say that the Indians had to “be hunted like wolves.” His orders to his men: “Attack and kill every male Indian over twelve years of age.” Conner’s goal was to open up the Bozeman Trail to give the whites more roads to the West.

Red Cloud and the other chiefs were angry because the whites had not asked permission to build forts and more roads through their country. That summer, the Sioux and Cheyenne killed hundreds of soldiers and cost the U.S. government millions of dollars. It was one of the worst military defeats at the hands of the Indigenous up to that time.

The next spring (1866) the whites wanted to talk peace. While Red Cloud and the others were negotiating, an army troop arrived at the fort with orders to build forts up and down the Bozeman Trail with or without treaties. Red Cloud denounced the peace commission and stormed out, taking everyone with him.

A guerrilla war followed. Crazy Horse developed a tactic of luring soldiers out of their defensive positions and into ambushes. It took great riding skill and courage, and earned him high respect from his comrades. The greatest victory was at Fort Phil Kearny, where Crazy Horse drew the soldiers from the fort and the combined forces of the Sioux and Cheyenne annihilated them.

Finally in 1868 the army gave up. Even General Sherman, who had led the Union march to the sea, could not subdue the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. The United States agreed to abandon the forts. Red Cloud, not trusting the whites, replied that he would not sign a peace treaty until the forts were actually abandoned. As the troops left, the warriors set fire to the forts. Red Cloud still waited to sign, worrying the whites even more. It was one of the few treaties whose terms were dictated by the indigenous.

 

http://www.lastoftheindependents.com/sandcreek.htm

http://www.indigenouspeople.net/redcloud.htm  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse

Indian Policy and the Black Hills

       

Sitting Bull                                         Russell Means

 

Our ideas will overcome your ideas.  We are going to cut the country’s whole value system to shreds.  It isn’t important that there are only 500,000 of us Indians….What is important is that we have a superior way of life.  We Indians have a more human philosophy of life.  We Indians will show this country how to act human.  Someday this country will revise its constitution, its laws, in terms of human beings, instead of property.  If Red Power is to be a power in this country it is because it is ideological….What is the ultimate value of a man’s life?  That is the question.

Vine Deloria, Jr., In Touch the Earth, 159 

 

It’s no wonder that the Indian cannot understand the white way or that native people have come to assume that whites are only capable of cultural theft of art, medicine, and ideas, of human labor and of land.  Sitting Bull articulated the cultural clash of worldviews and the resulting tragedy for the Sioux nation which defended the Indian way:

What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken?  Not one.  What treaty that the white man ever made with us has the white man ever kept?  Not one.  When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land, they sent ten thousand men to battle.  Where are the warriors today?  Who slew them?  Where are our lands?  Who owns them?  What white man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his money?  Yet they say I am a thief.  What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me?  Yet they say I am a bad Indian.  What white man has ever seen me drunk?  Who has ever come to me hungry and unfed?  Who has ever seen me beat my wives or abuse my children?  What law have I broken?  Is it wrong for me to love my own?  Is it wicked for me because my skin is red?  Because I am Lakota, because I was born where my father died, because I would die for my people and country?

Quoted in Peter Matheissen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 33

 

And now, five hundred years later, the colonizers still seek treasure.  Today treasure is not gold, but uranium; Indians within the United States are not reduced to slaves, but leaders are criminalized and imprisoned.  Law is able to accomplish what the whip and sword accomplished in the time of Columbus.  Just as Chief Guaironex and Sitting Bull cherished the land, Lakota leader Russell Means fights for the Black Hills today:

Right now, today, we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation are living in what white society has designated a National Sacrifice Area.  What this means is that we have a lot of uranium deposits here, and white culture (not us) needs this uranium as energy production material.  The cheapest and most efficient way for industry to extract and deal with the processing of this uranium is to dump the waste by-products right here at the digging sites.  Right here where we live.  This waste is radioactive and will make the entire region uninhabitable forever.  This is considered by industry, and the white society that created th is industry, to be an “acceptable” price to pay for energy resource development.  Along the way they also plan to drain the water table under this part of South Dakota as part of the industrial process, so the region becomes doubly uninhabitable.  This same sort of thing is happening down in the land of the Navajo and the Hope, up in the northern Cheyenne and Crow, and elsewhere….

We are resisting being turned into a National Sacrifice Area.  We are resisting being turned into a national sacrifice people.  The costs of this industrial process are not acceptable to us.  It is genocide to dig the uranium here and drain the water table, no more, no less.

Quoted in Peter Mattheissen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 525

 

It’s sadly ironic that the clash between the red and white vision is symbolized today in the Black Hills, the sacred land of the Great Sioux nation.  A legal fight rages over the 1868 Sioux claim to South Dakota lands, including seven and a half million acres of the Black Hills that were “lost” when Congress nullified the 1868 treaty following Custer’s defeat.  In the 1980s when the Sioux appealed to the Supreme Court, the government’s “right” to the land was upheld.  But the Sioux nation, faithful to tribal ethics and believing the earth is sacred and not for sale, refused the money.

The Black Hills is the land where the U.S. government chose to symbolize its democratic achievement. Chiseled into the stone hills of South Dakota are the faces of Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt.  The government of the United States seeks to renovate the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota—“a shrine of democracy,” according to President Bush.  The Sioux nation protests!  “Not only did they desecrate our sacred land,” said Tim Giago, an Oglala Sioux who is editor of the Lakota Times, “they also memorialized four Presidents who committed acts of atrocity against our people…They want to spend $40 million to repair Mr. Rushmore and it’s 70 miles from the poorest country in American, where our people are destitute (Chu and Shaw, 69-70).

Destitute indeed!  The annual income in the area is twenty-four hundred dollars, with an unemployment rate of eighty-five percent (Chu and Shaw, 70).  Impoverished and defiant, the Sioux will not accept money for the sacred.  Who is spiritually destitute, spiritually alive?  If the lands of the Americas are to be saved from destruction, it is the Indians of America, who by their faithful reverence for the living world will save it.  This sacred love of all beings is the profound spiritually that has enabled Indian people to continue to resist five hundred years of assault and degradation.  Indian spirituality is the hidden cultural weapon that sustains resistance in the face of hardship and death.  Penned in reservations, marginalized, made invisible, the red nations refuse to die. 

Five hundred years after the conquest of the Americas, an environmental crisis confronts the world.  Scientists predict that the destruction of the rainforest, industrial pollution, acid rain, nuclear radiation, and destruction of animal species has so altered the environment that the earth itself is in mortal danger.  Some of the Indian medicine people echo the Indian prophecy which foretells apocalyptic destruction as a result of the whites’ failure to respect the mother, Earth.  Lakota Wallace Black Elk articulates that vision:

The white people have to surrender their arms to the great Spirit.

This purification is coming real soon, and all the guns and gold will melt.  The holy spirit, the atom, the power of god, will melt those guns and tanks and poison gasses they create….They will be standing by themselves….When the time comes there won’t be no amnesty.

We’re going back to the beginning of time…I have no  fear, I have no slightest fear whatsoever.  Even if I have to face death like Chief Big Foot, it’s very beautiful.

We hold the key to eternity, where it is beautiful and it is everlasting for everyone.  That’s where we’re going.  We’re going home.  And finally we will be back in the Great Spirit’s hands again.  Grandmother’s arms again.  She’ll cradle us in her arms again.

Quoted in Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 547

 

Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a Micmac Indian, faced her own death with the same openness that Black Elk reveals.  A mother and activist involved at Wounded Knee, she was mysteriously murdered and found frozen in the snow in a remote area of Pine Ridge reservation.  Her hands were cut off and sent in a jar to the FBI in Washington for a fingerprint check.  Her sister, Mary Lafford believes someone connected with the FBI killed her.  AIM leader Dennis Banks said that her killer was not just the triggerman but the cultural triggerman of centuries.  “She wasn’t killed by just one person.  It was what she represented and what kin of person she was.  What happens to people in four hundred years?  Maybe that is the answer.  Maybe four hundred years killed Anna Mae” (Matthiessen, 268).