Sioux Indian Quotes

But the old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature's softening influence. — Chief Luther Standing Bear Oglala Sioux Some

Generosity is a mark of bravery, so all Sioux boys were taught to be generous.

When a Sioux Indian would take the calumet, the pipe, he would hold it up stem to the sky so that the sun could take the first puff. And then he’d address the four directions always. In that frame of mind, when you’re addressing yourself to the horizon, to the world that you’re in, then you’re in your place in the world. It’s a different way to live.

ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have the how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish having to assign a sex to every object: dog, table, tree, can-opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a sex to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First's English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and YOU are my servant whom I'm going to fire tomorrow if YOU don't watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I'm still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again; And who the hell are you anyway . . .?

Wherever we went, the soldiers came to kill us, And it was all our own country. It was ours already when the Wasichus made the treaty with Red Cloud, that said it would be ours is long as grass should grow and water flow. That was only eight winter’s before, and they were chasing us now because we remembered and they forgot.

Crazy Horse was dead. He was brave and good and wise. He never wanted anything but to save his people, and he fought the Wasichus only when they came to kill us in our own country. He was only thirty years old. They could not kill him in battle. They had to lie to him and kill him that way. I cried all night, and so did my father.

Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round . . . The sky is round and I have heard the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind in its greatest power whirls, birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.

it is better for both parties to come together without arms and talk it over and find some peaceful way to settle it. —SINTE-GALESHKA (SPOTTED TAIL) OF THE BRULÉ SIOUX

The Sioux, like all American Indians, are descendents of Asian nomads who crossed the thousand-mile Bering Land Bridge in various migrations between 16,500 and 5,000 BC.

Now all these virtues mean one thing, and that is bravery. A Sioux boy was taught to be brave always. It was not sufficient to be brave enough to go to war. He must be brave enough to make personal sacrifices and to think little of personal gain. To be brave was the supreme test of a Sioux boy, and this bravery might receive a greater test in times of peace than in times of war.

Mother! what a world of affection is comprised in that single word; how little do we in the giddy round of youthful pleasure and folly heed her wise counsels. How lightly do we look upon that zealous care with which she guides our otherwise erring feet, watches with feelings which none but a mother can know the gradual expansion of our youth to the riper yours of discretion. We may not think of it then, but it will be recalled to our minds in after years, when the gloomy grave or a fearful living separation has placed her far beyond our reach, and her sweet voice of sympathy and consolation for the various ills attendant upon us sounds in our ears no more. How deeply then we regret a thousand deeds that we have done contrary to her gentle admonitions! How we sign for those days once more, that we may retrieve what we have done amiss and make her kind heart glad with happiness! Alas! once gone they can never be recalled, and we grow mournfully sad with the bitter reflection.

It is thus with our life. We silently glide along, little dreaming about the waves which will so soon sweep over us, dashing us up against the rocks, or stranding us forever. we do not dream that we shall ever wreck, until the greater wave comes over us, and we bend beneath its power.

Despite all of the time he spent in Big Heart's, Wilson had never come to understand the social lives of Indians. He did not know that, in the Indian world, there is not much social difference between a rich Indian and a poor one. Generally speaking, Indian is Indian. A few who gain wealth and power as lawyers, businessmen, artists, or doctors may marry white people and keep only white friends, but generally Indians of different classes interact freely with one another. Most unemployed or working poor, some with good jobs and steady incomes, but all mixing together. Wilson also did not realize how tribal distinctions were much more important than economic ones. The rich and poor Spokanes may hang out together, but that doesn't necessarily mean the Spokanes are friendly with the Lakota or Navajo or any other tribe. The Sioux still distrust the Crow because they served as scouts for Custer. Hardly anybody likes the Pawnee. Most important, though, Wilson did not understand that the white people who pretend to be Indian are gently teased, ignored, plainly ridiculed, or beaten, depending on their degree of whiteness.

Whipple called him by his Indian name: Enmegahbowh, which translates from the Ojibwe language as He Who Prays for His People While Standing.

Experience is a great teacher, and we were then in her school, and learned that while hope offers the faintest token of refuge, we pause upon the fearful brink of eternity, and look back for rescue.

...from the Plains Sioux Indians. The Great Spirit the creator, decided to separate the world of animals and the world of men, so He gathered all living things on the Great Plains, and He drew a line down in the dirt. That line began to expand and form into a great deep crevasse, and at the last moment before it became unbreachable Dog leapt over and stood by Man. [from the book The NPR Interviews 1995, edited by Robert Siegel.]

The character of the Indian's emotion left little room in his heart for antagonism toward his fellow creatures .... For the Lakota (one of the three branches of the Sioux Nation), mountains, lakes, rivers, springs, valleys, and the woods were all in finished beauty. Winds, rain, snow, sunshine, day, night, and change of seasons were endlessly fascinating. Birds, insects, and animals filled the world with knowledge that defied the comprehension of man. The Lakota was a true naturalist - a lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, and the attachment grew with age. The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth, and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their alters were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the earth, and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing. This is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its live giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him.

Grant promised to send the Oglala Sioux large herds of sheep and cattle for raising stock and to build schools that would teach them English. For the Indians, however, this didn’t mean salvation so much as the wanton destruction of their traditional culture.

Specifically he was Dakota but in those days they were known as Sioux. He didn’t like being called an Indian which was understandable given the image that had been acid-burned with ridicule and hatred into the minds of white Americans. In the valley of the Minnesota River—hell, maybe everywhere back then—it was dangerous to be an Indian.

In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them. For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.

In a little depression there lay outstretched a stalwart Sioux warrior, stark naked with the exception of a breech clout and moccasins. I could not help feeling a sorrow as I stood gazing upon him. He was within a few hundred yards of his home and family, which we had attempted to destroy and he had tried to defend. The home of the slayer was perhaps a thousand miles away. In a few days the wolves and buzzards would have his remains torn asunder and scattered, for the soldiers had no disposition to bury a dead Indian.

We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things which in our minds are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us many symbols that teach us the meaning of life. We have a saying that the white man sees so little, he must see with only one eye. We see a lot that you no longer notice. You could notice if you wanted to, but you are usually too busy. We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and commonplace are one...We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart.

The Pawnees did most of the killing at Summit Springs, and they killed without mercy. The Cheyennes expected as much. “I do not belittle the Pawnees for their killing of women or children because as far back as any of us could remember the Cheyenne and Sioux slaughtered every male, female, and child they could run across of the Pawnee tribe,” said a Dog Soldier survivor. “Each tribe hated the other with a deadly passion and savage hearts [that] know only total war.” Sherman and Sheridan’s notion of total war paled beside that of the Plains Indians.

Our People were imprisoned within the most difficult of the Indian languages, so difficult indeed that no other tribe except one related branch, the Gros Ventres, ever learned to speak it. It stood by itself, a language spoken by only 3300 people in the world: that was the total number of Our People. The enemy tribes were not much larger: the Ute had 3600; the Comanche, 3500; the Pawnee, about 6000. The great Cheyenne, who would be famous in history, had only 3500. The Dakota, known also as the Sioux, had many branches, and they totaled perhaps 11,000.

Many whites attributed the violence to the Indians’ nature. By contrast, the bishop continued to blame the government corruption and mistreatment of the Indians, and he publicly told the stories of Dakotas who had risked their lives to rescue whites. His narrative was a lonely one, cutting against the grain of the dominant story. He persisted in telling it, without apology, while also showing his sympathy for the suffering of white civilians. Given the extremity of the circumstances, publicly following the path he did meant risking his reputation and even his physical well-being.

It was there that Lewis and Clark encountered and scrapped with the Arikara. It was there that unscrupulous agents of fur companies waged biological warfare on them, bringing blankets from Saint Louis—blankets deliberately contaminated with smallpox, to which the Indians’ unsuspecting immune systems fell easy prey. And it was there, on August 9, 1823, that Colonel Henry Leavenworth and a force of nearly three hundred U.S. Army soldiers, Missouri militiamen, and Sioux warriors attacked the villages with rifles, bows, clubs, and gunboats. During the night of August 14, the remaining Arikara slipped away from their battered villages. BY

The Sioux position, conveyed by White Face, is that the land needs to be returned; it needs to become tribal land again. White Face showed me what used to be several ancient sacred sites “where the Great Spirits dwell” and she wants those sites restored, so Sioux people can once again commune with the spirits. I reminded White Face that before the Sioux, there were Cheyenne Indians and other tribes on that land. So if America stole the land from the Sioux, didn’t the Sioux steal the land from the Cheyenne and other tribes? If the land is returned to the Sioux, shouldn’t the Sioux turn around and give it back to those who had it before? White Face looked flustered.

The answer was simple and direct, as it had been throughout the period of white contact with the red men. First, make them dependent. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark saw this in a flash after their initial encounter with the Sioux, of whom they said, “These are the vilest miscreants of the savage race, and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri, until such measures are pursued, by our government, as will make them feel a dependence on its will for their supply of merchandise.”22 All that would then be needed to put the Indian on the road to civilization was, in the words of Henry Knox, the Secretary of War in 1789, to give the Indian “a love for exclusive property.”23

My mother the friend, benefactor, and beneficiary of white liberal women said these things about white liberals: “Your average white liberal would die before she sat down to a raccoon and squirrel dinner with some illiterate shotgun-shack Arkansas white folks who believe the Good Lord is their one and only savior. But that same white liberal will happily eat fried SPAM and white bread with a Lakota Sioux shaman who never graduated high school, and give him a highly transcendent blow job after dinner.” “White pacifist liberals in favor of gun control will race from their latest antiwar demonstration to rally for the American Indian Movement, a radical Indian organization that accomplished much of its mission through gunfire and threat of gunfire.

One August morning at Blair House, he read in the papers that the body of an American soldier killed in action, Sergeant John Rice, had been brought home for burial in Sioux City, Iowa, but that at the last moment, as the casket was to be lowered into the grave, officials of the Sioux City Memorial Park had stopped the ceremony because Sergeant Rice, a Winnebago Indian, was not “a member of the Caucasian race” and burial was therefore denied. Outraged, Truman picked up the phone. Within minutes, by telephone and telegram, it was arranged that Sergeant Rice would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors and that an Air Force plane was on the way to bring his widow and three children to Washington. That, as President, was the least he could do.

Third, the Sioux did not delegate real power to an individual, be he a head of an akicita society, tribal chief, or simply a brave individual. As Lowie puts it, “in normal times the chief was not a supreme executive, but a peacemaker and an orator.” Chiefs—all chiefs—were titular, “and any power exercised within the tribe was exercised by the total body of responsible men who had qualified for social eminence by their war record and their generosity.”33 Whites could never understand this point, incidentally; because they could not conceive of a society without a solid hierarchy, the whites insisted that the Indians had to have chiefs who would be a final authority and able to speak for the entire tribe. Later, much difficulty grew out of this basic white misunderstanding of Indian government.

What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. What treaty that the whites ever made with us red men have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their lands. They sent ten thousand horsemen to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them? What white man can say that I ever stole his lands 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 gone 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 in me because my skin in red; because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my fathers lived; because I would die for my people and my country?32

Just across from Bismarck stood Fort Lincoln where friends and relatives of Custer’s dead cavalrymen still lived, and these emigrating Sioux could perceive such bitterness in the air that one Indian on the leading boat displayed a white flag. Yet, in accordance with the laws of human behavior, the farther downstream they traveled the less hostility they encountered, and when the tiny armada reached Standing Rock near the present border of South Dakota these Indians were welcomed as celebrities. Men, women and children crowded aboard the General Sherman to shake hands with Sitting Bull. Judson Elliot Walker, who was just then finishing a book on Custer’s campaigns, had to stand on a chair to catch a glimpse of the medicine man and reports that he was wearing “green wire goggles.” No details are provided, so green wire goggles must have been a familiar sight in those days. Sitting Bull mobbed by fans while wearing green wire goggles. It sounds like Hollywood.

A cavalry of sweaty but righteous blond gods chased pesky, unkempt people across an annoyingly leaky Mexican border. A grimy cowboy with a headdress of scrawny vultures lay facedown in fiery sands at the end of a trail of his own groveling claw marks, body flattened like a roadkill, his back a pincushion of Apache arrows. He rose and shook his head as if he had merely walked into a doorknob. Never mind John Wayne and his vultures and an “Oregon Trail” lined with the Mesozoic buttes of the Southwest, where the movies were filmed, or the Indians who were supposed to be northern plains Cheyenne but actually were Navajo extras in costume department Sioux war bonnets saying mischievous, naughty things in Navajo, a language neither filmmaker nor audience understood anyway, but which the interpreter onscreen translated as soberly as his forked tongue could manage, “Well give you three cents an acre.” Never mind the ecologically incorrect arctic loon cries on the soundtrack. I loved that desert.

John Fire Lame Deer, a Lakota medicine man, wrote gut-wrenchingly about what the bison meant for his people, and what happened when they were destroyed: The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tipis were made of his skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, holy. Out of his skin we made our water bags. His flesh strengthened us, became flesh of our flesh. Not the smallest part of it was wasted. His stomach, a red-hot stone dropped in to it, became our soup kettle. His horns were our spoons, the bones our knives, our women’s awls and needles. Out of his sinews we made our bowstrings and thread. His ribs were fashioned into sleds for our children, his hoofs became rattles. His mighty skull, with the pipe leaning against it, was our sacred altar. The name of the greatest of all Sioux was Tatanka Iyotake—Sitting Bull. When you killed off the buffalo you also killed the Indian—the real, natural, “wild” Indian.

We still talk a lot about ‘authentic’ cultures, but if by ‘authentic’ we mean something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local traditions free of external influences, then there are no authentic cultures left on earth. Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences. One of the most interesting examples of this globalisation is ‘ethnic’ cuisine. In an Italian restaurant we expect to find spaghetti in tomato sauce; in Polish and Irish restaurants lots of potatoes; in an Argentinian restaurant we can choose between dozens of kinds of beefsteaks; in an Indian restaurant hot chillies are incorporated into just about everything; and the highlight at any Swiss café is thick hot chocolate under an alp of whipped cream. But none of these foods is native to those nations. Tomatoes, chilli peppers and cocoa are all Mexican in origin; they reached Europe and Asia only after the Spaniards conquered Mexico. Julius Caesar and Dante Alighieri never twirled tomato-drenched spaghetti on their forks (even forks hadn’t been invented yet), William Tell never tasted chocolate, and Buddha never spiced up his food with chilli. Potatoes reached Poland and Ireland no more than 400 years ago. The only steak you could obtain in Argentina in 1492 was from a llama. Hollywood films have perpetuated an image of the Plains Indians as brave horsemen, courageously charging the wagons of European pioneers to protect the customs of their ancestors. However, these Native American horsemen were not the defenders of some ancient, authentic culture. Instead, they were the product of a major military and political revolution that swept the plains of western North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a consequence of the arrival of European horses. In 1492 there were no horses in America. The culture of the nineteenth-century Sioux and Apache has many appealing features, but it was a modern culture – a result of global forces – much more than ‘authentic’.

On the summits of these heights I found shells such as are picked up at the seaside. The Indians accounted for their appearance there by saying that once a great sea rolled over the face of the country and only one man in a boat escaped with his family. He had sailed about in the boat until the waters retired to their place, and, living there, became the father of all Indians.

Finally, doing good through the power of the state bumps up against institutional realities. Doing good requires bureaucrats and bureaucracies. But human nature dictates that people given bureaucratic power will exercise it in the service of petty psychological needs or for personal profit. Bureaucracy also means turf battles, in this case between the departments of War and Interior, and also turf battles within those departments. Doing good put the treaty-guaranteed food allocations at the mercy of yearly budget battles in Congress, where treaty obligations to the Sioux were extremely low on the hierarchy of interest that determined how congressmen voted. In fact, the realities of electoral politics meant doing good gave rising local politicians a chance to play on the anti-Indian fears and emotions of the populace to garner votes.

Indeed, as important as the prospect of physical bodily changes, he saw the immigrant psyche changing as it gradually adopted the psychology of the aboriginal peoples. Despite the best efforts of American whites, fragments of an American Indian soul were constantly appearing in their dreams and fantasies. “The American presents a strange picture,” Jung said, “a European with Negro behavior and an Indian soul. He shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil.”18

In evoking the figures of the devil and the divine, Jung interpreted the trickster figure in comparative terms that made sense to European psychologists and scholars, but which had little to do with American Indians. His misreading should caution us about the dangers of this kind of comparative work. Indeed, having laid this base in Western theology, Jung found it hard to stop, and he found himself arguing that the trickster is: a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.23

At his request--a Custer request was a command impossible to refuse--I produced a series of prints for the Centennial Expedition at Philadelphia: the general with Bloody Knife, his favorite Indian scout; with the Custers' pack of eighty dogs; with his junior officers, planning the destruction of the Lakota Sioux; with Libbie in the parlor of their quarters at the fort; and the general striking a pose that would become as recognizable as Napoléon's; arms folded across his chest, looking forward and slightly upward at his magnificent destiny.

This beast that puffed smoke and spat fire and shrieked like a devil of an alien tribe; that split the silence as hideously as the long track split the once smooth plain; that was made of iron and wood; this thing of the white man’s, coming from out of the distance where the Great Spirit lifted the dawn, meant the end of the hunting-grounds and the doom of the Indian. Blood had flowed; many warriors lay in their last sleep under the trees; but the iron monster that belched fire had gone only to return again. Those white men were many as the needles of the pines. They fought and died, but always others came. The chief was old and wise, taught by sage and star and mountain and wind and the loneliness of the prairie-land. He recognized a superior race, but not a nobler one. White men would glut the treasures of water and earth. The Indian had been born to hunt his meat, to repel his red foes, to watch the clouds and serve his gods. But these white men would come like a great flight of grasshoppers to cover the length and breadth of the prairie-land. The buffalo would roll away, like a dust-cloud, in the distance, and never return. No meat for the Indian — no grass for his mustang — no place for his home. The Sioux must fight till he died or be driven back into waste places where grief and hardship would end him. Red and dusky, the sun was setting beyond the desert. The old chief swept aloft his arm, and then in his acceptance of the inevitable bitterness he stood in magnificent austerity, somber as death, seeing in this railroad train creeping, fading into the ruddy sunset, a symbol of the destiny of the Indian — vanishing — vanishing — vanishing —

Dances with Wolves follows the exploits of an army officer in the American West during the late 1800s. Gradually he is drawn to take up the life of the Sioux Indians he thought were his enemy. The hero’s central moral problem is how he treats another race and culture and how he lives with animals and the land. Each opponent and ally takes a different approach to this problem.

understand you got all kinds of family stuff in there from Minnesota Sioux. Anything on Bluebird or Yellow Hand?” “I looked up Bluebird. He’s just about the last of the family. A lot of Bluebirds went East and married into the Mohawks and that bunch. There are still quite a few Yellow Hands out at Crow Creek and Niobrara. Those used to be Minnesota Indians before they got run out. But I know this Yellow Hand you talked

I hope this unforgettable story of Hannah Nelson and her family and their courage and compassion for the Lakota Sioux Indians warms your hearts and excites your imagination, as the saga of these brave and resilient people is told through my books".

The Plains Indians made cuffs and gauntlets which they wore on ceremonial occasions. The Blackfoot especially liked the gauntlet with its large beaded and fringed tops. These were no doubt copied after the riding gauntlets of the United States Cavalry in the Indian territory. The Sioux, Crow, Ute, and Cheyenne made the cuff part only. These, too, were decorated with bead and quill work.

The use of the peace pipe was held sacred by the Indians. Usually it was used in ceremonies of religious, political, or social nature. The decorations on the pipe’s bowl and stem, and even the method of holding or passing the pipe on to the next person, held great ceremonial significance. The pipe was never laid on the ground. To smoke it was a signal that the smoker gave his pledge of honor. It was also believed that the smoke made one think clearly and endowed him with great wisdom. In a treaty ceremony, the pipe usually was passed around to everyone, even before the speeches were made and the problems discussed. Some pipes were made out of wood, clay, or bone. But the most popular and the most treasured were those made of the soft catlinite mined in the pipestone quarries of Minnesota. These red stone quarries were considered sacred by the Dakotas (Sioux), and were traditionally neutral ground for all tribes. Indians traveled many miles to get this pipestone, and it was a medium of barter between various tribes. The stone was so soft that it could be cut and worked into designs with a knife when freshly quarried. Some pipes were inlaid with lead. It is said that some of the Indian raids on small western town newspapers were made by the Indians to get type lead with which to inlay their pipes.

By the time Columbus discovered America, the Indians were already using beads for decoration. Beads were made from shells, bones, claws, stones, and minerals. The Algonquin and Iroquois tribes of the eastern coast made beads from clam, conch, periwinkle, and other seashells. These beads were used as a medium of exchange by the early Dutch and English colonists. They were called “wampum,” a contraction of the Algonquin “wampumpeak” or “wamponeage,” meaning string of shell beads. The purple beads had twice the value of the white ones. The explorer, followed by the trader, missionary and settler, soon discovered that he had a very good trade item in glass beads brought from Europe. The early beads that were used were about 1/8 inch in diameter, nearly twice as large as beads in the mid-1800’s. They were called pony beads and were quite irregular in shape and size. The colors most commonly used were sky-blue, white, and black. Other less widely used colors were deep bluff, light red, dark red, and dark blue. The small, round seed beads, as they are called, are the most generally used for sewed beadwork. They come in a variety of colors. Those most commonly used by the Indians are red, orange, yellow, light blue, dark blue, green, lavender, and black. The missionaries’ floral embroidered vestments influenced the Woodland tribes of the Great Lakes to apply beads in flower designs. Many other tribes, however, are now using flower designs. There are four main design styles used in the modern period. Three of the styles are largely restricted to particular tribes. The fourth style is common to all groups. It is very simple in pattern. The motifs generally used are solid triangles, hourglasses, crosses, and oblongs. This style is usually used in narrow strips on leggings, robes, or blankets. Sioux beadwork usually is quite open with a solid background in a light color. White is used almost exclusively, although medium or light blue is sometimes seen. The design colors are dominated by red and blue with yellow and green used sparingly. The lazy stitch is used as an application. The Crow and Shoshoni usually beaded on red trade or blanket cloth, using the cloth itself for a background. White was rarely used, except as a thin line outlining other design elements. The most common colors used for designs are pale lavender, pale blue, green, and yellow. On rare occasions, dark blue was used. Red beads were not used very often because they blended with the background color of the cloth and could not be seen. The applique stitch was used. Blackfoot beadwork can be identified by the myriad of little squares or oblongs massed together to make up a larger unit of design such as triangles, squares, diamonds, terraces, and crosses. The large figure is usually of one color and the little units edging it of many colors. The background color is usually white, although other light colors such as light blue and green have been used. The smallness of the pattern in Blackfoot designs would indicate this style is quite modern, as pony trading beads would be too large to work into these designs. Beadwork made in this style seems to imitate the designs of the woven quill work of some of the northwestern tribes with whom the Blackfoot came in contact.

The women of the Plains tribes made their clothing of soft, tanned elk skin. Their principal garment was a simple, sleeveless dress made from two hides. The style of the garment followed the natural shape of the skins with little change from tribe to tribe. These dresses usually hung loose from the shoulders. Belts were sometimes worn to draw them in at the waist. Cowrie and other shells were used for decorations by the Crow, Sioux, and Blackfoot tribes. The shells were obtained by barter. Elk and buffalo teeth, leather thongs, bead and quill work, and tin cones were also used. Originally, Indian women wore their hair straight or in braids.

The country taken as a whole is only fit for the Indian and they had ought ... to possess it, they and their children, forever.

If land and religion are what people most often kill each other over, then the West is different only in that the land is the religion. As such, the basic struggle is between the West of possibility and the West of possession. On many days it looks as if the possessors have won. Over the past century and a half, it has been the same crew, whether shod in snakeskin boots or tasseled loafers, chipping away at the West. They have tried to tame it, shave it, fence it, cut it, dam it, drain it, nuke it, poison it, pave it, and subdivide it. They use a false view of history to disguise most of what they are up to. They seem to be afraid of the native West—the big, cloud-crushing, prickly place. They cannot stand it that green-eyed wolves are once again staring out from behind aspen groves in Yellowstone National Park. They cannot live with the idea that at least one of the seventeen rivers that dance out of the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada remains undammed. They are disgusted that George Armstrong Custer’s name has been removed from the name of the battlefield memorial, the range of the Sioux and Crow and Arapaho, replaced by a name that gives no special favor to either side: the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Worse, the person now in charge of the memorial is an Indian.

BY 1876, THE YEAR THE Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought, the United States had become a nation of some forty million people, the vast majority of whom had never seen a fighting Indian—not, that is, unless they happened to glimpse one or another of the powerful Indian leaders whom the government periodically paraded through Washington or New York, usually Red Cloud, the powerful Sioux diplomat, who made a long-winded speech at Cooper Union in 1870. Or, it might be Spotted Tail, of the Brulé Sioux; or American Horse, or even, if they were lucky, Sitting Bull, who hated whites, the main exceptions being Annie Oakley, his “Little Sure Shot,” or Buffalo Bill Cody, who once described Sitting Bull as “peevish,” surely the understatement of the century. Sitting Bull often tried to marry Annie Oakley, who was married; he did not succeed.

surely none can better testify to the worth of trust in God than those whose hope on earth seemed ended; and, faint and weak as our faith was, it saved us from utter desolation and the blackness of despair.

The Lakotas were the true horse-and-buffalo Sioux of popular imagination, and they constituted nearly half the Sioux nation.

Key Apache Adversaries—U.S. Military Figures and Civilian Apache Agents Clum, John P.—born 1851. Civilian Apache agent at the San Carlos and Fort Apache reservations. Nicknamed “Turkey Gobbler” by the Apache for his strutting nature. Later became mayor of Tombstone, Arizona. His claim to fame was being the only person to successfully “capture” Geronimo. Died in 1932. Crook, General George—born 1828. Called America’s “greatest Indian fighter.” He was the first to use Indian scouts and was crucial in ending the Apache Wars. Called Nantan Lupan (“the Tan Wolf”) by the Apache, he advocated for Apache rights while at the same time becoming one of Geronimo’s greatest adversaries. Crook negotiated Geronimo’s “surrender” at the Cañon de los Embudos. He died in 1890. Gatewood, Lieutenant Charles B.—born 1853. A latecomer to the Apache Wars, Gatewood used scouts but failed to bring in Victorio. However, Gatewood would ultimately negotiate the terms of Geronimo’s final surrender to General Nelson A. Miles in 1886. He died in 1896. Miles, General Nelson A.—born in 1839. Civil War veteran best known for accepting Geronimo’s final surrender. Fought Sioux and Cheyenne Indians after the Battle of Little Big Horn. He died at the age of eighty-five in 1925 and was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Sieber, Al—born 1843. A German-American, he served as the army’s chief of scouts during the Apache Wars. Died in 1907.

When the bell rings she hurries up to me with more than twenty sheets of paper. She’s Indian—Hidatsa, maybe, or Sioux—and the other children let her pass as if she were invisible. The morning star dances in a red circle, singing a song about his girlfriend Sheila; the angel Gabriel stands before Mary, his blue wings ablaze with stars. His mouth is open wide and notes are coming out, each one a different color. A woman with green hair holds her hands up to the sky and says: These are secret words, Say them after me. May all the plants and flowers rise And all people rise from death. I look up from the paper: a dusty shelf, a starfish in a jar caked with dust beside dusty petri dishes. I see shades of blue: the globe cerulean, the sky bleached out. And out the window, above the children’s heads, topsoil, the residue of ancient oceans, swirling like a thumbprint in the playground, wind pushing the empty swings. “So many poems,” I say, smiling at the girl. “You must love to write.” She shifts from foot to foot and weaves her hands in air. “I don’t have paper at home,” she says, “so I keep them in my head. That’s where they live until I write them down.

Because she kept the note from me, I left and you died.

The cheekiest of land speculators, or the most conscienceless of newspaper correspondents, could not say a word in behalf of that infernal region, which it would be the acme of exaggeration to term "land." But some of our old Indian scouts said it was Arabia Felix compared with what lay between us and the Powder river. Why the government of the United States should keep an army for the purpose of robbing the Indians of such a territory, is an unsolvable puzzle. It is a solemn mockery to call the place "a reservation," unless dust, ashes and rocks be accounted of value to mankind. Not even one Indian could manage to exist on the desert tract over which

I put in, in all, 15 years among the Sioux, Assiniboines and Mountain Crows. I'm not going into the subject, but I will say that the more I saw of the relations of the white man and the Indian, the more sympathy I had for the Indians. pg 62

Whose voice was first sounded on this land? The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows. … What has been done in my country I did not want, did not ask for it; white people going through my country. … When the white man comes in my country he leaves a trail of blood behind him. … I have two mountains in that country—the Black Hills and the Big Horn Mountain. I want the Great Father to make no roads through them. I have told these things three times; now I have come here to tell them the fourth time. —MAHPIUA LUTA (RED CLOUD) OF THE OGLALA SIOUX

This war did not spring up here in our land; this war was brought upon us by the children of the Great Father who came to take our land from us without price, and who, in our land, do a great many evil things. The Great Father and his children are to blame for this trouble. … It has been our wish to live here in our country peaceably, and do such things as may be for the welfare and good of our people, but the Great Father has filled it with soldiers who think only of our death. Some of our people who have gone from here in order that they may have a change, and others who have gone north to hunt, have been attacked by the soldiers from this direction, and when they have got north have been attacked by soldiers from the other side, and now when they are willing to come back the soldiers stand between them to keep them from coming home. It seems to me there is a better way than this. When people come to trouble, it is better for both parties to come together without arms and talk it over and find some peaceful way to settle it. —SINTE-GALESHKA (SPOTTED TAIL) OF THE BRULÉ SIOUX

In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor.

reputedly consulted with the spirit of a dead Sioux Indian chief.

The agency was started by the tribe’s economic development corporation, in an effort to diversify from its gambling casino called “WinnaVegas.” You read this right: Plains Indians publishing Arabic brochures for Nebraskans who are importing machinery from Koreans to be customized by a South Sioux City company for customers in Kuwait.

there would have been no warfare. One of the great Indian warriors of history was Red Cloud of the Oglala Dakota Sioux tribe, who had a reputation for daring and ferocity. In June of 1866, Sherman called Red Cloud and several other Lakota Sioux leaders to Fort Laramie to discuss a new treaty to permit a new road to be built through Sioux territory. Even before an agreement had been reached, however, a battalion

I truly hope the efforts of Red Shirt and Colonel Cody can bring about peace between their peoples, Watson. They have much to learn from each other.” I queried my friend, “The white race is far advanced beyond Red Shirt’s people, Holmes. I can see the advantage the Indians would have in being assimilated into American society, but what do they have to offer in return?” Holmes limped over to the window and replied, “They are an honourable and courageous people, Watson. They are also great respecters of nature, whereas the white man runs roughshod over it in the name of progress. We need their wisdom to maintain the delicate balance of man in his place in the natural world.” “Surely science can provide the answers we need, old man,” I answered. My friend crooked his finger at me and bade me join him at the window. The streets were bustling with people and horse drawn vehicles, the London sky was shrouded in a yellowish-grey, poisonous atmosphere from the many smokestacks of homes, trains and factories. “There is the result of science, Doctor,” he said pointing to the murky skyline. “I believe that I would gladly trade this version of ‘civilisation’ for the blue skies and simple ways which the Sioux fought so desperately for. What say you?” Holmes to Watson in Buffalo Bill and the Red Shirt Menace A Sherlock Holmes Alphabet of Cases: Volume One

Not unlike his brother physicians in civilized communities, the Indian doctor endeavors to confound the people by an unintelligible language, and serious expressions of countenance, as a substitute for real knowledge and skill, thus concealing his incompetency under the disguise of learning, sometimes to the destruction of his confiding patient.

Elderly Cheyenne warriors, weary of the misery and boredom of old age, made elaborate preparations to end their lives in battle. Yet accepting death was also an affirmation of life, for Crazy Horse also said he could die willingly because all the things he held dear—the sun, the land, the buffalo—were close by; his willingness to die was part of his way of honoring the human spirit. It was the lot of all people. As Sioux warriors acknowledged, "Only the rocks and mountains last forever; men must die.