Photo: Sitting Bull, c. 1883
Today I remember legendary Native American warrior, Lakota Sioux chief and medicine man Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, otherwise known as Sitting Bull who was born in 1831 a few miles below where Bullhead, South Dakota, now stands to a prominent Hunkpapa Lakota family, as both his father and two uncles were chiefs in the tribe in a village a few miles below where Bullhead, South Dakota.
As a child he was given the name Jumping Badger and was called “slow” due to his demeanor. Throughout his childhood, he participated in traditional games and competitions that tested a young man’s skills.
The youth grew to manhood as a member of the Hunkpapa tribe, one of seven among the Teton Lakota, the westernmost division of the Sioux Confederation. His people thrived as a nomadic hunter-warrior society. As an infant strapped to a baby-board, he was carried by his mother as the tribe roamed the northern Plains hunting buffalo. At five years, he rode behind his mother on her horse and helped as best he could around the camp.
By the age of ten, he rode his own pony, wrapping his legs around the curved belly of the animal (a practice that caused him to be slightly bowlegged for the remainder of his years). He learned to hunt small game with bow and arrows and to gather berries. He reveled in the games and races, swimming and wrestling with the other boys. His was an active and vigorous life, and he loved it.
The warrior dimension of Lakota male life came more into focus as the boy grew. The Tetons concentrated most of their wrath on the Crow and Assiniboin Indians at first, and the whites at a later time.
The hub of Lakota society centered on gaining prestige through heroic acts in battle. Counting coups by touching an enemy with a highly decorated stick was top priority. The Lakota lad learned his lessons well, and, at the age of fourteen, he joined a mounted war party. He picked out one of the enemy, and, with a burst of enthusiasm and courage, he charged the rival warrior and struck him with his coup stick. After the battle, word of this heroic deed spread throughout the Hunkpapa village. The boy had reached a milestone in his development; for the remainder of his life, he enjoyed telling the story of his first coup.
Around the campfire that night, his proud father, Jumping Bull, gave his son a new name. He called him Sitting Bull after the beast that the Lakota respected so much for its tenacity. A buffalo bull was the essence of strength, and a “sitting bull” was one that held his ground and could not be pushed aside. In 1857, Sitting Bull became a chief of the Hunkpapa. He had ably demonstrated his abilities as a warrior, and his common sense and his leadership traits showed promise of a bright future for him. Although his physical appearance was commonplace, he was convincing in argument, stubborn, and quick to grasp a situation. These traits gained for him the respect of his people as a warrior and as a statesman.
During this time, Sitting Bull advocated against the Lakotas forming relationships with white settlers. However, there were many members within the tribe that were open to developing these relationships for commerce and diplomacy purposes. Sitting Bull was opposed to this and continued to avoid white settlements until later in his life.
Although born in Dakota territory, Sitting Bull’s people weren’t involved in the Dakota War of 1862, where several bands of eastern Dakota people killed an estimated 300 to 800 settlers and soldiers in south-central Minnesota in response to poor treatment by the government.
But in 1863/64 while they were still fighting the Civil War, the United States army retaliated against bands that had not been involved anyway, involving Sitting Bull, who, along with many others, defended his people. In a time of many tribes with different idiosyncratic tendencies and rivalries, Sitting Bull was elected to lead, some say as the “Supreme Chief of the whole Sioux Nation”, however this has also been refuted as the Lakota society was highly decentralized, still, Sitting Bull was seen by many as a great leader.
A year later in 1864, the man leading the campaign into the Dakotas, Brigadier General Alfred Sully, would attack a village of 8,000 Sioux that included Sitting Bull..
The Sioux had captured Fanny Kelly, a white American woman, and the U.S. wasn't happy about it. The attack was brutal and much of the Sioux was forced to retreat to the Badlands while leaving the majority of their possessions behind, according to the National Park Service.
In 1866, the Lakotas led by Chief Red Cloud had launched a campaign against forts along the Bozeman Trail. After two years of hostilities, the monumental 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed. The Lakotas in attendance agreed to end hostilities and move to a reservation in what would later become South Dakota.
Sitting Bull had refused to be a part of these treaty negotiations and, therefore, did not agree to its conditions. He believed that the conditions only applied to those who agreed to the treaty in the first place. Thus began a deep fracture between the Lakotas: those who followed Red Cloud onto the reservation and those who followed Sitting Bull and continued their way of life.
During the period of 1868-76, Sitting Bull developed into the most important of Native American chiefs, refusing to become dependent on government support and having his people living on government enforced reservations, and was joined by many others who didn’t want to fall under subjugation. Sitting Bull welcomed all tribes and people to join with him peacefully, nourishing them and providing support, and his camp continually expanded into a community of over 10,000 people.
In the summer of 1874, gold was discovered in the Black Hills. The territory belonged to the Sioux according to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, but, after the discovery, the United States sought to buy the land from them. Despite the Sioux’s opposition to selling their land, the United States still continued allowing white settlers to move to the Black Hills. Controversy over possession of the lands known as the Black Hills, and the second 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie were critical factors that pitted Plains Indians tribes against the US. federal government.
In November of 1875, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs gave Sitting Bull an ultimatum and told him that he and the rest of his tribe that they had until January 31, 1876, to move onto their reservation otherwise they would be considered hostile against the U.S government. Sitting Bull and the non-treaty Lakotas, as they were called, refused and instead prepared for battle.
In late 1875, the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians defiantly left their reservations, outraged over the continued intrusions of whites into their sacred lands in the Black Hills. Soon, the recalcitrant Indians gathered in Montana with the great warrior Sitting Bull to fight for their lands.
As tensions between U.S. forces and Sitting Bull’s people rapidly intensified, the Lakota chief looked for spiritual guidance. And in early June 1876, Sitting Bull decided to initiate a Sun Dance ceremony. During this ceremony, Sitting Bull famously danced for 36 hours straight. He then made 50 sacrificial cuts on each arm. As blood ran down his limbs, he reportedly entered a trance, and had a clear vision of victory.
When he emerged, Sitting Bull announced that he’d seen U.S. soldiers plunging into a Native American camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky. In the vision, the men were upside down. Some were even losing their hats. It was a sign, the chief declared. Soon, the Lakota people and their allies would triumph over the U.S. troops. And just weeks later, they did. Not only did Native American warriors emerge victorious at the Battle of the Rosebud , where they defeated General George Crook but they also won an even bigger victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn shortly thereafter.
On June 25, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry attacked the Lakotas and Cheyenne along the Little Bighorn River. Here, one of the most famous battles in American history took place — the Battle of Little Bighorn. When Custer’s 7th Cavalry attacked their camp on the Little Big Horn River (known as the Greasy Grass River to the Lakota) on June 25, 1876, they didn’t realize how large the camp was. More than 2,000 Native American warriors had left their reservations to follow Sitting Bull, and being inspired by his vision where he saw the soldiers being killed upon entering the camp, they fought back,
While waiting aid from the other Cavalry forces, another group of Indian forces, led by Crazy Horse, effectively trapped Custer and his men. In a desperate attempt to hold off the Indian warriors, Custer ordered his men to shoot their horses and stack their bodies to form a barricade to protect them from the Indians. It took less than an hour for the arrows and bullets of the Indians to annihilate General Custer and his men. And as Sitting Bull’s warriors squared off against the U.S. troops during the bloody battle, the chief protected the tribal women and children and kept them out of harm’s way.
Many still tend to learn about Custer dying bravely during battle, for example, but not about the bravery of the Native Americans who defended themselves against settlers of European descent who were there illegally.
What doesn’t fit neatly into the Custer story of the popular imagination is the 1868 Treaty of Laramie, which had given the area where the battle took place to Lakota. To some historians, the Battle of the Little Bighorn happened because the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie, in which the U.S. government guaranteed to the Lakota and Dakota (Yankton) as well as the Arapaho exclusive possession of the Dakota Territory west of the Missouri River, had been broken.
We rarely learn about either the Battle of the Washita, which took place eight years before Little Bighorn and in which Custer led an attack on a village of mostly Southern Cheyenne people and rounded up women and children as prisoners.
Sitting Bull and his peoples victory didn’t last long, Custer’s defeat, poignantly dubbed Custer’s Last Stand, shocked and enraged the U.S. government. Soon, more U.S. soldiers flooded west with revenge on their minds, as Custer was considered a national hero, The aftermath of the battle also meant ceaseless harassment from the government to non-treaty Indians.
Realizing the constant threat of the U.S. government, Sitting Bull in May 1877, led his followers into Canada, where he remained in exile for four years. He was even offered a pardon and a chance to return, but refused.
In 1881, a memorial was erected over the mass grave of the Seventh Cavalry soldiers, U.S. Indian Scouts, and other personnel killed in The Battle of Little Bighorn battle. In 1940, the battlefield’s jurisdiction was transferred to the National Park Service.
Over the years, the American Public’s sentiment towards Custer’s image and the Battle of the Little Bighorn has changed as the recognition of the general mistreatment of Native Americans during America’s westward expansion has increased.
In 1991, the U.S. Congress changed the battlefield’s name from Custer Battlefield National Monument to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and ordered the construction of an Indian Memorial. Today, additional red granite memorials have been erected to commemorate the Indians who fought there, including Cheyenne warriors Lame White Man and Noisy Walking, Lakota warriors Long Road and Dog’s Back Bone.
When crossing the border into Canadian territory, Sitting Bull was met by the Mounties of the region. During this meeting, James Morrow Walsh, commander of the North-West Mounted Police, explained to Sitting Bull that the Lakota were now on British soil and must obey British law. Walsh emphasized that he enforced the law equally and that every person in the territory had a right to justice. Walsh became an advocate for Sitting Bull and the two became good friends for the remainder of their lives.
While in Canada, Sitting Bull also befriended Crowfoot, the leader of the Blackfeet, a long-time enemy of his tribe. However, his presence in Canada increased tensions between that nation and the US. Additionally, there were fewer buffalo to hunt, so his people were starving. Eventually Sitting Bull was so desperate for his people, who at this time, contained only 190 or so people. that he and his followers returned to America and surrendered at Fort Buford on July 19, 1881.
He proclaimed, “I, Takanka Iyotanka, wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.”
Tatanka Iyotake made the following statement to journalist James Creel in 1882: “This land belongs to us, for the Great Spirit gave it to us when he put us here. We were free to come and go, and to live in our own way. But the white men, who belong to another land, have come upon us, and are forcing is to live according to their ideas. That is an injustice, we have never dreamed of making white men live as we live. White men like to dig in the ground for their food. My people prefer to hunt the buffalo as their fathers did. White men like to stay in one place. My people want to move their tipis here and there to different hunting grounds. The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in towns or farms. The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food that is as good as the right to move in the open country, and live in our own fashion. Why has our blood been shed by your soldiers?
Sitting Bull drew a square on the ground with his thumbnail.
" There! Your soldiers made a mark like that in our country, and said that we must live there. They fed us and sent doctors. They said we should live without having to work. But they told us that we must go only so far in this direction, and only so far in that direction. They gave us meat, but took away our liberty. The white men had many things we wanted, but we could see that they did not have the one thing we liked best-freedom. I would rather live in a tipi and go without meat when game is scarce than give up my privileges as a free Indian, even though I could have all that white men have. We marched across the lines of our reservation, and the soldiers followed us. They attacked our village, and we killed them all. What would you do if your home was attacked? You would stand up like a brave man and defend it. That is our story. I have spoken.”
What Sitting Bull said applies to our “modern” age. We are a pathetic civilization that pays to live and eat, instead of acting as stewards of nature and relying upon its abundance.
By the 1890s, a long and desperate struggle on the part of Native American tribes to stem the tide of US expansion was lost. The Plains Indians perhaps suffered the destruction of their way of life and livelihood more acutely than any other.
Sitting Bull and his followers would spend 20 months at Fort Randall as prisoners of war, before returning north to live on the Standing Rock Reservation.
In 1884, Sitting Bull was invited to tour Canada and the northern US in a show called the “Sitting Bull Connection.” During this tour, he met and befriended Annie Oakley. He was impressed with her shooting ability and symbolically adopted her as his daughter. He called her “Little Sure Shot,” a name she used throughout her career.
The following year, Sitting Bull was again invited to travel, this time as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. He received $50 a week to ride around the arena but was only allowed to tour for one season. . He also gave speeches urging education for children and improving relations between the Sioux and whites.
Sitting Bull remained to his death the white man’s boldest, strongest and most stubborn opponent. He battled the land agreements of 1888 and 1889, which demanded the return of half the Great Sioux Reservation for white settlement and divided the rest into six separate reservations; when the federal government exploited Sioux factionalism amongst the “government-appointed chiefs” in order to obtain the necessary signatures for this new so-called treaty, Sitting Bull alone refused to sign; and, somehow, he remained a beacon of hope amongst his increasingly hopeless people.
And thanks to the Battle of Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had become a living legend and had garnered enough fame that he was able to live off of his fame by charging money for autographs and pictures.
As was true with vulnerable people all over the world, falling victim to introduced diseases, slavery and dispossession, a strong, utopian movement took root among the Plains Indians, known as the Ghost Dance. This was a movement that promised a supernatural return to a time before the arrival of the white man, manifest in specific songs and dances communicated to their profits and seers. Such spiritual accouterment as ‘Ghost Shirts’ were worn as protection against white man’s bullet’s, and a mood of defiance, perhaps even belligerence began to be expressed.
Naturally, the US authorities, receiving intelligence of this, interpreted the Ghost Dance as a war dance of some sort, and an obvious preliminary to an uprising or rebellion. It was therefore decided to nip any militant ambitions in the bud by implementing a crackdown.
Sitting Bull did not fully embrace the movement albeit he was curious about it. Although Sitting Bull did not lead the movement, many of his followers practiced it, and officials feared his influence could turn spiritual expression into armed resistance. Fearing he and his followers would leave the reservation, and scared that Sitting Bull still revered as a spiritual leader, would join the Ghost Dancers as well, on December 15th, 1890 at 5:30 AM roughly 40 Indian officers descended on Sitting Bull’s home with orders to arrest him.
The Indian policemen burst into Sitting Bull’s cabin and dragged him outside, where his followers were gathering to protect him. The proud chief didn’t go without a fight. After a brief scuffle with the Indian officers, one of history’s greatest resisters of colonialism and staunch fighter for the traditional ways of the Lakota would lay dead from shots to the head and chest. Eight Indians were also killed, including Sitting Bull's son, Crow Foot, and several others wounded.
Sitting Bull was buried in the military cemetery at Fort Yates. His funeral was attended by hundreds of Native Americans and was a solemn and mournful occasion. His death was also seen as a tragic loss to the Native American community, his crime? Leading resistance against colonialism and its campaign of land seizure, broken treaties, and cultural destruction.
Sitting Bull’s death was not an isolated incident. It removed a respected leader and intensified a climate of fear and repression. The events that followed exposed the brutal consequences of federal policy toward Indigenous nations at the end of the 19th century. And remembering Sitting Bull means understanding how his killing marked the final steps toward one of the darkest episodes in American history.
Following the killing of Sitting Bull, panic spread across the reservation, and 300 Hunkpapa Lakota fled the Standing Rock Reservation out of fear, and joined Spotted Elk (later called "Big Foot") and his band of Miniconjou Lakota on the Cheyenne River Reservation.
Spotted Elk's arrest was sought soon after Sitting Bull's death. On December 23, 1890, Spotted Elk led the Miniconjou Lakota, along with 38 Hunkpapa Lakota, from the Cheyenne River Reservation to the Pine Ridge Reservation, seeking shelter and food for the winter with Red Cloud and his band of Oglala Lakota.
On December 29, 1890, the 7th Cavalry intercepted the band of over 350 Lakota at the village of Wounded Knee. The cavalrymen insisted that the Lakota give up all their arms. A deaf man, by the name of Black Coyote, couldn't hear the order and resisted giving up his gun. After a struggle, the gun went off.
The Cavalry was already in position, and its members had been drinking throughout the night. They started shooting at the defenseless Lakota. At the end of the bloodshed, up to 300 Lakota were killed and 50 wounded, along with 26 Cavalry members killed and 39 wounded. It later came out that the dead and wounded Cavalry members were casualties of friendly fire since the soldiers surrounded the Lakota, their bullets went astray and hit their own men.
American Horse, an Oglala Lakota chief, described the inhumanity of the 7th Cavalry: There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce...A mother was shot down with her infant; the child, not knowing that its mother was dead, was still nursing...The women as they were fleeing with their babies were killed together, shot right through...and after most all of them had been killed, a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come forth, and they would be safe. Little boys...came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight, a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.
A blizzard blanketed the plains for next three days, leaving the dead and wounded covered in snow. Frozen into horrifying postures, the dead women, children and men laid there until the blizzard cleared. Then the federal government paid white settlers $2 per body to dump the corpses in a mass grave at the top of the Wounded Knee Hill. Among the frozen corpses, Spotted Elk was identified, and in an act of dominance, the settlers scalped him. The Wounded Knee massacre marked the end of the Indian Wars and the total subjugation of the Lakota tribes.
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2018/12/wounded-knee-massacre-never-forget.html The Ghost Dance movement also died that day, and Wounded Knee is now remembered as an iconic moment in Native American resistance, and symbolic of the wider destruction of an ancient people, removed from their ancient occupation of the land.
Since his death, Sitting Bull however has become a symbol of resistance and freedom for not just the Lakota, but for other Indigenous peoples and oppressed communities around the world. He is remembered not just for his military victories over the colonial settler state, the United States, but also for his fierce rejection to accept, whether through force or assimilation, the ways of the wasicu (fat takers). He understood freedom. Not the false sense of freedom that exists by the now larger general public, but freedom in its truest most natural sense.
Sitting Bull understood well also that the Western world offered only the promise of enslavement, prisoners to their own institutions and ideologies. Through his eyes, during his trips back East, he saw a world that benefitted the elite that held no compassion for the natural world, or even cared for its own children. It is often repeated that Tatanka Iyotake was baffled at the sight of poor white children begging for food on the streets of east coast cities.
Sitting Bull's legacy as a courageous and respected leader endures. He remains a powerful symbol of Indigenous sovereignty, cultural pride, and enduring resistance against injustice, inspiring generations through his courage and steadfast defense of his people's traditions.
The story of his remains has compounded the tragedy of his death. In 1953, one of Sitting Bull's descendants by marriage, Clarence Grey Eagle (the son of one of the Indian police who arrested Sitting Bull), and a group of businessmen from Mobridge obtained an opinion from the Bureau of Indian Affairs that the descendants of Sitting Bull should determine his final burial site.
On April 8 of that year, the group used the BIA letter as justification for the clandestine relocation of the great chief's remains to a site in the southern portion of the Standing Rock Reservation that overlooks the Missouri River near Mobridge.
Less than five months later, South Dakota dedicated a memorial to Sitting Bull on the site of the relocated remains. A bust created by famed sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski (well known for the Crazy Horse monument in the Black Hills) was erected to commemorate the gravesite.
Ziolkowski actually boycotted the dedication ceremony for the monument by Governor Sigurd Anderson because exploiting the ceremony for political and economic gain was against the wishes of Sitting Bull's descendants.
Both the original gravesite in Ft. Yates, ND, and the current site have tremendous significance today. Sensitive to the exploitation of Native Americans and the suspect way Sitting Bull's remains were handled in the past, a commitment has been made not to exploit or commercialize the Sitting Bull monument for financial gain. The statue is in an isolated park that remains serene, impressive, and free to visitors.
Every December, Native Americans conduct an annual ceremony at Sitting Bull’s burial site to commemorate him and offer prayers in his honor. His story is a reminder of the struggles and sacrifices made by Native Americans in the face of colonization and oppression, and serves as a testament to the resilience and strength of Indigenous communities. His life was defined by bravery, resilience, and a steadfast defense of his people’s way of life.
