(1868?-1939)
Brulé Sioux author and film actor
Placing his birth in or around 1868—the "winter" known to his tiospaye, or extended family group, as the "breaking up of camp" and five years later than is indicated by Bureau of Indian Affairs records—Luther Standing Bear was from the last generation of Sicangus or Brulé Sioux who could claim to have been reared in the ways of the prereservation Lakotas. As he was later to write, "My first years were spent living just as my forefathers had lived—roaming the green, rolling hills of what are now the states of South Dakota and Nebraska." At the same time, according to Standing Bear, these were "troublous days . . . when the Sioux were succumbing to the trickery of the whites and the undermining of their own tribal morale."
The "troublous days" began for the Sicangus the year of Standing Bear's birth, directly after Spotted Tail and other Lakota chiefs had "touched the pen" to a treaty at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. Although the Lakotas believed that this agreement granted them the right to continue their customary practices, its intentionally ambiguous contents in fact consigned them to life on a reservation as federal wards. The transformation of the Sicangus into a reservation people almost immediately influenced the direction that Standing Bear's life would take. In 1879, his father enrolled him in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Captain Richard H. Pratt's Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Although he was initially entered on the school rolls by his birth name, "Ota Kte [Plenty Kill], son of Standing Bear," once at Carlisle he was assigned the Anglo name Luther Standing Bear. This was only the first of many changes that would be thrust upon him during his career at Carlisle. In writings and lectures Standing Bear would later recall the odd mixture of traumas and pleasures he experienced in contending with the school's assimilationist curriculum and unremitting assault on its students' Indian identities. His response to being groomed and outfitted as an "imitation white man" was typical of this ambivalence. Of the required haircut he wrote, "When my hair was cut short, it hurt my feelings to such an extent that tears came into my eyes." However, concerning how he and other Sioux students reacted to Euro-American clothing, he stated, "How proud we were with clothes that had pockets and boots that squeaked! We walked the floor nearly all that night."
Notwithstanding his later criticism of Carlisle, Standing Bear not only survived but seems to have thrived under the school's challenges. He apparently was able to transvalue painful conditions by facing them with a warrior's courage. Upon leaving for Pennsylvania he had vowed that he would not return alive "unless [he] had done something very brave."
In 1884, following his final term at Carlisle, Standing Bear moved back home to the Rosebud Reservation. Like most other returned students, he soon discovered that the vocational training he had received in the East (tinsmithing) was totally ill suited to life on the reservation. Nevertheless, he realized that there "would be no more hunting—[Indians] would have to work for [their] food and clothing . . . like the Garden of Eden after the fall of man." With the help of a letter of recommendation from Pratt, Standing Bear was eventually hired as an assistant at the reservation's government school. In 1891 he visited the neighboring Pine Ridge Reservation. The local agent (a former employee at Carlisle) offered him command of one of that reservation's day schools. The young graduate took charge of the school at Allen, South Dakota, and managed at the same time to operate a small ranch. He later worked as a store clerk, post-office assistant, and minister's aide.
In 1902 Standing Bear successfully auditioned for a role in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and spent eleven months performing in England. A second season with the troupe in 1903, however, was cut short by a train accident in which several cast members died and Standing Bear was severely injured. In 1905 he was chosen to replace his deceased father as the chief of his tiospaye. Although this was undoubtedly the greatest honor that could be accorded a Lakota male, Standing Bear wrote, "with all my title of chieftain, and with all my education and travels, I discovered that as long as I was on the reservation I was only a helpless Indian, and was not considered any better than any of the uneducated Indians . . . according to the views of the white agent in charge of the reservation. . . . If I tried to better conditions of my people, while on the reservation, I found it was an utter impossibility."
In order to escape from under the thumb of the reservation agent, Standing Bear traveled to Washington, D.C., to win his citizenship and control of his allotment and trust moneys. Later he would describe his feelings on the "happy day" his petition was granted as follows: "When I got my freedom from the iron hand of . . . the Indian agent at my reservation, I began to feel that I had been raised higher than a chieftainship." Citizenship accorded Standing Bear the freedom to come and go from the reservation without first receiving permission from the agent. He spent most of the remaining years of his life in non-Indian environments, first working in Sioux City, Iowa, at a dry-goods firm and then at the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma. In 1912 he moved to California, where he found employment as a film actor at the studio of Tom Ince and was eventually elected president of the Indian Actors' Association. He costarred with such notables of the silent screen as William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks. His sound movies, mostly grade-B "oaters" of the Stetson vs. warbonnet ilk, included The Santa Fe Trail (1930), Texas Pioneers (1932), Circle of Death (1935), Cyclone of the Saddle (1935), and Fighting Pioneers (1935). He died in Huntington, California, on February 19, 1939, during the filming of the movie Union Pacific.
Among all his pursuits and accomplishments, Luther Standing Bear is today best remembered for his contributions to Indian literature. In addition to numerous essays and articles, between 1928 and 1934 he wrote four important books with the help of his niece Waste Win (Good Woman): My People, the Sioux (1928), My Indian Boyhood (1931), Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933), and Stories of the Sioux (1934). Although varied in content, all of Standing Bear's works reflect the central purpose that inspired his writing: to defend the worth and dignity of Indian cultures. In pursuing this goal, he can be said to have raised the art of autobiographical apologetics to new heights. While both My People, the Sioux and My Indian Boyhood may be read simply as accounts of his life, their common subtext is an attack on the conception of Indians as savages and of assimilation as a process for turning Indians into whites. His labors as a writer were in perfect harmony with his participation in such groups as the League for Justice to the American Indian and on the lecture circuit as an outspoken advocate for Indian rights. Toward the conclusion of Land of the Spotted Eagle Standing Bear eloquently summarized his position on America's obligations to its Indians when he exhorted the "white brethren" to "look upon the Indian world as a human world; then let him see to it that human rights be accorded to the Indian. And this for the purpose of retaining for his own order of society a measure of humanity."
See also
Movies.
Richard N. Ellis, My People, the Sioux by Luther Standing Bear (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975); Richard N. Ellis, Indian Lives: Essays on Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Native Americans "Luther Standing Bear: 'I Would Raise Him to Be an Indian,'" ed. L. G. Moses and Raymond Wilson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985); Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933).
Harvey Markowitz
Newberry Library
Chicago, Illinois
