Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,627

This is the grave of Luther Standing Bear.

Born on the Spotted Tail Agency in South Dakota in 1868, Matȟó Nážiŋ, or Luther as he became known in the white world. Standing Bear grew up at the very end of Lakota autonomy on the Plains and the aftermath of that. He was part Brulé Lakota and part Oglala Lakota. His father was a chief of the Sicangu, another word for the Brulé and one that is more commonly used today since it represents Lakota language instead of European languages. When he was five, he was witness to the last major indigenous attack on other indigenous people what had become the United States, when his father led a large band of Lakota to massacre Pawnee hunters at what became known as Massacre Canyon in Nebraska. I’ve actually randomly run across the historical marker for that site while driving around southwestern Nebraska, as one does in that great home of American tourism.

Later in life, Standing Bear provided first-hand accounts of this event. He was only five at the time, so of course he wasn’t part of the action, but he remembered his father returning. In fact, what Luther Standing Bear would do for much of his life was a version of this–providing the nation with an unapologetic Native point of view about what had happened to his people and Native Americans generally. By 1879, the Americans had defeated the Lakota and forced them onto reservations. Standing Bear’s father was running a store and he was one of the Lakota who fully acquiesed to white victory and figured they were stronger and the future was learning their ways. So he sent Luther and his brother Henry to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

We have covered Carlisle in depth in this series, but basically it was a new phase of genocide. “Kill the Indian and save the man” was the catchphrase of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the school. There, Native kids were forced to cut their hair and live the white man’s ways, with harsh punishments for speaking their own language, practicing their own religion, or resisting in any way. Those punishments included beating, starvation, and sexual abuse. It was a horrible, horrible thing, one of the many parts of this nation’s history which today people basically refuse to recognize or deal with. Thousands of children died.

Well, Standing Bear’s father told him to be good and so he was. In fact, Luther Standing Bear became Pratt’s ideal as a student. The fact that he was the son of the chief who led the Lakota at Massacre Canyon only reinforced this–if Pratt could change him, then he could change anyone. It was at this time that Matȟó Nážiŋ became Luther. He would recruit kids back at Pine Ridge in South Dakota to come to Carlisle. He led the delegation from Carlisle across the Brooklyn Bridge upon its opening. Part of what Pratt wanted to do was to get these Indian kids to work in the white world. Usually this was a disaster. A kid would be rented out to farmers. who would often beat them or starve them to death. But of course Pratt got Standing Bear a position with John Wanamaker in Philadelphia. Again, he was the Model.

In 1884, Standing Bear returned to South Dakota, having graduated from Carlisle. For all Pratt wanted out of these people, there wasn’t really any place in white society for them, even if that is what some ended up wanting. So Standing Bear worked as an assistant at the school at Rosebud. In 1890, shortly after Wounded Knee, he moved to Pine Ridge and became principal of a school there. He worked with his old mentor Wanamaker to get a post office out there too, though the government wouldn’t let an Indian run it. He ran a little store and ran some livestock too. Later, in the early 20th century, he signed up for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He did that for a couple of years, but in 1903, there was a horrible train crash that killed a bunch of people involved in the show. Basically, the cars that held most of the Indians were struck from behind by another train. Three people died and Standing Bear came very close to being the fourth. He broke many bones and had to leave the Wild West Show.

Standing Bear moved back to Pine Ridge and the Oglala Lakota chose him as a chief in 1905. But he was struggling. Like so many graduates of the Indian Schools, Standing Bear was kind of lost. He was between two worlds. The old ways were no longer possible. But the new ways were not acceptable either. He tried to flee. The odious Dawes Act effectively privatized the reservations by giving each tribal member an allotment that they could do with what they liked and then opening up the reservations to white settlers to have the rest of the land. Standing Bear sold his allotment. As he stated, he “was no longer willing to endure existence under the control of an overseer.” So he started a store in Iowa. But that wasn’t great either.

So Standing Bear ended up in Hollywood. After the store closed, he got a job doing some rodeo stuff in Oklahoma, was good at it, and realized that Hollywood needed Indian parts. The director Thomas Ince hired Standing Bear and he appeared in many westerns, starting with Ramona, in 1916, as well as a tiny part in the odious Bolshevism on Trial, from 1919.

But Standing Bear found a way late in life to enter into American society in a way that would be crucial–he began to criticize the government’s Indian policy and long history of exploiting Native peoples. That started in Hollywood himself, when Standing Bear began to push within the Actors Guild and otherwise in Hollywood to require that Native Americans be played by Native Americans and end the redface that was so common. In 1926, he and some other indigenous actors founded the War Paint Club to represent their interests in the city as a kind of informal organization. In 1936, he and Jim Thorpe and a few others established the Indian Actors Association to build on the War Paint Club.

Standing Bear also began to write and those writings proved critical in moving to change policy. He published My People the Sioux in 1928 and started a national tour promoting the book and explaining what his people’s culture was really like to whites. They were interested. He got to know John Collier, the expert on indigenous issues who demanded an end to allotment and basic respect for Native cultures. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president, he named Collier as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and repealed the Dawes Act with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, ending the horror of allotment. Standing Bear became an important public face of this political change. He attacked the Indian schools he had attended, told whites to stop trying to turn Indians into white people. He wrote to FDR that American schools should be required to teach Native American history and culture. Standing Bear was a major influence on Collier. He wrote several books up until his death that are remarkable documents from someone who had seen and lived so much and lived to tell the tale too. These included Land of the Spotted Eagle, from 1933, What the Indian Means to America, also from 1933, and Stories of the Sioux, from 1934.

Standing Bear continued to work in the movies too, partly to support himself and partly because he wanted to act. In 1939, he was shooting Union Pacific, a Cecil B. DeMille film, when he came down with the flu. He died of it, at the age of 70.

Luther Standing Bear is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.

If you would like this series to visit other Native American writers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Richard Twiss is in Sturgis, South Dakota and Carlos Montezuma is in Fort McDowell, Arizona. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.