Native leader gets statue in Capitol
Chief Standing Bear just wanted to bury his son at home.
The teenager, on his deathbed, told his dad he was worried that if his bones were not buried with his ancestors, then he would be alone in the afterlife, according to biographer Stephen DandoCollins. So in January 1879, Standing Bear left Oklahoma’s Indian Territory for Nebraska with his child’s remains.
That act of grief and love set in motion a chain of events that would make Standing Bear a civil rights hero. On Wednesday, he was honored with a statue representing the state of Nebraska in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall.
Standing Bear was born sometime between 1829 and 1834 in the Ponca tribe’s native lands in northern Nebraska. A natural leader, he became a chief at a young age, according to the Nebraska History Museum.
His tribe was forced to relocate to Oklahoma in 1878, too late in the season to plant; they also didn’t get any of the farming equipment the government had promised them. More than a third of the Poncas died of starvation and disease — including Standing Bear’s sister and his beloved son.
Standing Bear and his burial party evaded capture while they traveled home but were caught and detained after visiting relatives at the Omaha reservation.
The man who caught them, Brig. Gen. George Crook, had been fighting Native Americans for decades, Brown wrote, but he was moved by Standing Bear’s reasons for leaving the Indian Territory and promised to help him. Crook went to the media, which spread the story of the plight of Standing Bear and his fellow prisoners nationwide. Then two lawyers offered to take up their case pro bono and asked a judge to free the Poncas immediately.
The U.S. attorney argued that Standing Bear was neither a citizen nor a person, and as such did not have standing to sue the government.
On the second day, Chief Standing Bear was called to testify, becoming the first Native American to do so. He raised his right hand and, through an interpreter, said: “My hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. The same god made us both. I am a man.”
The judge agreed, ruling for the first time in U.S. history that “the Indian is a ‘person’ ” and has all the rights and freedoms promised in the Constitution. The judge also ordered Crook to free Standing Bear and his people immediately.
Standing Bear returned to Nebraska and buried his son alongside his ancestors. When he died there in 1908, he was buried alongside them, too.
A few decades later, in 1937, the state of Nebraska sent two statues to the U.S. Capitol. In recent years, Nebraska lawmakers voted to replace its statues. The first is Chief Standing Bear; soon, another will be replaced by a statue of author Willa Cather.
At the dedication ceremony Wednesday, which included Ponca tribal leaders and members of the House and Senate, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said it was an honor to recognize “one of the most important civil rights leaders in our country that almost nobody knows about.”