Bismarck, N.D. — I’m reading a biography of Sitting Bull (1831 – 1890). Among other things, I am ashamed I know so little about him. He’s an amazing man, at once a superb warrior who won distinction in the warrior societies among the Hunkpapa, a Lakota holy man who had prophetic dreams, and a generous community leader who took a particular interest in children, widows, the lame, and those in need.
In American memory, we lock him into the events at the Little Bighorn in June 1876. That’s a mistake. He had a big life, and the Custer fight was just something that happened after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming.
What has impressed me most in reading Robert Utley’s The Lance and The Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull is the Lakota way of war. It bears almost no resemblance to the wars of the whites, as exemplified by the Battle of the Bulge or Verdun.
War was more individualistic for the Lakota. It seems to echo the heroic warfare we see in Homer’s Iliad. More than anything, the Lakota prized counting coup. A warrior won acclaim by approaching his enemy so closely that he could touch (or club) him. This was the great expression of bravery and courage. Killing the enemy was less important than getting body to body with him.
Sitting Bull belonged to the elite Akicita society. These carefully chosen individuals, painted in their medicine colors, carried a stake and rope into war. When they encountered the enemy, they staked themselves to the ground. At this point, they must defeat their combatant, die, or be rescued by fellow Lakota, but they could not pull up the stake and withdraw from the hand-to-hand combat.
This is the stuff of the Iliad, not General Ulysses S. Grant’s Union army.
When we talk about the “Indian Wars,” we need to remember that war meant very different things to the two cultures who met on the Great Plains between 1854–1890. War for the Lakota meant something like “a horse raid that might include violence,” “a limited skirmish characterized by heroic individual feats,” or “a limited exchange of violence to win honor and make a point, but the killing was not always the main objective” or “limited revenge for the thing they did to us last winter.” Lakota warriors were hard to discipline because they had been trained from their earliest childhood to seek glory in hand-to-hand combat. They did not usually submit to a battle strategy or battle orders offered by a Lakota leader. There is a world of difference between a handmade bow and set of handmade arrows on the one hand and a howitzer or Gatling Gun on the other.
Throughout his life, Sitting Bull did strange and wonderful things in battle. His approach to war has no analog in the industrial warfare of white people after the invention of gunpowder. On one occasion in eastern Montana, he walked out and sat down well within rifle range of the U.S. Army. He leisurely smoked his pipe, and U.S. soldiers repeatedly shot at him. Sitting Bull finished smoking, got up, and returned to the Hunkpapa lines. It was a bold, risky, possibly suicidal thing to do. But it deeply impressed everyone, white and Native. It proved to the Hunkpapa that Sitting Bull had great medicine and spiritual protection.
As a North Dakotan, I should know this story better than I do. Sitting Bull was born in South Dakota, just south of the N.D.–S.D. border. He eventually surrendered in northwestern North Dakota near the Canadian border. The reservation Sitting Bull spent his last years on straddles the North Dakota–South Dakota line. He often camped on the Little Missouri River during the winter and visited Bismarck (on the Northern Pacific RR line) many times. He was, for many recent years, a central figure in North Dakota’s tourism portfolio.
At this point, we should want two things. First, every North Dakotan and American should know more about the 200-year encounter of Euro-Americans and the Native peoples of an ever-receding American West. This needs to be granular, not just an annotated timeline of the fights and the massacres. It would be easy to assemble a brief bibliography of ten books every American should read, or even three if necessary. We must lift people out of their childhood memories of “cowboys and Indians” if we want to make any progress. I wonder how many white people would agree to do this?
Second, we need to make some amends. We should formally apologize and invest in programs Native people believe will be useful to their communities. We should deed back some lands. Even a modest return of lands to their Native sovereigns would indicate a serious commitment by the white community. We should do a lot of listening.