LEGENDS OF AMERICAN INDIAN RESISTANCE This page intentionally left blank LEGENDS OF AMERICAN INDIAN RESISTANCE Edward J. Rielly Copyright 2011 by Edward J. Rielly All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rielly, Edward J. Legends of American Indian resistance / Edward J. Rielly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–313–35209–6 (hardback) — ISBN 978–0–313–35210–2 (ebook) 1. Indians of North America—Kings and rulers—Biography. 2. Indians of North America—History. 3. Indians of North America—Government relations. I. Title. E89.R54 2011 970.004097—dc22 2010054394 ISBN: 978–0–313–35209–6 EISBN: 978–0–313–35210–2 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Greenwood An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America The chapter on Sitting Bull is adapted from material in Rielly, E. J. (2007). Sitting Bull: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Used by permission of ABC-CLIO, LLC. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Timeline of Events in the History of Native American–U.S. Relations xiii Philip 1 Pontiac 19 Tecumseh 39 Black Hawk 63 Osceola 89 Sitting Bull 109 Crazy Horse 143 Chief Joseph 181 Geronimo 215 Dennis James Banks 249 Russell Charles Means 273 Mary Brave Bird 303 Bibliography 321 Index 327 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments I am especially appreciative of the support that during my work on this book I have received from my home institution, Saint Joseph’s College of Maine, and from the libraries of Saint Joseph’s College and the University of Southern Maine. My editor at ABC-CLIO, Mariah Gumpert, has been consistently help- ful and understanding. Of course, this book would not exist at all without the tremendous efforts by so many Indian leaders who have struggled to resist the destruction of their way of life or, in recent decades, to reclaim a heritage rich in cultural and spiritual values. Above all, I thank my wife, Jeanne, for her con- stant support. This page intentionally left blank Introduction Long before Europeans arrived in North America, Indians from the Atlantic to the Pacific populated what would become the United States. They lived a life of relative freedom, able to maintain their traditional culture and practice their religious beliefs as their ancestors had done. This freedom, of course, was not absolute. American Indians’ movements were limited by the availability of food, water, and other necessities such as materials for constructing their homes. They also had generally defined areas for living and hunting, and if they crossed into other Indian people’s traditional areas, conflict was possible. Life was not easy, nor was it necessarily peaceful. Many Indian nations had traditional Indian enemies, and warfare was not uncommon. Nonetheless, within these limitations, each Indian nation enjoyed consider- able freedom. No nation told another nation what to do, and even warfare seldom threatened a people’s very existence. From generation to generation, Indians lived according to their traditions and beliefs and were able to maintain a clear identity. Then came the Europeans. With their arrival in the New World, life gradually— and in some cases suddenly—changed for the native peoples. A major cause of that change was the Europeans’ desire for land. Land for Europeans was some- thing to own, whereas Indians, although exercising territorial rights to tradi- tional homelands and hunting grounds, did not own the land. They certainly did not individually own portions of the land. In their view, the land was to be reverenced, and one would no more cut open the land as European farmers did than one would cut open one’s parent or grandparent. Likewise, no one would claim to own something that was viewed as essentially a spiritual entity. As Europeans and their Euro-American descendants steadily moved west- ward from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, they took the land that they wanted, often by national policy. When Indians were in the way, they did their best to remove the native peoples. That removal might be by killing the Indians or, later, forcing the survivors onto reservations. These reservations usually consisted of land that the Euro-Americans did not x Introduction want, typically the poorest of land. If they later decided that they did want some or all of the land set aside for reservations, they simply forced the Indians to move again. Illness was an effective ally of the Euro-Americans during this process of removal, and diseases such as smallpox that migrated to America with the Europeans wreaked great destruction on Indians, who had been unable to establish any immunity to them. Euro-Americans, also by established policy, tried to remake the remaining Indians in their own image. They sought to change how Indians dressed, worked, worshipped, and were educated. As the United States grew and extended itself from Canada to Mexico, and from one ocean to the other, it attempted by national policy to effect, if not total annihilation, at least cultural genocide of the native peoples. Yet Indians throughout these centuries of the new nation’s expansion did not yield easily. Many Indian nations fought hard to maintain a way of life that to them was sacred, given to them by the Great Spirit. Leaders arose who used their intelligence, organizational skills, courage, and commitment to traditional values to resist Euro-American expansionism. If such efforts appear through a retrospective lens to have been doomed from the start, that simply makes the struggle even more heroic. Later, as the twentieth century passed its midpoint, new leaders arose who attempted resistance once again. These modern leaders set out to resurrect much of past tradition, to secure the rights of Indians as citizens of the United States as well as their basic right to be Indian, and to create cultural, spiritual, and economic opportunities to make a better life for themselves. That better life looked forward to the future while also turning back to their ancestors’ values. Something of the past, in fact, had survived, and the calling of the modern leaders was to build on that survival within the context of a very dif- ferent world. Survival in earlier centuries—not mere physical survival of an individual person, but survival of a people—had required resistance. In the modern world, survival and resistance also went hand in hand. Events such as the take- over of Wounded Knee in 1973 have been about both resistance and survival, even more so than individual political issues or government policies. They have also been about freedom—the freedom to live one’s identity with pride and the opportunity to possess those qualities of life long granted to Euro- Americans: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Legends of American Indian Resistance examines the lives of 12 such leaders, ranging from Metacom (more commonly known as Philip) in the seventeenth century to three twentieth-century figures: Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Mary Brave Bird. Each chapter explores especially that individual’s method of resistance and his or her accomplishments. Biographical context is included to help readers come to know these Indian leaders more thoroughly. The arrangement of chapters is designed to offer readers a coherent narra- tive of the Indian resistance movement. The approach is generally chronologi- cal, although some overlapping of individuals’ lives regarding their dates Introduction xi occurs, as well as some overlapping of events. Both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, for example, played important roles at the Battle of Little Bighorn; years later, Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Mary Brave Bird did the same during the takeover of Wounded Knee. The narrative begins with Philip in the seventeenth century and the conflict commonly known as King Philip’s War of 1675–1676. A discussion of Pontiac, who lived during the eighteenth century and is best known for his role in what is called Pontiac’s Rebellion during the 1760s, follows. Tecumseh is the subject of the third chapter. Tecumseh was born in 1768, about a year before Pontiac’s death, and died during the War of 1812, bridging the old cen- tury and the new. Black Hawk is the subject of Chapter 4. Although he was born in 1767, almost contemporaneous with Tecumseh, he is most promi- nently remembered in history for the conflict named after him—the Black Hawk War of 1832—and thus follows Tecumseh in this book. Osceola, the subject of the fifth chapter, is the first resistance leader dis- cussed in this book who was born in the nineteenth century. He died young, in 1838, after leading resistance in the Second Seminole War, which began in 1835. The discussion of his life logically follows the story of Black Hawk, who died in the same year, but who was born 37 years earlier than Osceola. Chapters 6 and 7 cover two Lakota leaders, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, both of them born well after Osceola’s birth (and in the case of Crazy Horse, after his death). Sitting Bull, almost a decade older than Crazy Horse, precedes him in this book.