Stephen Dando-Collins - Standing Bear Is a Person

Should you ever venture to northern Oklahoma and visit a little metropolis near the Kansas state line called Ponca City, population 25,000, you will see an Indian chief who stands twenty-two feet tall and weighs four thousand pounds. You will be looking at a bronze statue of Standing Bear, or Machunazha as he was known in his own tongue, clan chief of the Poncas, the small Native American tribe for which the city is named. The statue, proudly dedicated by the city fathers in 1996, is the work of sculptor Oreland C. Joe. Ironically, this is the last place Standing Bear ever wanted to be.

In 1879, so determined was Standing Bear not to live here beside the Arkansas River in Oklahoma, he took the U.S. government to court, creating a legal case without precedent in U.S. history. Standing Bear and his people wished to live and die on the land of their birth, a thousand miles away in northeastern Nebraska, rather than in the Warm Land, as the Poncas called Oklahoma, the alien place to which the U.S. Army had marched Standing Bear and the Ponca tribe at the point of a bayonet two years earlier.

Before the Standing Bear case went to court, few Americans had ever heard of the small Ponca tribe. Suddenly the story grabbed the headlines across the country, and the name Standing Bear was on millions of lips. As editorial writers from New England to California told their readers, the outcome of the case could not only change the fate of the peaceable Poncas but terminate the forced removal of all Native Americans from their traditional lands and end the Indian reservation system, the system at the heart of government policy for westward expansion of the United States.

This is the story of that case, and its repercussions. An adventure story. A love story. A unique human rights story. It is also the story of an unusual coalition of players who paved Standing Bears path to U.S. district court in April 1879an army general who was considered Americas greatest Indian fighter, a crusading newspaper editor who was once a gun-toting frontier preacher, a young attorney who had a brilliant idea but doubted the case could be won and another lawyer who hadnt appeared in court in sixteen years, and a shy Indian princess who became world famous. The tale you are about to read has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood epic, but it is very much a true story.