Standing Bear is a Person

This 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 of the same color as yours. I am a man. God made us both.

I seem to stand on the bank of a river. My wife and little girl are beside me. In front, the water is wide and impassable, and behind it there are perpendicular cliffs. No man of my race ever stood there before. There is no tradition to guide me. A flood has begun to rise around us. I look despairingly at the great cliffs. I see a steep, stony way leading upward. I grasp the hand of my child. My wife follows. I lead the way up the sharp rocks, while the waters still rise behind us.

Finally, I see a rift in the rocks, I feel the prairie breeze strike my cheek.I turn to my wife and child with a shout that we are saved! We will return to the Swift Running Water that pours down between the green islands. There are the graves of my fathers. There again we will pitch our tipis and build our fires.

But a man bars the passage! He is a thousand times more powerful than I. Behind him, I see soldiers as numerous as leaves on the trees. They will obey that man's orders. I too must obey his orders. If he says that I cannot pass, I cannot. The long struggle will have been in vain. My wife and child and I must return, and sink beneath the flood. We are weak, and faint, and sick. I cannot fight.

He paused, bowing his head....Standing Bear looked (judge) Elmer S. Dundy in the eye, then declared in a low, intense voice, "You are that man."

Dando-Collins, Stephen, Standing Bear is a Person:The true story of a Native American's Quest for Justice, Cambridge, Ma, 2004, p.128-129 excerpted.


The speech was made in a dramatic setting. Standing Bear was a Ponca chief. His people had become farmers, and rather prosperous ones. Governmental clerical errors coupled with stupidity to cause the Poncas to be "removed" from their homelands to Oklahoma where, at the time of this trial, 158 of them had already died in but a short time.

Standing Bear had seen his son die. His son had made him promise to take his bones back to be buried with his ancestors. Standing Bear and roughly 25 members of his tribe illegally left their "home", a band of wind-torn tents so unlike the comfortable log cabins of their homelands. His goal was to bury his sons bones and, perchance, return to the land the Poncas had never agreed to leave. They were forced to leave despite a clause in their treaty they could only be moved with written consent of their tribe...consent that was NEVER given.

General Crook, of whom I have much to say, both good and bad, conspired with a journalist, a couple of lawyers, and a judge to try a new kind of case...a case that Indians were human beings with rights, not merely wards of a state so corrupt the man responsible for their welfare was a member of the "Indian Ring", a group of people profiting by short-changing treaty-promised supplies, ignoring death and devastation in the name of a dollar. Well, lots of dollars.

Native Americans had no rights before the courts. They had less rights than even slaves prior to the Civil War and their lot got worse after it.Standing Bear was not only non-violent...twice he saved the lives of soldiers, keeping them from starving and freezing to death. The Poncas, forcibly and illegally removed from their home, even as they were on the journey that would kill so many so soon, saved numerous of their soldier escorts (read "guards") when the soldiers were swept off their horses and were drowning while fording a river. The fearless Poncas immediately dived in and saved them.

Their day in court arrived and Standing Bear made his eloquent plea. Oh, how I wish I had his power for speaking to the heart. Not one person who knew the story of the chiefs forced to walk hundreds of miles by the filth that was their agent, sworn to help them, not one person who knew of the putrid, horrifying conditions that were killing Native Americans by the hundreds every year in the "Indian Territory" (best translated "land the whites have not yet discovered a use for or a mineral under) of Oklahoma...not one person who knew of the white-friendly stance the Poncas had long held and heard his eloquent plea to be given that smallest gift...to be considered a person, a human being, could hear that and not be moved.Humanity is the basic thread that ties us all together.

There are differences to be sure. Differences of gender, of culture, of interests, abilities, intellect, breeding, and millions of other differences. But at the root, we are all people who, when our hand is pierced, bleed the same color.I like to think that in our "enlightened" times no person would be treated like Standing Bear, considered less than a person. Sadly, too many people on this vale of tears have axes to grind they are unwilling to put down long enough to admit they, like Standing Bear, are a person, and every person should be treated with dignity and respect.Standing Bear was a person and a good man. I hope of each of us the same can be said.