Standing Bear of the Poncas -- iv

It’s near to nine, the evening of May 2, 1879. The courtroom is standing room only on the second long day of an explosive trial that pits a weary band of indigenous people against a massive law-and-order government.

The Omaha courtroom features the famous Indian fighter Brigadier General George Crook, who often took to the military field in buckskin, civilian togs. But today he's donned his full-dress uniform. Just three years earlier the nation’s celebrations at its own big centennial commemoration were muted by bloodletting at Little Big Horn.

But another man in that room captures even more attention than the famous general. An eagle feather dangles from his braided hair. His shirt is bright blue. He wears blue leggings and deerskin moccasins, and a red and blue blanket is flung over his shoulders. His bear-claw necklace hangs around a brass medallion featuring Thomas Jefferson. He could have worn white man’s clothing, but Standing Bear wore his own full-dress uniform.

He and his people were rarely in Omaha courtrooms. They were Indians—they had no rights. Their being in that packed courtroom was rare, unheard of, but dozens of spectators had been reading local papers and knew the story. They wanted to bear witness. 

Rather than rounding up the Ponca and herding them like longhorns back to Warm Country again, General Crook had plotted a new and radical scenario. In a secret meeting, he’d urged a local attorney to obtain a writ of habeas corpus in defense of the Poncas, a move that could usher Standing Bear and his people into court for the very first time. Crook’s mind and soul had determined there had to be a better way than more bloody war.

It’s late—after nine. Lengthy speeches have prolonged proceedings; the case has stimulated passion: should the Ponca be allowed to move back to the Niobrara, their precious homeland, or should the government send them back once again to the place where all of the nation’s indigenous would, by design, eventually live? Is Standing Bear free and his people free, or are they not?

Standing Bear raised his hand up, looked at it patiently before speaking, then started his story, speaking in the his Ponca language, translated by Susanne LaFlesche, "Bright Eyes" to many, an artist and writer from the Omaha people.

“That hand is not the color of yours,” he said to the judge in a deeply pitched voice, “but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain.” It was an extraordinary moment, a Native man speaking for himself and for his freedom in a court of law. “That blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours,” he said, and then uttered a determined testimony: “I am a man,” he told the judge and the hushed courtroom. “The same God made us both.”

He described a dream. He and his wife and child climbed a bluff that overlooked the swift running water of the Niobrara River and the graves of his fathers. Then he told the courtroom that in the dream, only one man stood between him and his homeland. He faced the judge, pointed. “You are that man,” he said.

The silence lay deep in that room. Then, someone started to clap, then to cheer. Many joined.

General George Crook, in full-dress uniform, Brigadier General of the Department of the Platte, commander at Fort Omaha, the government's man, stood from his chair at the front, walked across the courtroom floor to Standing Bear, and shook his hand.

Ten days later, the judge offered his ruling. He said that never before had he adjudicated a case marked by such extremes: a people “weak and unlettered, and generally despised” on one side, and the government of “one of the most powerful, most enlightened, and most christianized nations of modern times” on the other. 

The decision, every word of it, appeared in the Omaha Daily Herald, then in the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily Tribune. “Out in Omaha at least,” the New York paper said, “the idea has come to the surface at last, that an Indian is a man with human rights.”

And forthwith, Standing Bear and his people, carrying with them the remains of Bear Shield, Standing Bear’s son, were free to go, free to return to the land of the people. They were free to be human.