The Glasgow Ghost Shirt -- i

 

Ft. Laramie, Wyoming

No amount of nuance or circumlocution can shade the plain-and-simple truth that from 1492 well into the 20th century, what happened on the American continent was a monstrous land grab. 

What was once indisputably “Native land” was drawn-and-cornered into lots, acres and sections, a few of which were “reserved” for indigenous people. The land where the first nations lived in liberty as wholesome as anything dreamed in the white man’s founding documents was stolen away in the unlikely name of “progress.” With sustained passion, Euro-Americans either wanted the land itself or wanted to get rich selling it off to others.

All of that had begun long before Wigmuka Waste Win, “Pretty Rainbow Woman” was born to Florence Four Bear and Joseph Ryan, on October 12, 1919. It started in 1492, then again in 1620, the moment newcomers put their boots down on a land they called “new.”

The sad truth is such things continued to happen thereafter as well. To understand and appreciate the life and contributions of Pretty Rainbow Woman, much of the century in which she lived—and even the century before she lived—needs to be opened and understood. What she valued—and continues to value—was created by stories that began long before she opened her eyes in the log home not all that far from the banks of Moreau River.

Just a few decades before she was born, a decades’ long series of fights, many bloody, some not, occurred throughout the Dakota Territory, skirmishes and full-fledged battles between the Euro-Americans invading, en masse, the traditional lands of Native people, including the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. Each of those fights had its own history and origins, but they all arose from a clash of cultures which occurred when a people given, heart and soul, to the ownership of private property met a people whose character was formed and sustained by a nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life, a fight between two tribes really, one white and one red, both of whom wanted their freedom.

The Lakota way of life meant taking up residence wherever water and grasses were abundant for the horses, and wherever the buffalo could be located. The requirements of that level of mobility made the accumulation of goods, of things, not only unnecessary, but a problem, even an impediment. Some argue that no single factor was more important in understanding the Great Sioux Wars as that immense cultural divide—people who measured their worth in things in opposition to those who did not in part because they could not.

Those fights—and that conflict—shed blood and loss on both sides, and prompted the American government, in 1865, to assess the possibilities for peace between those doing battle throughout “Native” America, an expanse that ran from Minnesota to Oregon, from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, from Texas to California. That study, released in 1867 and titled “A Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes,” established an Indian Peace Commission, who reasoned that further conflicts could and should be avoided by separating the opposing forces, thereby keeping the fighters apart. 

The Indian Peace Commission determined to continue what had already become standard operating procedure among the Euro-Americans, the creation of more “treaties” with Native people, legal documents meant not only to establish boundaries to determine who would live where on the measureless lands of the West, but also to set what price Washington would pay for the compliance of the Indian tribes. Simply, Washington said to the Native people they chose to speak to, “Give up your land, and we’ll make sure you won’t starve.” That, at least, was the promise at Ft. Laramie in 1868, as it had been in any number of treaty negotiations and signings before.

What happened at Ft. Laramie is itself a story that needs to be told, even though it happened a half century before Marcella LeBeau was born. For the moment, what is important to know is that the most distinguishing result of the Peace Commission, “The Report on the Condition of Indian Tribes,” and the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868, was, and is, the establishment of lands “reserved” for Native people — “reservations.”

The story doesn't begin with reservations, but nothing changed Native life in North America like the reservations created by hundreds of treaties between Natives and their colonizers, none of which--it must be said--white folks ever kept.

Ft. Laramie Treaty talks, 1868