The Glasgow Ghost Shirt--an introduction

Strangely enough, this picture showed up in the Washington Post recently, years after it was taken and run earlier in the paper. The picture accompanied a story on repatriation because the leather shirt here pictured begins a story that, a century later, resulted with its return to the people of the Cheyenne River Reservation. The woman pictured above is Marcella LeBeau, a member of the Two Kettle band of Lakota (Sioux) people many of whom live on the Cheyenne River reservation.

I knew Marcella, knew her very well. She died six months or so ago; she was 100 years old. For a couple years before Covid, I worked with her, hoping to help her put down her life story on paper. That project didn't work out, for several reasons--one of which was Covid. 

With her, I did write quite a bit of her story however, and, when I saw this picture and read the article, I thought it a shame, really, that the book never got finished. Because the Post's interest in stories of repatriation continues, the story I'd like to tell--the story behind the picture above--is still relevant.

Let me say this, too. I've spent a lot of my retirement years learning some Native American history--I'm not complaining. I've loved every minute of it and still do. But when I'm asked to speak about some aspect of Native American history, I'm surprised by how much ordinary people simply don't know. Twice, I've been in front of senior citizen groups in the region--when I bring up the Spirit Lake Massacre  (which happened, I'll grant you, in 1857), very few in the room know at all what I'm talking about, even though the massacre occurred an hour or so east of her in the middle of what is, without question, one of the major vacation spots in the entire state.

What's more striking is a second question--"What happened at Okoboji is really clearly related to the Dakota War of 1862 just north of us in Minnesota. How many of you have heard of that?"

Even fewer.

The vast majority of my blog's audience is white. Therefore, I think I can safely say that most of those who tune into what's happening on this blog likely know very little about the story of those who were here long before, right here on ground we tend to believe was ours in 1870 and still is ours today.

This part of Marcella's story is long and includes lots of details that might be skipped if they weren't essential to understanding just exactly what happened here in the last decades of the 19th century especially. 

The story concerns Marcella LeBeau's efforts to retrieve a Lakota ghost shirt from the distinguished place it made for itself already a century ago in the biggest and best of the museums in Glasgow, Scotland. It's an amazing story, but it will take some time to tell. If you're interested, stay with it--if you're not, go ahead and try.

I'll start telling it tomorrow.