Standing Bear’s Courtroom Speech – Native American Heritage Month

Primary sources, such as Chief Standing Bear’s courtroom speech, give students a personal connection to historical events. The speaker’s poetic eloquence offers insight into his values, culture, and world view that stimulate questions and critical thinking.

I Am a Man

“It was well after nine o’clock, almost twelve hours since the day’s session began. The three lawyers had spoken for more than nine hours and the large crowd of prominent citizens, of clergy and church faithful, judges and lawyers and newsmen, the general’s large staff decked in military uniforms and their wives milled about after [Standing Bear’s attorney Andrew] Poppleton finished his closing argument, heading for the door. Before the crowd began to file out, the judge made an announcement.

Although the trial now had officially ended and the legal proceedings were finished, one last speaker, he said, had asked permission to address the court. He supposed it was the first time in the nation’s history such a request had been made, but he had decided to grant it and he had earlier informed all the lawyers of his intention to do so.

The crowd settled back down and turned its attention to the front of the courtroom. They saw him rising slowly from his seat, and they could see the eagle feather in the braided hair wrapped in otter fur, the bold blue shirt trimmed in red cloth, the blue flannel leggings and deer-skin moccasins, the red and blue blanket, the Thomas Jefferson medallion, the necklace of bear claws.

When he got to the front, he stopped and faced the audience and extended his right hand, holding it still for a long time. After a while, it is said, he turned to the bench and began to speak in a low voice, his words conveyed to the judge and the large crowd by the interpreter.

 ‘That 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. The same God made us both.’

Then he turned and faced the audience, pausing for a moment, staring in silence out a courtroom window, describing after a time what he saw when he looked outside. ‘I seem to stand on the bank of a river.

My wife and little girl are beside me. In front the river is wide and impassable.’ He sees there are steep cliffs all around, the waters rapidly rising. In desperation, he scans the cliffs and finally spots a steep, rocky path to safety.

‘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.’

So, they hurriedly climb the path, getting closer and closer to safety, the waters rushing in behind them. “

‘But a man bars the passage … 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 stopped and turned, facing the judge, speaking softly. ‘You are that man.’

In the crowded courtroom, no one spoke or moved for several moments. After a while, a few women could be heard crying in the back and some of the people up closer could see that the frontier judge had temporarily lost his composure and that the General George Crook, who arrested Standing Bear, too, was leaning forward on the table, his hands covering his face.”

Soon, some people began to clap, and a number of others started cheering and then the general got up from his chair and went over and shook Standing Bear’s hand and before long, a number of others did the same.

The bailiffs asked for order and when it finally grew quiet again, the judge said he would take the case under advisement and issue his decision in a few days. Then he adjourned the court shortly after ten o’clock on a warm spring evening on the second of May 1879.

In his office in the building that dominated the corner of Fifteenth and Dodge streets [in Omaha, Nebraska], one floor below the large courtroom, the judge would have much to ponder in the days ahead. He was aware that he was now in a position to bring some clarity to the long-muddled picture of exactly where the American Indian stood upon the nation’s legal landscape.

He also knew that the location had eluded several generations of his judicial colleagues and that neither the country’s legislative nor its executive branch had been much help. And he knew, too, that he would be harshly criticized – from anxious white settlers and a powerful military on one side to newspapers, clergy and a burgeoning East Coast Indian Reform movement on the other – no matter which way he ruled.

Still, he knew the legal issues that had landed on his desk were long overdue, and he intended to take his time in sorting through the important questions they raised. Were these Indian prisoners, as the young district attorney maintained, still loyal to their tribe and chief? Were they dependent government wards who had illegally fled their assigned reservation and must now be returned – as the law required – to the Indian Territory?

They were Indians who farmed, went to church, sent their children to school and, much like Dred Scott had once done, were now asking the court to set them free. Indians whom the government had no legal right to arrest and detain and return to the Territory. Indians who were people – human beings within the meaning of the law – who had a legal right to sue the government and were entitled to the full protection and provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Source: Court Review Posted on Digital Commons

Excerpts are from The Case of Standing Bear: Establishing Personhood under the Law written by University of Nebraska Professor Joe Starita and published in 2009 in Court Review - Volume 45 4. Standing Bear, 25 F.Cas. at 697. Court Review is the Journal of the American Judges Association.