Luther Standing Bear

Luther Standing Bear was raised in the traditional Sioux manner. He was away from the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota for sixteen years before returning in 1931, and soon after, he wrote this book. His absence gave him the point of view of both a tribal member and an outsider at one and the same time, for he could see where changes had been made and could compare the way his people lived on the reservation with the way people lived elsewhere. His outside experience coupled with his new exposure to native life convinced him about "the impact of federal Indian policies and convinced him of the need to educate the American people about the strengths of traditional Sioux culture" (vii). His book is an effort to accomplish this.

American Indian life has been based on endurance, on the ability to survive and adapt. At one time, the Native American population was much larger than it is today and ruled the entire continent. The coming of Europeans also meant the beginning of a policy of extermination, a genocidal war against a people because they had a different world view, a different religion, and were in possession of v

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bal governments. In the late 1700s, the U.S. treated the Indian tribes as independent sovereign nations. in the mid-1800s, the federal government more and more attacked traditional tribal governments, and the federal policy of forced relocation to Indian reservations caused severe disruptions in traditional governing bodies. From the late nineteenth century to about 1930, the U.S. followed a policy of breaking apart Indian reservations and assimilating Native Americans into mainstream non-Indian society, and the allotment of Indian lands and the forced assimilation of the people further eroded the power of tribal governments. Standing Bear recognizes the value of Lakota culture and realizes the degree to which that culture has been subjugated by the United States and its government. He knows the culture because he is part of it: "As a babe I was cared for and brought up in the same manner as all babes of the Lakota tribe" (1). He details his own education in tribal customs and mores through his boyhood and into young manhood, and the world in which he was raised was still close enough to the old ways before subjugation that he knows much about the earlier history of his people and about how they lived when they were truly
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Approximate Word count = 1388
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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