In the book Land of the Spotted Eagle, Luther Standing Bear offers an analysis of his people, the Lakota Sioux, their relations with the government of the whites, and a strong sense of what it means to be part of a population whose land has been systematically stolen, whose culture and rituals have been denigrated, and whose future is in doubt.
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 vast tracts of land whose resources the Europeans wanted to exploit. There was a fundamental difference between the way Europeans viewed the world and its relationship to the human community and the way Native Americans viewed these issues. Europeans believed God had given them dominion over nature, while Native Americans believed that humanity had links to the chain of being of living nature and were part of it instead of rulers over it.
The Europeans who ...