My time on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota has opened my eyes to the need for a new leadership model that honors everyone. Overreaching has consequences, and winning isn’t winning unless everyone’s winning.
Take, for example, these Indigenous perspectives on America’s “winning of the West” during the last decades of the nineteenth century:
“If we ever owned this land we own it still, for we never sold it. In the treaty councils the commissioners have claimed that our country has been sold to the government. Suppose a white man should come to me and say, “Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.” I say to him, “No, my horses suit me, I will not sell them.” Then he goes to my neighbor, and says to him, “Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.” My neighbor answers, “Pay me the money and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.” The white man returns to me and says, “Joseph, I have bought your horses, and you must let me have them.” If we sold our lands to the government, this is the way in which they were bought.”
—Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce
“I want you to go and tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell any land to the government. . . . [Picking up a pinch of dust, he added,] Not even so much as this.”
—Sitting Bull
“One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.”
—Crazy Horse
“The white men have crowded the Indians back year by year until we are forced to live in a small country . . . and now our last hunting ground, the home of the People, is to be taken from us. Our women and children will starve, but for my part I prefer to die fighting rather than by starvation.”
—Red Cloud
“I have heard that you intend to settle us on a reservation near the mountains. I don’t want to settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down we grow pale and die.”
—Santana, Chief of the Kiowa
“Tell them at Washington if they have one man who speaks the truth to send him to me, and I will listen to what he has to say.”
—Sitting Bull
“News came to us there in the Moon of the Falling Leaves [November] that the Black Hills had been sold to the Wasichus [the white people] . . . I learned when I was older that our people did not want to do this . . . only crazy or very foolish men would sell their Mother Earth. Sometimes I think it might have been better if we had stayed together and made them kill us all.”
—Black Elk
“Wherever we went, the soldiers came to kill us, and it was all our own country. It was ours already when the Wasichus made the treaty with Red Cloud that said it would be ours as long as grass should grow and water flow. That was only eight winters before [1868], and they were chasing us now because we remembered, and they forgot.”
—Black Elk
“It was early in the Moon When the Ponies Shed [May] that Crazy Horse came in with the rest of our people and the ponies that were only skin and bones. There were soldiers and Lakota policemen in lines all around him when he surrendered there at the Soldiers’ Town [Fort Robinson]. I saw him take off his war bonnet. I was not near enough to hear what he said. He did not talk loud, and he said only a few words, and then he sat down.”
—Black Elk
In reservation communities across the northern plains, and elsewhere, there are still communities among us recovering from how the West was “won.” There was room for everyone. There’s always room for everyone.
