Standing Bear, Luther, 1868?-1939

Luther Standing Bear (Óta Kté or "Plenty Kill," also known as Matȟó Nážiŋ or "Standing Bear") was a Sičháŋǧu Lakota author, educator, activist, and actor, and Oglála Lakota Chief active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Luther Standing Bear was born in December 1868 on the Spotted Tail Agency, Rosebud, Dakota Territory, the first son of George Standing Bear and Pretty Face. Luther's father, George Standing Bear, was a Sicangu (Brulé Lakota) Chief. The boy was raised by his mother's people as a traditional hunter and warrior.

In the late 1870s, George Standing Bear built a general store, the first Native American-run business on the Spotted Tail agency. In 1879, young Standing Bear became one of the first students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Once there, he was asked to choose a name from a list on the wall. He randomly pointed at the symbols on a wall and named himself Luther. Standing Bear served as a recruiter for the school and worked as an intern for John Wanamaker, an merchant in Philadelphia. In 1884, following his final term at Carlisle, Standing Bear returned home to the Rosebud Agency, Rosebud, Dakota Territory, where he was hired as an assistant at the reservation's school at the salary of three hundred dollars a year.

In 1890, some time after Wounded Knee, Standing Bear moved from Rosebud and followed his father and brother, Ellis Standing Bear, to Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Pine Ridge provided a series of varying employment and family ventures. In 1891, Standing Bear became principal of a reservation day school. Standing Bear also worked in his uncle's little general store.

Standing Bear wrote to Wanamaker, who served as U.S. Postmaster General, to inquire about establishing a post office on the reservation, but was told that Native Americans were not legally permitted to serve as postmaster. The post office was set up in the name of a white missionary but run by Standing Bear. Later, Standing Bear and his brother Ellis opened a dry goods store at Pass Creek and started a small ranch raising horses and cattle. Standing Bear also organized public meetings at his dry goods store in Pine Ridge to discuss treaties and current events.

Standing Bear married Nellie DeCrory in 1886, and they had six children: Lily Standing Bear; Arthur Standing Bear; Paul Francis Standing Bear; Emily Standing Bear; Julia Standing Bear; and Alexandra Birmingham Cody Standing Bear. Around 1899, Standing Bear married Laura Cloud Shield, and the couple had one additional child, Eugene George Standing Bear.

In 1902 Standing Bear joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and toured Great Britain for a year. He signed up for another tour with Buffalo Bill, but the touring season was cut short on April 7, 1903, by an accident in Maywood, Illinois, when the rear cars of Standing Bear's train were struck by another train. Three young Indigenous performers were killed, and 27 performers badly injured. Standing Bear was seriously injured and almost died. He suffered a dislocation of both hips, a left broken leg below the knee, a left broken arm, two broken ribs, a broken collar bone, a broken nose, and deep gashes on head. As a result, Standing Bear and his family could not return to Buffalo Bill's Wild West.

After returning to Pine Ridge, Standing Bear was chosen as a chief of the Oglala Lakota on July 4, 1905, but he decided to leave later that year. Standing Bear sold his land allotment and bought a house in Sioux City, Iowa, where he worked as a clerk in a wholesale firm.

After a brief job doing rodeo performances with Miller Brothers 101 Ranch in Oklahoma, he moved to California in 1912 to seek full-time employment in the motion picture industry. Standing Bear was recruited as a consultant by director Thomas H. Ince because of his experience as a performer with Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Standing Bear made his screen debut in "Ramona" in 1916. From 1912 to the 1930s, he was employed in the motion picture industry, working alongside Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, and William S. Hart on early Hollywood Westerns. Standing Bear appeared in a dozen or more films (sources disagree), playing both Indigenous and non-Indigenous roles.

Standing Bear was a member of the Screen Actors Guild of Hollywood. He was critical of Hollywood's portrayals of Native Americans, and wanted only Native Americans to play Indigenous roles and appear on the screen in leading and meaningful roles. In 1926, along with other Indigenous actors in Hollywood, he created the "War Paint Club." Ten years later, Standing Bear joined Jim Thorpe in creating the Indian Actors Association to protect rights and characters of Native American actors from defamation or ridicule.

Between 1928 and 1936, Standing Bear wrote four books and a series of articles about protecting Lakota culture and in opposition to government regulation of Native Americans. Standing Bear's commentaries challenged government policies regarding education, assimilation, freedom of religion, tribal sovereignty, return of lands and efforts to convert the Lakota into sedentary farmers. Standing Bear opposed the Dawes Act's policy of privatization of communal holdings of Native American tribes, and was critical of government support of missionaries who undermined Lakota religion, as did the prohibition against the Sun Dance, the most important religious and social event in the yearly cycle of Lakota life.

Between 1928 and 1934, Progressives organized and launched a national education campaign to change government policies towards Native Americans. The campaign began in 1928 with the publication of Standing Bear's book "My People the Sioux" and the release of John Collier's Meriam Report. During this period, Standing Bear toured the forums of the American lecture circuit building critical support for an Indian New Deal.

In 1931, Standing Bear published "My Indian Boyhood," a memoir of life, experience and education of a Lakota child in the late 1800s. That year, after an absence of 20 years, he visited Pine Ridge, South Dakota. He was so distressed by the desperate plight of his people that he wrote "The Tragedy of the Sioux" in the "American Mercury," condemning federal Indian policy for the continued destruction of the Lakota.

Another book, "Land of the Spotted Eagle," published in 1933, is an ethnographic description of traditional Lakota life and customs, which criticizes whites' efforts to "make over" Indigenous people into the likeness of the white race. In 1933, Standing Bear also published "What the Indian Means to America." In 1934, he published a collection of Lakota tales and legends in "Stories of the Sioux."

In 1933, Collier was appointed commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and Standing Bear wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Congress should legislate that the history and culture of Native Americans be made part of the curriculum of public schools.

The next year, Collier introduced what became known as the Indian New Deal with Congress' passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, legislation reversing 50 years of assimilation policies by emphasizing Indian self-determination and the Dawes Act's policy of privatization of communal holdings of Native American tribes. Standing Bear's essay "The Tragedy of the Sioux" and his book "Land of Spotted Eagle," published near the end of the Progressive campaign, had wide impact influencing Collier's Indian New Deal policies and fighting to restore tribal culture and sovereignty.

On February 20, 1939, Luther Standing Bear died in Huntington Park, California, at age of 79 of the flu while on the set of the film "Union Pacific."