Between 1870 and 1880 all Sioux were driven into reservations, fenced in and forced to give up everything that had given meaning to their life —their horses, their hunting, their arms, everything. But under the long snows of despair the little spark of our ancient beliefs and pride kept glowing, just barely sometimes, waiting for a warm wind to blow that spark into a flame again.

— Mary Crow Dog, “Lakota Woman”, 1991.

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The long-expected detachment of Sioux, on their way to the Oklahoma Indian Territory, arrived in Omaha yesterday afternoon... American Horse had his squaw and papoose with him and there were eleven other squaws in the party. One or two were quite pleasing in the face, but the majority looked as though they were natural-born mothers-in-law. Perhaps this is too severe —they all had the appearance of being amiable at times, and the Herald does not wish to say anything really bad about them. American Horse’s papoose was a chubby, sturdy little beggar, and when one of the ladies spoke to him, he set up a tremendous wail, just as natural and lifelike as if he were human.

— The Omaha Herald, November 4, 1876.

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Most (Indian Service) agents did their best to undermine and ignore the authority of chiefs and leaders who resisted their ways and demands, while they catered to lesser men who would do whatever they were told. In addition, these agents struck hard at the most critical point, uniting church authorities in a massive effort to extinguish the vital ceremonial life of the Sioux.

As early as 1881, calling the Sun Dance such things as “savage rites”, “barbarity”, “this cruel spectacle”, and “horrible”, the whites moved to stamp it out by forbidding its practice on any Sioux reservations. Shortly thereafter, they condemned nearly all of the traditional rituals and practices, and those who violated the rule were subject to instant discipline and arrest.

— Thomas E. Mails, “Fools Crow”, 1979.

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Then round and round dance the worshippers, their eyes fixed on the blazing sun, while the jerk, jerk, jerk, of the bleeding flesh beats a sickening time to the hi-yas of a Dakota song. These and a thousand other monstrous customs were what the early missionary had to combat.

It would be an error, of course, to suppose that all the Sioux have embraced Christianity. Every one knows that there are still those malcontents who wear the hair long, who withdraw as far as possible from their agencies, and who still yearn for the extermination of the whites and the return of the buffalo.

Godliness, usefulness, cleanliness, politeness, and learning are the points strived for. When I gave the customary “How, cola” to a little mite at the St. Elizabeth mission, the mite replied, “Good morning, sir”, in a way that made me feel decidedly at a disadvantage.

The churches and religious societies have certainly quenched the fire of barbarism in the Indian children. The Bible, translated into their native language, has been put before them, so that the younger element does not grow up with a belief in that convenient form of prayer —merely pointing the pipe— which expressed so little, but implied all manner of requests for ponies and meat and comfortable old age. Marriage according to Christian rites has succeeded the annual virgin feast, where a slandered maiden stood face to face with her accuser by the sacred fire and swore a high-sounding oath to her purity. The disappearance of blanket and breechcloth, long hair and highly painted faces, is a sign that the Sioux has succumbed to a stronger civilization, and with his old customs have fallen his old gods.

— William H. Wassel, “The Religion of the Sioux”,
Harpers New Monthly Magazine, 1893.

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It is under contemplation by the Indian Bureau to institute a vigorous campaign against the practices of the medicine men, or native Indian doctors and magicians. The secrecy with which their operations are conducted and the superstitious awe in which they are held by a large number of Indians, even at the present day, have rendered it very difficult to eliminate them from the reservations, and, though they are proscribed by law from exercising their traditional functions, it has only been the most flagrant cases of their barbarous rites that come to the notice of the authorities.

— An old and rare newspaper article, author and publisher unknown.

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The whites destroyed the tiyospaye (extended family group), not accidentally, but as a matter of policy. The close-knit clan, set in its old ways, was a stumbling block in the path of the missionary and government agent, its traditions and customs a barrier to what the white man called “progress” and “civilization”. And so the government tore the tiyospaye apart and forced the Sioux into the kind of relationship now called the “nuclear family” —forced upon each couple their individually owned allotment of land, trying to teach them “the benefits of wholesome selfishness without which higher civilization is impossible”. At least that is how one secretary of the interior put it. So the great brainwashing began, those who did not like to have their brains washed being pushed farther and farther into the back country, into isolation and starvation. The civilizers did a good job on us, especially among the half-bloods, using the stick-and-carrot method, until now there is neither the tiyospaye nor a white-style nuclear family left, just Indian kids without parents.

— Mary Crow Dog, “Lakota Woman”, 1991.

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The recent law passed for the compulsory education of Indians is a step in the right direction. Although we may urge that these people might ultimately be persuaded to adopt voluntarily the means of a higher culture, yet there is no time to wait for such developments in the case of the Indians of today. Their immediate education is their only salvation. They must be forced as far as possible to transform their mode of living in accordance with the customs of modern industrial and civil life.

It is not to be supposed that parents of Indian children are capable of determining whether education is good for their children or not. Indeed, it is hardly conceivable that those who have reached advanced years would willingly turn away from their savage life, when we consider the past relations of the United States Government to its Indian wards, as they may be called.

It is the only hope of salvation for the Indian race. The tribal inspiration and the tribal influence must be broken up and the Indians must be taught to take their stand among the people of their country, to toil for their bread and to engage in the industries of common life. They must be prepared for intelligent citizenship; they must know how to gain and hold property; they must understand their rights and be content with what belongs to them and ask for no more. With such education the Indian problem gives fair promise of solution.

— F.W. Blackmar, University of Kansas, 1895.

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The instruction of all Indian children in good schools, during a given period of each year, should be made compulsory. In that direction lies the one great hope of modifying and ameliorating the Indian character. It is uncertain, to say the most, whether the adult members of the wild tribes can ever be induced or constrained to raise themselves from their abject savagery to the level of any fixed idea of education. But the rising generation is plastic, and can be molded effectually, and to higher uses. The education of children goes to the core of the problem. We must begin at the cradle if we would conquer barbarism and lift a race to a height beyond itself.

— Harry King, “The Indian Country”, 1916.

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Many Indian children are placed in foster homes. This happens even in some cases where parents or grandparents are willing and able to take care of them, but where the social workers say their homes are substandard, or where there are outhouses instead of flush toilets, or where the family is simply “too poor”. A flush toilet to a white social worker is more important than a good grandmother.

— Mary Crow Dog, “Lakota Woman”, 1991.

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The mission school at St. Francis was a curse for our family for generations. My grandmother went there, then my mother, then my sisters and I. At one time or other every one of us tried to run away. Grandma told me once about the bad times she had experienced at St. Francis. One time she was in church and instead of praying she was playing jacks. As punishment they took her to one of those little cubicles, about five by five by ten feet, where she stayed in darkness because the windows had been boarded up. They left her there for a whole week with only bread and water for nourishment. After she came out she promptly ran away, together with three other girls. They were found and brought back. The nuns stripped them naked and whipped them. They used a horse buggy whip on my grandmother. Then she was put back into the attic —for two weeks.

Once, when I was 13 years old, I refused to go to Mass because I did not feel well. A nun grabbed me by the hair, dragged me downstairs, made me stoop over, pulled my dress up, pulled my panties down, and gave me what they called “swats” —twenty-five swats with a board around which Scotch tape had been wound. She hurt me badly.

— Mary Crow Dog, “Lakota Woman”, 1991.

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The things being done to the Indians today might best be called silent violence. It is not necessary to have armed confrontations or to destroy with fire and guns in order to have violence. The silent violence is what is crushing the Indian people today. It is this that has brought among us drunkenness, malnutrition, starvation, disease, suffering, and an endless number of deaths.

We are kept ignorant of our rights and of the benefits due us. There is no consistent attempt to correct unjust laws to strengthen our social and economic structure. At present, the United States Government has but one interest, which is, in our view, self-interest. This creates for them a special blindness wherein the truth cannot be seen. No one sees any longer how we actually live. The system prospers by using us, and no one really notices.

— Fools Crow, 1975.

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Schools left many of us illiterate. We were not taught any skills. The land was leased to white ranchers. Jobs were almost nonexistent on the reservation, and outside the res whites did not hire Indians if they could help it. There was nothing for the men to do in those days but hit the bottle.

— Mary Crow Dog, “Lakota Woman”, 1991.

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A recent investigation by the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee revealed such things as this: the death rate for Indians is 40 times higher than it is for any other group in America. The best government-built houses, which the Sioux must buy if they want one, are the cheapest plywood, and have no insulation to keep away heat or subzero temperatures. Indians suffer 60 times more dysentery, 30 times more strep throat, 11 times more hepatitis, and 10 times more tuberculosis than other Americans. 29 of the 51 hospitals maintained for Indians by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare do not meet the minimum standard set by the government.

— Fools Crow, 1975.

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Hungry people cannot be patient. Without proper clothing people were ashamed. When people are freezing, and have the feeling no one cares what they think or do, they lose all hope and sometimes do rash things.

— Fools Crow, 1975.

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In South Dakota the killing of an Indian was usually treated as a mere misdemeanor and went unpunished, but if an Indian killed a white man he was condemned to death and was lucky to have it bargained down to a life sentence.

— Mary Crow Dog, “Lakota Woman”, 1991.

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Those who would like to understand the Sioux Indian’s questions about justice must know something about the United States Government-Teton Sioux, Arapaho Treaty of 1868. It has never been revoked, but it has been shamefully violated. The more important sections of the treaty are as follows: 

• Peace between the United States and the Indians; the United States will punish anyone, Indian or white, who violates the treaty, and reimburse the injured person for the loss.
• The Sioux and Arapaho will have a reservation of everything west of the Missouri River in present South Dakota; the area north of the Northern Platte River and east of the Big Horn Mountains (in Wyoming) will be unceded Indian Territory, where no whites will settle or pass through. The Indians give up claim to other land.
• If the reservation yields less than 160 acres of farming land per person, the United States will provide nearby land. Anyone living on the reservation may take land for his own or his family and own it privately; otherwise, land is held in common by the tribe. The United States may pass laws about passing down land to descendants.
• The United States will provide: educational and economic buildings; an agent who lives on the reservation and who can forward complaints of treaty violations for prosecution; assistance for farming; clothing and necessities for thirty years; food for four years; oxen and a cow for every family that farms.
• The treaty can only be changed by a vote of three fourths of the adult members of the tribe.

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We took some of our rhetoric from the blacks, who had started their movements before we did. Like them we were minorities, poor and discriminated against, but there were differences. I think it significant that in many Indian languages a black is called a “black white man”. The blacks want what the whites have, which is understandable. They want in. We Indians want out ! That is the main difference.

— Mary Crow Dog, “Lakota Woman”, 1991.

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The subjugation of a race by their enemies cannot but create feelings of most intense hatred and animosity. Possibly if we should put ourselves in their place, we might comprehend their feelings. Suppose, for instance, that instead of being a nation of vast wealth, population, prosperity, and happiness, our numbers were narrowed down to 250,000 souls, scattered in bands, villages, or settlements of from 500 to 20,000 people, and confined within the limits of comparatively small districts. Suppose this vast continent had been overrun by 60 million people from Africa, India, or China, claiming that their civilization, customs, and beliefs were older and better than ours, compelling us to adopt their habits, language, and religion, obliging us to wear the same style of raiment, cut our hair according to their fashion, live upon the same food, sing the same songs, worship the same Allahs, Vishnus, and Brahmas; and we realized that such a conquest and the presence of such horde of enemies had become a withering blight and a destroying scourge to our race: what then would be our feelings towards such a people? In considering this question we may be able to realize something of the feelings of the Indians of today.

— General Nelson A. Miles, “The Future of the Indian Question”,
North American Review, January 1891.

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We are a great people for dying. “It’s a good day to die!” That’s our old battle cry. But the land with its tar paper shacks and outdoor privies, not one of them straight, but all leaning this way or that way, is also a land to live on, a land for good times and telling jokes and talking of great deeds done in the past. But you can’t live forever off the deeds of Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse. You can’t wear their eagle feathers, freeload off their legends. You have to make your own legends now. It isn’t easy.

— Mary Crow Dog, “Lakota Woman”, 1991.