Leaders of the Oglala Sioux: The Lives and Legacies of Crazy Horse and Red Cloud

Well over half of the kids enrolled at Red Cloud lack internet access at home, and the school prohibits teachers from assigning homework that requires a computer. Neither of her parents graduated from high school and they wanted more for their daughter. Now a recent graduate of Red Cloud, Spotted Thunder—who has straight black hair, glasses, and a magnetic smile—will be driving miles northeast in the fall to major in sociology at Minnesota State University.

Unfortunately, it was a message she started to believe. A few years ago, she hit a tipping point and attempted suicide. After taking a short break from school to recover from the incident, Spotted Thunder, at the encouragement of her English teacher, decided to join the poetry-slam team.

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She had never been part of a group that allowed her to express her feelings so viscerally and honestly. Since then, the poetry-slam community has served as somewhat of a lifeline for her: And so that really sparked a big thing in me to want to do better. For Spotted Thunder, staying on the path to college required far more than ambition and exposure to a college-going culture—it required an outlet, a place to reflect on things, cope with hardship, and boost her self-esteem.

It also required confronting the generational poverty, trauma, and cultural disconnection that forced her mother and so many other Natives into addiction. She had to really commit to breaking those cycles. In addition to the private schools, there are the tribal-grant schools, which are overseen by a local governing board.

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There are the Bureau of Indian Education schools, which are federally funded and often federally operated. Pushing her backpack aside to clear the table, she shrugged.

With a slight smirk and black bangs nearly covering her eyes, the year-old explained that she only recently moved to Pine Ridge from Pierre and had spent nearly her entire life in the foster-care system. Pine Ridge is her fourth, and favorite, high school. But if she had been able to choose, she would have skipped high school and gone straight to college. Sometimes maybe too long. From her difficult childhood experiences. From her involvement in social-justice volunteer work.

Despite a spotty academic record, when I spoke with Mousseau, all she could talk about was college and beyond. That post-high-school ambition is matched only by her passion for social justice. Mousseau is on the youth advisory board of a group called the Encampment , which encourages youth activism and brings members together to engage in community service and workshops, among other activities. Pine Ridge, like so many other Native American reservations in the United States, bears the scars of a history defined by discrimination and injustice and abuse.

There, American troops slaughtered at least Sioux natives—roughly half of them women and children. The carnage, which was instigated following a minor clash between a Lakota and a member of the U. The year before the Wounded Knee massacre, the U.

It was more or less around the same time that, across the country, the U. A motto attributed to Colonel Richard Henry Pratt embodies the philosophy behind this practice: Children, many just a few years old, were often forcibly removed from their parents; some never saw their families again. The elders get together once a month to discuss the state of education and related issues; my visit to the reservation happened to coincide with their March meeting, so I asked Dayna Brave Eagle, who oversees the Oglala Sioux tribal education agency, if I could stop by.

The conversation eventually segued into one about college-going culture on Pine Ridge—a discussion that made it clear that for students like Mousseau, Spotted Thunder, and Rosales, the decisions around where to go to, what to study, and even whether to go at all are incredibly thorny. But blindly pushing reservation youth toward college, particularly when campuses are far away, can set them up for failure. It can also mean depleting the reservation of human and social capital.

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Native Americans serve in the military at a higher rate than any other ethnic group, according to some statistics , and that has been the case since the American Revolution. Maybe the best option for others is to go straight into the workforce. But things get tricky even when talking strictly about the Pine Ridge youth who are college-bound.

Should they leave the state altogether? Leaving the reservation for college often means more than just moving elsewhere to get a degree—it can also mean landing in a place where your ethnic and cultural identity is no longer baked into the fabric of everyday life, a place where that identity is treated as insignificant or exotic. Of course, staying on the reservation has downsides, too. Then there is the battle of expectations. And every student who leaves and comes back prematurely and never manages to return to school is just another Native who failed to fulfill her higher-education goals.

Native Pathways sends coaches to high schools across South Dakota, North Dakota, Washington, Montana, Wisconsin, and Alaska to conduct workshops and provide one-on-one guidance. Perhaps most importantly, the coaches rigorously engage with prospective college-goers through social media and text messages to make sure students are on track in the search process and confident in their application choices.

I accompanied Davida Delmar, the coach assigned to Pine Ridge, as she visited schools across the reservation. She consistently encouraged students to friend her on Facebook, to add her on Snapchat, to take down her cell-phone number. Actually experiencing a campus before attending is especially key for Native kids, explained Delmar, a Navajo who went to Brown University as an undergraduate and returned to her home state to pursue a graduate degree at Northern Arizona University. Lyle Jacobs, who graduated from Red Cloud in and attended Duke University on a full-tuition scholarship, likewise stressed the importance of finding peer groups.

Speaking on an alumni panel hosted by Red Cloud one afternoon, he admitted to an audience of high-schoolers that he was close to dropping out his entire first semester. I wanted to go home. I had stuff I was doing; I joined clubs and stuff. And Duke was the best four years of my life after that. Being a person of color at a predominantly white college can be overwhelming, and that feeling of isolation can become unbearable when that person is a Native who has spent her entire life in a place where her cultural identity is integrated into every institution.

From Red Cloud to Pine Ridge School, students and counselors and teachers cited homesickness as one of the biggest obstacles to postsecondary attainment for reservation youth. Nakina Mills, the director of advancement and alumni support at Red Cloud, has witnessed too many students go off to college with big dreams only to return to the reservation months later overwhelmed with a sense of detachment from those dreams.

Three years later they met again on the Little Bighorn in the battle that made both men famous.

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Sitting Bull was not a war leader in that fight, but he had predicted that many soldiers would fall, and his followers believed that his magical powers had brought the victory. Although Sitting Bull survived, an aroused and vengeful army forced him to flee to Canada. After two years he was permitted to live on Standing Rock Reservation where he continued to use his influence to keep Sioux lands from being taken by the government. The rise of the Ghost Dance, a tribal religion that proclaimed that all whites would disappear and dead Indians and buffalo would return, brought him into disfavor with government officials in because he made no effort to stop the dancing at Standing Rock.

When Indian police were sent to arrest him on December 15, , Sitting Bull was killed in a melee outside his cabin. Eric Foner and John A. We strive for accuracy and fairness.

Crazy Horse Never Died - True West Magazine

But if you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Five years after General George A. Army, which promises amnesty for him and his followers. Sitting Bull had been a major leader in the Sioux uprising Miles, commander of the U. Army troops in South Dakota. Miles asked Cody to proceed immediately to Standing Rock, a reservation in Dakota Territory, where a On this day, Indian Inspector E. Watkins submits a report to Washington, D.

In so doing, Watkins set into motion a series of events that led to Tall Bull was the most distinguished of several Cheyenne warriors who bore this hereditary name. He was a leader of the Dog Soldiers, a fierce