Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the
Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number
157.
So today we are going to pick up where
we left off from our previous episode and we
are going to be discussing. We're going
to be rounding out our conversation that we were having, Tom Levy and I,
that we were having around the the Book
and the Life of Sitting Bull by
Ernie lapointe. Now, if you haven't listened to
part one of this episode, it was recorded, gosh,
close to a year ago now, right, Tom? That's probably less.
Yeah, maybe a little bit less. Might be nine months to a year ago,
where we covered the first part of Sitting Bull, his life and
legacy. We talked about who Sitting Bull was. We talked about
his wives and his children. We talked about the challenges
of bringing in a second wife into.
Into the living situation, into the living environment the
Sitting Bull was faced with. And we also talked about
the nature of how Sitting Bull became a man
and came into his manhood as a warrior in
the. Correct me when I'm wrong,
Tom. Lakota tribe. Correct. Correct. Yes.
Excellent. From the
home, Papa. Thank you. Yes, that's right. Yes. I had to pull it
deep from the recesses of my fertile mind.
I kind of have a lot going on there lately. So.
So we were going to pick up our conversation around. Around
Sitting Bull and we're going to pick up
with challenges as to.
To. Not
good enough of a word. It's not really
challenges. It's more like his interactions. His
battles. Interactions is too low key a word too. His
battles with the United States Cavalry and the
removal of the Lakota people
from the West. So we're going to pick up with that. Talk about that
today. Tom, I know it's been a while since we talked about
this. Is there anything that we need to refresh the folks on
as I pick a spot to land on in this book?
No, I don't think so. I mean, I think
as we talk about, as we go through the
different topics that you're looking to like, for example, you know, for example, with his,
you know, his interactions with the US Cavalry and stuff like that, we can. There's
probably bits and pieces in there that people are probably going to want to
know about a little bit more detail or possibly even go research on their own.
Because I, I'm assuming that there's no singular
piece of content that is gonna. Is gonna be perfectly complete. So I'm. I'm
assuming there are certain things that you can either fact checked or,
or. Or look at from a different perspective, especially in that. In
that arena. And then the second part would be toward the end of his life.
And what. I don't know if we're going to get there today, but like how
his life actually ended. And there's a lot of speculation and
firsthand accounts of the situation and things like that and the
immediate aftermath, things like that. Some of those things, again, depending
on who you ask or which piece of content you read, they come at it
from a little bit different perspective. But the interesting thing about this particular
book, again, just to remind everybody that the person who wrote this book was
his great grandson. Like, this is a direct line to him, which
means this person's mother
was her. It was her grandfather. Like, so some of these things
she heard firsthand from him, and she might have even been present
at the. At the time, you know, of his. Of his. Of his
demise. So, you know, again, the. I think this is
probably going to be the closest you can get to viewing it from his eyes.
Coming direct from descendants to descendants. And the way that
oral history is managed throughout the Native community,
it. It is. It's. It's very sacred. So
you're not allowed to tell. To retell a story
until the person that tells you is satisfied that you're telling it
properly. So that's how that you control the narrative going
from generation to generation. So I'm assuming that I make the
assumption, and I would hesitate that anybody in our community
would not make the assumption, but so most of us would make the assumption that
these stories are as legitimate or as close to legitimate as you can
possibly find. So. And
not to leapfrog ahead and no, but.
And I do recall
that there has or there was some
controversy, conflict, disagreement about who gets to
tell this story and why.
I do recall that Mr. Lapointe
had some
conflicts and challenges, to say the least, around. Around writing
this story down and around documenting it in
the way that he heard it, which
goes along with the preservation of an oral narrative.
And then sort of the. I guess lack of a better term would be
resistance maybe to writing it down,
which. And I think we talked a little bit about this in our last
episode. To me, from
my. From my perspective, and it is a. It is a. Is
a Western perspective.
If you don't write it down, did it really happen?
Because once people are dead, you know that the people who are alive
get to sort of shape the narrative. But I don't think that
that's. I don't think that's a similarly Held, you know, idea
across, across different groups. Right. And I essentially don't think that
that's a group, an idea held by Native
American groups at all or perspective held by them at all.
So there's a,
a challenge of veracity maybe. I don't know. I don't, I
don't know. I don't, I don't understand that, you know, to, to, to your
point. But I know that I do remember that that was something that,
that in my research around Ernie Lapointe and
around him writing the, the story of Sitting
Bull that was brought up,
you know, and that was, that was excavated, you know, does this person have the
right to tell the story? Does he have the right to write it down? Should
he have documented it? Who gets to say those kinds
of things? Sometimes, sometimes pop up or do, or have popped up around
this, around this narrative. So, yeah,
and I would imagine, and I haven't done any research
specifically about that topic of why he should
or shouldn't or who would put up roadblocks to him writing this or why they
would or wouldn't. But I would imagine that the list
of Native people trying to stop him from writing this
was probably short. If he was getting pushback from writing
this. It. To your point about the, the, you know, is there any
way to validate this? There's no validating documentation. That sounds to me
like a very white centric thing. So maybe a publisher
and maybe somebody like that that was probably putting up some roadblocks, maybe
histor. Very often historians,
archaeologists, anthropologists, people who think they know better because
it's their area of study. I could see them putting
up some roadblocks or some fight about him writing this, but I think it would
be, and, and if there were Native people fighting
it, it would be more in the lines of, you shouldn't write
that down because they don't deserve to be reading it. Not because the story
isn't true or that he needs to validate it with any of us as to
whether it should or shouldn't be sorry. Whether it, whether the
stories are truthful enough to be written down
or like that would have never happened from our side of the coin. But I
could see if a Native person was restrict, was
hesitant about him writing this down because they wouldn't think that
the general population or the Eurocentric
communities that are outside of the Native community would be
worthy to read it because it is our, our history
that we tell on our side of the coin. Right. So it's, and again,
it's, it's that whole adage of, you know, there's three
sides to every story, right? His, hers, and the truth. And in these cases,
there's also. There's three sides to the story. It's not. It's not his, hers in
the truth, but it's the. The winner, the loser in the truth. Right. So
the victory is usually the person. The victor is usually the one writing
the history books, but that doesn't always tell the whole story.
So in this case, again, where the pushback may be is that this story
is written from one singular perspective, but
the person writing it. That's why it's coming from one
singular perspective. It's from their perspective. Right. It's from the right. So
it's that. That's the whole point of it. We're not trying to. We're not trying
to argue, again, going back to, you know, things that could or could
bet the best one so far, not the best one, but there's
a lot of what. There's a lot
of stories that are.
There's no way to validate them as to who. Who actually killed
Custer. Right. We know when it happened. There are certain facts of
the case. If you were a historical detective, there are facts of
the case that he was, you know, alive on this day, he died on this
day, and that there was a battle, and that the battle was between A and
B side, whatever, all this factual information there. But when you look
at who actually pulled the trigger or shot the arrow or
however you want to talk about it, there's a
lot of controversy behind that because there have been several people to take credit for
the kill, the actual kill shot. Right. So.
And again, like, how do you. So who has
the right to tell that story? Well, you know, we, like. It's hard to tell
because nobody knows who actually pulled the trigger. Whereas certain
things that happened in, in, in. In Sitting Bull's
life, it's.
When you're talking about firsthand account, it's
firsthand account. It's. It's not an opinion. It's factual information,
but it's, It's. It's framed in a
way that comes from a particular person's perspective. So
again, and I go back to one of the reasons we don't need
validation or documentation like this is because if you are a
historian in our community, if you are a storyteller in our community, you are not
allowed to re. You are not allowed to recite any of those
stories or those histories in any way, shape or form in public until
the person teaching you is comfortable that you do it right and that you have
everything in an order. Like, it has to be the same way they
say it. If you deviate or if you put in your two cents somewhere,
then you don't get permission from your elder or from your teacher to go and
tell the story. You're not allowed to do that. So again, if
you look at his life and the fact that his mother was the direct
daughter of Sitting Bull and she gives him permission to do this,
then to me, that says he has permission to do it. Yeah. There's any reason
to worry about validation. But. Okay,
well, let's. Let's pick
up with a meeting
that was held in. In
1867. Let's pick up with that.
And this is. This is Sitting Bulls meeting. Now, the
Sitting bowl, just for those of you who are listening, is, for
lack of a better term, what the Americans call this man.
And. And his. His Lakota name is
Tatanka Iotake. Okay? And so
that is how he is referred to in this. In this writing,
and that is how he is referred to in the history. Sitting Bull is
not. Is not how
the Lakota refer to him. So we're going to take
from this. It's also not a direct translation either, by the way. Okay.
Not a direct translation either. Okay. Yeah. So if you look up the English firm,
and I hope I quote this right, and if any of my Lakota
cousins out there are listening, I apologize if I butcher it a little bit. But
it's something to the sense of, like, buffalo. The buffalo bull who
sits. Right. So it's like. So the English, when you translate
that as, oh, that's a Sitting Bull. So that wasn't a direct,
though. So even though. Even though the English we. The English basically renamed
him. Yeah.
He didn't even use the. They didn't even use the. The direct. The direct
translation. They just decided to change even the direct translation. So never
mind. Tatake. This is not like. They didn't. They.
Not only did they use. Did they not use his Lakota name, but they just.
They just decided to call him something else. They decided to call him something else.
Well, you know, a lot of that happened at Ellis island, too. So, you know,
is. It goes around. It
goes around. So, okay, so we're gonna pick
up with this chapter. The leader of the Lakota. We're gonna
read a few things from this. The encroachment of the white man was
advancing very quickly, and this worried Four Horns. He decided that
new leadership was necessary. In 1867, he sent word to all
the Lakota bands and the other nearby nations requesting a gathering to discuss
an important matter. There were six Lakota bands, some
Yanktonai, and a few Cheyenne who responded to his call
and arrived at the camp at his camp on the lower Powder River.
By the way, this meeting is described by Dee Brown and Bury my
Heart ETOV at Wounded Knee. Among
those who arrived quickly were Crazy Horse and Gaul.
They were in agreement with Four Horns about the need for new leadership, and they
understood the urgency of the situation. Four Horns
began the council by explaining to the chiefs and elders why he believed new leadership
was required. He said he was advancing in age and a younger
Wakasa was desired to lead the people. He recommended his nephew,
Tatanka Iotake, to be chief of the
Teotunwa Lakota nation. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, and I
apologize if I am not. The council members all agreed with Four Horns that
Tatanka Iotake was the best choice, for he was advancing,
advanced in his thinking and actions for one who was
only 36 years old. They also agreed to the appointment
of Crazy Horse as the second chief. This was a very significant
decision. In order to determine the gravity of, or to underline the
gravity of this action, the Lakota performed a solemn ceremony
to invest Tatanke Iotake with his new position. Four
chiefs went to Tatanke Iotake's teepee and escorted him out. They
brought a buffalo robe with them and had him sit on it. Then
they carried him to the council TP for the ceremony. Four
Horns. Four Horns spoke. He told everyone that the council had
appointed a new chief and that it was now his responsibility to see
that the Teotunwa Lakota were fed and defended.
He told Tatanka Iotake, quote, when you tell us
to fight, we'll raise up our weapons. And if you tell us to make peace,
we will lay down our weapons. We will smoke. We will smoke the
Kanupa Wakan sacred pipe, so Wakantanka will
bless our decision. Tatake was given a
magnificent bow and arrows and a rifle. He was presented with a
headdress, with a trailer of eagle feathers all the way down his back to the
ground. Each eagle feather on the headdress represented a coup by the warrior who
contributed it. Finally, he was given a magnificent white
stallion. He was lifted onto its back and led around the camp.
The warriors from many different societies followed behind, dressed in their finest
and wearing their eagle feathers proudly.
Tatanke Iotake was gifted in composing songs. He started to sing as he
was led around the camp. He sang this song. I'm going to read the English
translation because I do not want to butcher the language. I humble
myself when my people speak my name. So said Tatanke
Iyotake. From the time of the ceremony,
Tatanke accepted the burden of responsibility for the well being of all his people.
The Brulees under Spotted Tail and the Southern Oglalas
under Red Cloud did not attend the gathering. They refused to recognize
Hatake Iotake as their chief. Now
this leads into the battle at, at
Arrow Creek, which apparently started at, at
Rosebud River. And,
and there was a, there was a battle there
that basically
a two days battle, a big battle that basically pulled in
a lot of warriors
right from the surrounding tribes, right?
And the Lakota
were watching the laying of the Northern Pacific Railroad
and the planning of that, that rail mine through Montana
Territory into Dakota Territory. And the railroad had sent
surveyors to identify and locate the best route possible,
along with a military escort of 500 men out of Fort Ellis under the
command of Major Eugene M. Baker. And the surveyors
knew they were in the heart of the Lakota territory, but they felt safe near
with the military escort and they established
a camp near Arrow Creek. Now,
once they established the camp, of course the Lakota were
watching them and tracking them and were paying attention to
what they were doing, by the way.
Pause. I'm currently reading Empire of the Summer Moon.
And the Comanche were experts at this.
Comanche were experts at this. We're going to bring that
book to the podcast coming up here in a few months and
some fascinating things. As a person who, who lives,
who lives in Texas now, I won't say where, but I live in Texas where
a lot of Comanche were. 1 Once Upon a time running around here. And
it's just, it's really interesting sort of how they
perceived battle and how they conducted battle
and, and it's interesting how that occurred not necessarily
in opposition, but just in a different kind of way than the way the
Cheyenne would, would, would, would engage in battle or even
in the ways that Lakota, quite frankly, were eventually pushed to
engage again. I don't think the Lakota actually wanted to engage in battle this way,
but by the time we got to the 1870s,
everything was so hot. This was, this was the direction that things were. Things were
going to be going. So from
the book, the Lakota warriors and the Long Knives exchanged shots all
night. The Long Knives killed one Hunkpapa warrior who
had run the daring line. They took his body and threw it on the campfire.
The warriors were infuriated at the show of disrespect by the Long Knives.
The morning brought Tatanka Iotake and Crazy Horse to the top of a bluff overlooking
the battlefield. They realized the Log Knives are well entrenched and it would be difficult
to reach them. Yet the warriors were continuing to run their daring line. There was
no need for this, for they had already proven their courage.
Tatanka Iotake soon discovered these braves were followers of a warrior who said he
had had a vision. Any warrior who rode with him would be cloaked with an
invisible blanket and would not be hit by arrows or bullets. His followers
kept riding repeatedly between the opposing forces. Some were hit, but none
was seriously injured. Tatanke Itake located
the warrior whose vision the young rays were following and said, enough.
I do not want the young braves wounded or killed. Their bravery is evident and
the shedding of their blood will not do us any good. The
warrior whose vision was in question spoke up and challenged in return.
The great warrior Tatana Iotake perhaps has forgotten what it takes to
be brave after all, he said defiantly. It is said that with
age, blood upsets a man's stomach.
Some of the young braves were also upset at Tatanke Yotake's advice. They did not
hesitate to make their feelings known. They preferred actions, words, and they said
their chief was interfering and bossy. These young warriors had just questioned
Tatake Yotake's position as chief of the Lakota nation and leader
of the Strong Heart Society.
Now, the way he sort of
dealt with this was
he invited the young warriors
to. Well, he invited them to a smoke.
So he dismounted his horse and took down his pipe bag and tobacco pouch. He
proceeded to walk with his noticeable limp at a steady and deliberate pace towards the
middle of the opposing force. When he had reached a point midway between the Lakota
and the Long Knives, he sat down. He called back to the Lakota, inviting anyone
who wished to smoke to join him and share his kadupa. It was more
of a challenge than an invitation. None of the
complainers stepped forward, including the warrior who claimed to be cloaked in invisibility and
invulnerable to the Long Knives guns. Only three men, two
Cheyenne, two Cheyenne, and Tata Itake's nephew, White Bull, had the
courage to join him. If there were any sharp eyed observers, they
would have noticed how shaky their legs were as they came and
sat down. The reason I'm reading that.
So let's talk about this. This is interesting. We sort of ended our last episode
with this idea, but I want to pick up here, and then we can move
forward into how the Lakota began to deal
with the cavalry and the
long, slow sort of decline. Right. Of the
Lakota in the West.
And we sort of explored this from the perspective of
how does a leader deal with usurpers? Right. Coming
in to sort of challenge their
authority. But let's sort of flip this.
So what is the weight?
And I'm not asking you, for you to speak for all your people. Forget that,
just in general, because I don't like it when I'm asked to do that. And
I'm not going to ask you to do that in general. What is the,
what is the pressure there in that particular situation? If you're
the usurper, if you're the young warrior, what is the
pressure there? So
I, I mean, I mean, think of it. Okay, so let's
put this into, into like modern perspective,
right? Sure. So. And again, something that's not quite as life threat,
life threatening. Let's just say, let's say,
you know, you have the last $20 that you own
in your entire life. You have nothing but $20 left in your pocket,
and you're on a basketball court and somebody says,
all of us put $20 down, and whoever hits it, you know, hits a
basket from half court gets to keep all of it. And you
go, I, I'm pretty confident I can make that
shot, but do I really want to risk my entire 20 on this? Right.
And I'm using, I'm using an
example that is not nearly as life threatening as
what we're talking about. Right. But, but if you think
about it, we're at a point in history where
you and I have talked about it. I don't remember if we've talked about it
on an episode or not, but I know you and I have talked about this
at one point or another, about how today's version
of I give you my word means something very different
than it did 50 years ago. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like
you and I could, could create a deal like 50 years ago, a
hundred years ago, if you and I shook hands, that was the
end of it. And if I went, if I went back on that deal, my
reputation was trash and I couldn't show my face in the neighborhood. Right.
Whereas today you say, yeah, I give you my word. And we're like, what
does that mean? Like who? Like, no, no, no. Unless you can give me a
contract and you sign it, like, I'm not doing business with you. Right. Like, okay,
so. And again, I, I know this sounds like I'm all over the place here,
but I'm coming back. So if you look at your question and you
say, in that sense, what does this mean to the, to the
usurper, the guy whose vision that is, the fact that he didn't
go out there and sit with him, his credibility is
gone. Like, no, it, it no longer exists.
Like, he can no longer take charge of a group
of warriors. They're not going to even. They're not
going to follow him. They're not going to do anything for him ever again. Ever.
Like, in order for him to get back that honor,
he would have to go through leaps and bounds beyond belief. And even then, he
might not get it back. Whereas Sitting Bull doing what he
did is basically saying to everybody, I'm proving to
you that my word is my bond. I'm proving to you that if we go
out here and we just sit and we don't do anything and we don't shed
any more blood, that this is the right way. And the people who
followed him, and I'm not sure if it, I'm assuming in the
book it talks about when they come back. Yeah. So,
like, when they get them and come back, this is a very different
conversation for him at that point. Now, when Sitting Bull comes back to that
get that garrison of people and he says, so
as I said, we're done with this. Don't go. I don't want our
braves shedding blood for no reason anymore.
It's. It's almost like it's, it's,
it's. It's like the word of God, so to speak. And I'm not saying he
was God. I, I just want to make that clear. I'm not suggesting neither. And
nor did he think he was a God. That's not the point. But
it's that idea or ideal
of putting your money where your mouth is and being able to back up and
support what you say and the level of integrity that you
have to have in order to lead the men of men.
He just proved that he had it. And his. And his, his.
The other person did not. Right. So like. And again.
And by the way, the, the opposite effect is also. It
is also true in today's day and age. Right. If you and I have an
agreement, I say, hey, son, don't worry, I will take care of that. And I
do. You still don't give the credit to that task
that they used to. Right. If you met
somebody and said, hey, is Tom's worth. Is Tom's word worth anything. You'd be like,
I guess so. Sure you wouldn't go, absolutely. Because
he has done xyz. Now, I'm not saying you individually, I'm saying people in general.
Because I do feel like there are certain. There might be
a few people around that still that still think of it
in this way. I. I do. By the way, I actually do feel
that a person's word is strong, like if. And
by the way, I'm also of the opinion that I trust your word until you
give me reason not to. Not the other way around. You don't have to prove
yourself to me until you disprove it. And then I. Then
again, like I explained a few minutes ago, then your word is worthless to me
and it's very, very difficult to get it back for me. But I think
that again, it's like
we see so many examples of this where, you know,
if you, if you run a restaurant and you own the restaurant, but you're willing
to go wash dishes and you ask somebody to go wash the dishes in your
stead, they're not going to give you grief because they know you're willing to do
the hard work. If you own a mechanic shop and you're willing to
twist the wrenches and you say, hey, can you go finish that break job for
me? Because I've got to go finish something else. There's some credibility
in that where I don't think we put enough emphasis on that.
And there's. In these days, we were just talking, you and I were just talking
offline about. About a particular sales
thing. And I won't get too deep into it, but. But
even in sales is the same way. If somebody brand new to sales comes to
me and says, hey, I want to try this technique of. I've heard it's really
good. I may have had bad experiences with it, but I'm not going to shut
them down. I'm going to say, you know what? You want to try it, go
try it. But if it fails, then you got to come back to my way.
Right? I'm giving them some room and leeway to try some new
things, but I'm only going to give them so much leeway. And if that fails,
I want you to pull yourself back to my processes and go back to my
way because I gave you the opportunity to prove that you were right and you
failed. But so now I want you to go do, do it my way. And
by the way, I've been there, done that. I know that fails, but I'm not
going to ridicule you for it. Right. I'm not going to just shut you down
for it. So there's, there's some instant credibility
things that happen with, with things like this. And again, go back to, to the
book. I, when, when I read that, I
found that I actually got a little bit of, like, I got some chills. I
was like, God damn it, I was born in the wrong era. Like, I would,
I would have loved to been out there with him. Like, it's like.
Because I would have trusted him. He would have been somebody I would have trusted.
Like, that's the, the idea. He was. So
we've talked about a different context, but,
you know, we talked about lionizing a villain a couple of episodes ago
with the Dark Knight. With the movie the Dark Knight, Right, The
Joker. Right. Yes. And. And we talked about sort of lion
ising a villain and, and this, the, the, the capacity we have as
a modern culture for lionizing, quite frankly, evil
and, and making that seem like it's complicated and full of gray
area and blah, blah, blah. Okay.
When you talk about word and honor, I think of
the line from the Joker in the Dark Knight where he
says, I'm a man of my word. And then, of course, he lit half
the money on fire with. That the mobsters stole,
you know, or that he stole from the mobsters. Right. Or for them. Well, no,
he actually stole it from them. And then. And then, you know, tried to, you
know, extort them with it. And he only set fire to his half.
Right. Because he was a man of his word. He did
everything that he said he was going to do. This also reminds
me of the line in.
It's. Either it's. I think it's Eli Weisel's night where
Eli Wisel. Or it might have been in Viktor Frankl and Man search for meaning.
I think it was man search for meaning. Yeah. Where Victor Frankl was in the
concentration camps underneath. In the Nazi concentration
camps. Right. And he was talking with a prisoner
and a fellow prisoner, and the fellow prisoner said to him,
there's only one person I believe
where. I believe they will do what they say, and that's. That's Hitler, because he's
done everything that he said he was going to do.
Okay.
We don't talk too much about honor. To your point, you
framed it exactly correctly. We don't talk about honor very much
anymore in our society and culture. But
honor, the need for honor as social glue still
shows up in the form of
washing the dishes in the back or tightening the screws on the
engine. Right,
let's do a brief jog about honor. How do we regain honor in
our society and culture? How do we do that? How do we.
I'm not saying how do we. I don't know that we can get back to
Tatanke Yotake level of honor. I don't think we can get back there.
Or if we could get back there, it would take something
happening in our society and culture that would be apocalyptic to get us back there.
Yeah, agree. And I don't think any of us want to experience that. I don't
think any of us want to shepherd that in or want to usher that in.
So between apocalyptic,
between apocalyptic dystopia and wonderful utopia,
there's got to be a middle ground somewhere. How do we hit the
middle ground on honor? How do we teach our children to behave honorably in a
world where, where because of the Internet and social media, talk is
cheap? Well, I, I
think, I think that, I think the answer to that question lies
in the question itself. And, and we've talked about this on this podcast more than
once. You just asked. Think about the way you phrase that question.
How, how do we teach our children about honor? I think
that's where the foundation needs to start. The, the fact that we're not
talking to our children. I don't. Nobody does it
anymore. Nobody teaches their children
how to shake hands.
Look people in the eye when you say something, you have to believe it.
Like, nobody. We don't talk to our kids about this anymore. You know why? Because
when they get too much, you just put them in front of this thing and
you walk away. Yeah. So the people that are teaching our kids
about morals and guidance and, and ethics
and make sure they're watching the right shows, guys. Because
if they're watching the wrong shows, they're not learning the right morals. That's,
that's the, that's a big problem. It's a big problem for me. It's a big
problem watching this. I have a three year old
grand niece. Like, she's my nephew's daughter and she's,
she's, fortunately for me, she's a, she's a very big part of my life. My
nephew brings her over all the time. We love her to death. It's like kind
of like a grandchild to me. Right? Only it's my, my grand niece.
But like, but when we talk to him about,
like, why is she on the screen so much? She's three years old. Why does
she have a phone in her hand? Like, why aren't you just spending time? And
he's a single dad, so it's like he goes, I only have so much time
in the day. Like, I have to do things around the house. I have to
do that. Like, And I get that. I do. But,
but at some point, to, to your point, how do we get this?
We have. We have to start taking ownership of our own kin,
so to speak, right? Like, yeah, yeah. And by the way, that this is
another. This is another component of this that I think is a big deal. Today's
parents are not as willing to allow.
Do you remember the whole phrase, it takes a village to raise a child
that doesn't exist anymore? It's, it's my child.
Don't tell my child what to do. Don't correct my child. Don't. Like, they
don't allow the general population. Now, granted,
I'm not saying to let any random stranger go correct you. I'm not
saying that. But there's something to be said,
and I'll give you an example of exactly what I'm talking about. I was
so, in part of our community, we were, we were at an event. It was,
it was a cultural event, and I was there with a
couple of our people, and they had younger kids there. I think one was
five or six, and one was eight or nine, maybe ten, something like that.
And guilty. I got
them riled up. I'm the age of a grandparent. I feel like
that's my responsibility to take young kids and get them all riled
up and, like, get them, you know, active and actionable and, like, doing all these
things. So anyway, so we were, we were just kind of going a little crazy,
and I looked at his dad and I said, I'm sorry. This is all
my fault. I got them all round up. And his dad said, no problem. I
get it. Like, that's, that's no worries. Okay?
So then I looked at the two boys, and there was two young boys, by
the way. So that's probably the other reason why they were all going crazy. I
mean, they were going nuts and anyway. But I looked at them both and I
went, all right, guys, hey, hey, hey, hey. All right, enough, enough. You guys are
getting a little out of control. You need to calm down. And I went to
the dad and I said, hey, I'm really sorry, but I just kind of like,
I, I, I calmed them down. I told him to stop and stuff. And the
guy's like, the dad was like, that's your responsibility as
the elder. Like you, I Have no problem with this. Which doesn't happen
anymore. Like, I. I remember. I remember I was in a
supermarket. My best friend and I were in a supermarket. We were getting some
groceries for a cookout or whatever. There was this little boy, probably about five or
six, and he was like, whacking his mom. Whacking her. Mom, mom,
mom, don't do that. He's just being a little brat, right? So
my friend walks over to the little boy and he's like, hey, don't. Don't hit
your mom. Like, that's not nice. And the mother looks at him. She's like, who
the hell are you to say to talk to my kid like that? The guy
looks at my. My friend, three Hawks looks at her and goes, hit her
once for me. And he walked away. Like, what?
Like I like. So. So. Do you see what I'm saying? Do you see what
I'm saying? Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Behind. It takes a village.
As long as it is your village, why are you hesitant to allow
an elder to correct your child or point them in the right direction or
do. Or. Or. Or tell them they're not doing the right thing? Like
it's. It should be everybody's responsibility that you
like and that you trust. Like again, your circle of influence. I'
about letting the general public correct. By the way, I'm also
not talking about allowing people to. With corporal
punishment or anything. Like, I'm not talking about that. So let's just be. Let's just
be realistic of what I mean by this, because there's last
example. I'll just give you one more example. Yeah, go ahead. We go to powwow,
right? So my kid. My kids were little. When my kids were little, they,
they. The. The general rule of thumb was if you are on the powwow
field, I don't care where you are. Like, so, you know, like, if you're out
with your kids and you say something like, as long as I can see you
and you can see me, we're okay. Yeah, we didn't even care if we could
see them as long as they stayed on the powwow field. We were good with
this. We didn't care where they were, who they were talking to or anything because
we knew we had so many people with eyes on them that nothing was going
to happen. And by the way, if they did something wrong, we
would know about it before they ever got back to us, right? So
like if an elder had to growl at them or if, If a.
If somebody that we, whatever. If something happened, like they did something
stupid, whatever, and they had it. They got growled at by one of our elders
or one of our, our even a contemporary that somebody that we liked and
trusted, like somebody that, you know, that was just family, whatever. But if we got
wind of that, they were, they were nervous coming back to us because they
knew that we already knew what they did wrong. And
the fact that an elder had to growl at them, they were even in more
trouble than if we just found out they did it. But that stuff
doesn't exist anymore. Like even in, even in,
like, even in communities that it like. Okay, so
outside of the native communities, I know that there are other communities that have similar.
Oh yeah. Similar circumstances. Your, your,
you know, you're especially the Southern Baptist group of people
like my, My dad, My dad was. Belonged to a Southern Baptist church. And if
a, if a pastor or somebody up had to give you a quick pap
upside the head, my dad, you deserved
it. And by the way, you'd get another smack from your parent
because the pastor had to give you a dad. You know what I mean? Like,
but even those environments now are less likely to stop for
stuff like that to happen. And I think that's a big problem. I think, I
think we need to stop this BS about like,
this thing is not your life and like this thing should not be raising
our children. Like. And so again, I think the problem lies in
just the way that you asked the question, like, how do we teach our kids
about honor and about. Listen, you have to take
an active role as a parent and teaching your kid what honor means, what
integrity is, the definitions of them, the actions of them, what
it looks like, how it's supposed to present itself to the world, the. How you
supposed to present yourself to the world. I don't care if you don't have a
single dollar in your pocket. Your word is still worth something to me. If you
are, if you have integrity, like, if you're, if you're an integral person,
I don't care how much money you have. That money is irrelevant to me.
At the end of the day, the only thing that's valuable
to your point. Actually, no, you know what?
I'll go to Jay Z my balls. And my word is all I have.
Yes. I'll give you another one last example that I think is very
valid here. There's a homeless guy by, by a store that I frequent
and I watched a guy walk in the, in the store. And the homeless guy
asked him, he's like, hey bud, you Know, do you have any spare change? And.
And the guy just basically looked at him, ignored him, and walked in the store,
right? Sure. Another person was in front of me, and I was in the parking
lot. So I was walking up to the door, another guy walked up. Hey, hey,
buddy. Actually, he's like, hey, brother, you know, you have a little bit change, whatever.
The guy's like, listen, I don't carry cash anymore. I'm really sorry. And walked right
by him. Like, at least he acknowledged him. When I came up to the door,
the guy was like, hey, buddy, you having a little change? And I went, I
don't carry change, but what do you need the money for? And
he goes, I just, I really could use a drink. I go, what if I
bought you the drink because I don't carry cash? I can get you a drink.
Would that be okay for you? I was like, oh, my God, that would be
amazing. What would you like? Gatorade. Any preference in
color? He's like, no, I don't care. No, no, I don't. No, no. And I
was like, okay. You sure? He's like, yeah. He goes, well, if they have blue,
he's like, I don't want to be picky. Like, you're doing me a favor. I
don't want to be. If they got blue, I'll get it. If they don't, I'll
just get whatever they have. Great. Come out. And I, I, I found these little.
It was like a six pack of Gatorade for like three bucks. And I
bought him and I handed it to him. You would have thought I gave this
guy a million flipping dollars because everybody else that he's asking for
money thinks that he's going to go spend it on drugs. They already have an
assumption of what he's doing with the money, and they're never going to give him
money because they don't want to. They don't want to contribute to the delinquency of
it. Right. Instead of actually taking a half a second and
asking the guy a couple of questions, which I did. And again, I'm not suggesting
I'm a saint. I was like, this guy, it just didn't look like somebody like
that to me. It just looked like somebody who was down on his luck that
just, he presented as well, he was articulate when he
spoke. He like, like, it just felt like to me, like it was somebody who
just happened to be homeless and not somebody was like the run of
them, like the, the run of the sewage person or whatever the hell you want.
To call it the fact that this man had the integrity to answer
my question, told me that he was gonna buy it for. For. He was
just. He was just looking for a drink. And I asked, what kind of drink?
And he said, just a Gatorade. And I was like, well, what if I buy
it? And he was like, oh, my God, that would be amazing. Like, he never
hesitated to be like, well, at the register, you can always ask for
cash back. Like, he. It was never anything. It was never about the money.
Right? That. To me, that man, that homeless man,
showed me more integrity and honor than half the people I meet on
a regular basis. So we're going to get back
to the book in a minute, but I want to. There's one other point I
want to make, and I think it's valuable in what you said about the homeless,
in your story there, that you related about the homeless man and about the Gatorade
during times of chaos, social chaos,
moral chaos, economic chaos,
cultural chaos, which I assert, we've been in for the last
25 years. I think. I think it's slowly coming to
a close. I absolutely do. That's why I do the podcast in the way that
I do it. I think we're slowly coming to a close with this a. Because
chaos is exhausting, and people are
genuinely, I think, psychologically and spiritually exhausted. They
don't know why they're exhausted. This is why we're. This is why the. We're
the country with the highest amount of diagnosed
anxiety and depression. Because depression is just anxiety turned inward. It's
just anger and fear turned inward. And then anxiety is just the outward
expression of inner. Inner fear and anger.
Where does fear and anger come from? It comes from a sense of chaos, a
feeling of being out of control. Most SSRIs, you know, out of any
country in the world are consumed. In the United States of America, diagnosed to
consume in the United States of America. Goes along with our fentanyl
addiction, by the way, folks. It's all part of the Same
fentanyl opioid SSRIs,
all part of the same thing. And we're finally, by the way, getting the.
Getting the guts up as a society in America to actually say this stuff out
loud, which means we're now on the road to actually
fixing the problem. Right? Okay. One of the ways you fix the problem
is through, to Tom's point, reestablishing the
bonds of family,
culture, or not culture, sorry, family, community,
and traditions. And
community, which is the part that Tom's talking about
community. Only happens in high trust environments. The
powwow field is a high trust environment. What you've described, right.
My church, you know, the church that I went to in New York,
the church we're currently in the middle of a church search right now this summer.
It's just as terrifying and anxiety ridden as you could
possibly imagine. Well, we came out of one community
and now we're trying to get into another community and we're trying to find, we're
trying to find which community is going to be high trust. Right. For sure.
And you know, the, the church communities that I've been a part of, I've
always said to people, if you see my kid doing something, because I can't be
there 247 if you see my kid doing something,
correct. My child say stop
that if it's, if it's something that is not what they should be
doing and you know, they shouldn't be doing it. Now a lot of people don't
take me seriously on this because to your point, they have the vision of the
lady in their head that's being hit by the five year old. Right? Right. So
it takes a little while for them to take you seriously, but the second you
open, not the second, but after a little while, once that door is open
and you don't turn out to be a growling maniac. As a parent every time
your kid is corrected and you, and you recognize that you see your child as
a human being with foibles the same way every other human
being has foibles. And your kid's not perfect.
It's just a work in progress. And I just say it, it's just a work
in progress like everybody else. Is it in progress? Okay.
Okay. Now there will be correction when the child
screws up, but again, this requires high trust.
In high trust environments, that works.
One of the key things that goes away during times of chaos is trust. And
it becomes really hard to reestablish that.
And so what you're left with, to your point about the homeless person is
low trust. Like those three reactions you had before you walked up.
Those are all low trust reactions. All of them. I
don't trust this person. I'm more suspicious of this person.
I'm more protective of myself. I don't have the
thing that this person needs because I've made an assumption in my brain about
what this person needs. And I don't trust enough myself or the
other person to ask these questions. These are all signs of low trust society.
And I also think there's, there's Some added. So I
purposefully did not talk about race in this, in that story. Absolutely
not. I don't think, I don't think that's relevant at all actually to what you're
talking about. But, but I do think it's relevant and in a small sense
because of that whole like that, that judgmentalness
that happens, that is not blatant racism, but
it's still there. That's underlying tones, things.
That was part of it too. And again, I purposely left that out because
quite honestly, I didn't give a crap that the guy was not my race. It
didn't matter to me. And again, you notice I'm still not, I'm avoiding telling you
what the race was on purpose. Correct. Right. Well, and I think to me
it. Didn'T matter, but to everybody else I, I think it did matter. That's what
I think. What I. Why, why I brought it up because I think there was.
That was a component of it that. Well, that mistrust
was a component of it, of the, of the race. The race. So in low
tr. Well, and in low trust societies,
you see that. And, and one of the. It's interesting that we're having this
conversation now because one of the conversations I've had, I've had recently with somebody
on a different project that I'm involved in was really
focused around. Well, not focused around one of the questions that he has been
asking myself or that we've been exploring in this, this project that I'm
working on is how do you real establish how do you reestablish
cultural institutions? How do you reestablish trust in cultural institutions? Right.
And he made the comparison
to cultures in northern Europe, right. Like Finland or Sweden or
Denmark. And I said, well, those three cultures have something
that's remarkably in common that we don't. So that's why
they're not necessarily a false comparison, but not an apples to
apples comparison.
Those societies in general tend to be highly
homogenous racially and ethnically,
highly homogenous culturally, and their populations
tend to be small, smaller, significantly smaller than the
population of the United States of America. That I said, what you get here is
a multi ethnic, multiracial society
that is not homogenous, that is spread over a large geographic
area with a lot of people. And I said
part of the challenge of reestablishing social
institutions is going to be how do you
reestablish social cohesion? And the only
ways to reestablish social. Not the only, but the beginning of the ways to
reestablish social cohesion are to build, to build
trust starting in. And this is the hard work that no one wants to hear.
But starting in families and then communities
and then moving up, you can't start at the top, which is what everybody wants
to do. Everybody wants a government program. You cannot start at the top.
You have to start with, quite frankly, Tom Libby.
You've got to start with Hassan Sorrells. You got to start with us
and how we raise our families. And, and to the point about the smoking of
the pipe, that was a way of establishing that this person
not only was the big dog on the battlefield, let's be real, as the kids
would say these days, that was a major flex. I believe the kids are still
saying that. I don't know what the kids
are saying, but I think, I think they're saying that. But
it was also a way of establishing that
this person was someone who was
trustworthy. And trustworthy, of course, means
worthy of being trusted, which honor goes
along with that. So does appropriate judgment. So
does all of the other things that, that we've talked about. So
these, these things all link together in a, in a virtuous circle. And I think,
in answer to my own question, I think the way that you re. Establish honor
or you teach people to establish honor is you have to do it in families.
You have to be, you have to be a person of your word.
And by the way, the tip that I would give is, if you can't be
a person of your word, never give your word. Right?
Right. Just don't give your word or rarely give your
word. Or when you give it, move heaven and
earth to commit to that thing and tell your kids you're
moving heaven and earth to commit to that thing
and let your yes be your yes. As it says in the New Testament,
your yes be your yes and your no be your no. You know, and that
in and of itself turns you into a trustworthy person. Right. Like so,
like, if you never give your word or the very, very
few times you do, you fulfill it, then
that, that, like that, that's becomes your legacy. Right?
Oh, can I, can I trust Tom's word? Oh, for sure. Because if he,
he doesn't give his word lightly, and if he does, he's going to, like, he
never, he doesn't throw his, that's not something he throws around. I, I remember.
So my kids were told when I was, when they were very young that
I, I, I am not a gambler. I do not gamble. I don't like
gambling. I Don't like the risk of, well, let's face it, I
don't like the risk of losing money, but I don't like the risk of losing
face either. So gambling, even gambling on, you
know, on a gentleman's bet, so to speak, is not my thing.
So my, my kids always grew up. Like if they had, if, if we had
some sort of disagreement and I looked at them and I said, do you want
to make a bet? They would immediately stop because they knew I would
not say that unless I was not 50 or 70.
No, I was a hundred percent sure I was right.
Because I don't gamble. I won't gamble with. And I won't gamble with my word.
So if I ever said to somebody, you want to bet?
I'll bet right now. I'll bet whatever you want to bet. I don't care what
it is. I'll make a bet with you. And they'll go, well, I know Tom
doesn't gamble, so he's got to be right. I'm not betting. I'm not taking that
bet.
So, you know, and you might as. Well, you might as well take your wallet
out of your pocket and just give him the money. Just give it money already.
And whether it was fact checking something that I said and you know, again, as
my kids got older and they had access to the Internet and, you know,
and, and again, knowing who I am, you'll get this more than the problem the
listeners do. But like, is this plant edible? Or can I use this for
a bow string or whatever? And I would say, yes. No, don't do that. Don't.
Then they'll be like, oh, I, I read somewhere on, on Google that I can
do that. I'm like, all right, well,
I don't think so. I'll bet you. I'll bet you on it, my son. I
never mind. I don't want. Never mind. No, no, no.
You heard it here first. Tom Libby is better than Google on some things. Oh,
no, no, I don't know about better than Google. But again, you got to remember
when kids, again, my kids are all adults now, so when Google in his
infancy, you had to be really cautious
how you asked it a question. And like today's Google is very different.
Like, it's very different. So it's not, it wasn't the same thing.
Yeah, they said, I read on Google. It really meant Google showed me a
website. I have no idea how credible the website is. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's so it's, it's not something today. It's some schmuck
somewhere. Yeah, well, it's, it's kind of like, it's kind of like the, the thing
we're currently going through with the LLMs. Absolutely. Yeah. It's, it's. We're
just, we're just at the beginning of another revolution now. Look at that. All right,
all right, so I want to talk about
the Lakota and the Battle of Greasy. Of the Greasy
Grass. Okay, so let's talk a
little about this because this is the battle that
precipitated, I guess is the best word to use the
movement of the Lakota in,
in, in the United States, in the Dakotas actually,
into, into Canada. Right. And then going back and forth from
the Canadian border, or not from the Canadian border, but crossing
the U.S. canadian border. Right. Going back and forth
in order to avoid, not only to avoid the US Cavalry but also to
avoid being imprisoned in
a military prison and eventually sent
to a reservation.
This battle began that process. So let's pick up
in the book Sitting Bull, his life and legacy, the Battle of the Greasy Grass.
Want to read a few pieces here? Custer. And yes, that would be the
Custer that you are thinking of, ladies and gentlemen. Custer assigned Captain
Frederick Benteen 350 men and set them to circle to the
west of the Lakota camp. He assigned Major Marcus Renault
175 men and ordered them to approach from the south. Custer took the remaining
225 men to attack from the east.
Renault was the first to engage the Lakota when he charged the Hunk Papa camp.
The first volley from his troops killed Chief Gaul's two wives and
his two daughters. The Hunkapapa warriors were quick
to react though and repelled the attack. Renault ordered his troops to
dismount at the edge of the tree line and form a skirmish line. Standing next
to his re scout, Bloody Knife, Renault prepared for the upcoming battle.
Then a bullet from a Lakota rifle struck Bloody Knife in the head. Blood
and brains splattered all over Renault's head and clothes. Dazed and horrified, Renault called
for an all out retreat back across the river to the top of the hill.
And there he waited for Benteen to
reinforce him. Meanwhile, Custer led his
225 men under the COVID of deep ravine to the eastern edge of
and you will not be surprised to hear this folks, the Little Bighorn River.
On the western side of the river, some young warriors were engaged in retrieving their
horses. They spotted the column of soldiers on the east side of the river getting
ready to cross. The warriors were armed with rifles and started firing at this new
troop of long knives. They picked off the first two riders in the
file. The next two long knives reached out and picked up one of the fallen
troopers, and the whole column turned and fled. The route was
on. As they attempted to read the top of the highest point to the northeast,
a bluff now known as last stand
hill, Taka Iotaki began preparing
himself to join the battle. He was ridding his favorite horse when his aged mother
stopped him. She pointed out that he did not have to fight because he did
not have anything more to prove to the people. She reminded him that he had
two wives and small children to take care of. Since he was now a mature
man of 45 years, he could lead the younger. He could
let the younger warriors prove their worth by protecting the camp and defending the people.
Pause. I'm 45 this year.
Tom is not. Tom's a different age.
Let me tell you this. Right now, my brain were in that situation. I'm
mounting up in front of my horse and I'm leaving.
And my mother's in her 70s. She would probably say the same thing. And I
would probably ignore my mother, too. I
probably would. I would probably. I'd be like, okay, I'm going back. I'm a little
older than 45, and I'm still with you, so I'm going.
Where's my horse? Thank you. I've been advised.
Where's my horse is the equivalent of hold my beer. There you go. Right? Exactly
like we're getting. That's. They. They. We.
They are coming here, and I would love to accommodate these people. They seem to
want to have a fight. They seem to be very enthusiastic
in the Lakota culture. So back to the book. In Lakota culture, the wisdom of
women was much respected and admired. Tatanka Iatake was
a chief of the Lakota nation and leader of the midnight strong heart society. With
many coups as a sash bearer, Yeti had the ultimate respect for his mother's
advice. He accepted her wisdom and bowed to her
wishes by not participating in the battle. Instead, he guided the vulnerable non
combatants to a safe place. Okay, that's the difference between
him and me. The long knives were attempting to reach the highest point of the
ridge. Gaul was leading a group of warriors in pursuit when crazy horse and abandoned
Lakota came up over the top of the ridge and cut off the retreat. Two
moons and the Cheyenne warriors were coming in on the flanks. The shrill of the
eagle bone whistle was just as loud as the constant sound of gunfire. The
warriors are praying for Help and guidance from the spirits by blowing through their eagle
bone whistles. When the battle began, a young
warrior was eager to join the fight. In count Ku, he had three good ponies,
so he chose his favorite to ride into battle. He handed his weapons to a
friend to hold while he caught the pony throwing a rope around its neck. He
tried to mount, but the pony was excited too. It shied and ran around in
a circle at the edge of the halter rope with the young warrior chasing behind.
By the time he managed to catch the horse and mount, the battle was over.
His brave plans to count coup on the enemy had disappeared while he
had tried catching his horse. As one warrior said after the
battle, quote, the fight with the long knives lasted as long
as a hungry man eats his meal. Close quote.
I love that it was over very quickly.
The fact that Long Hair Custer was present was unknown to Tataka
Iotaka or any of the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors. Custer had cut
his hair short and was dressed in the usual cavalry uniform rather than his flamboyant
trademark buckskins. Unbeknownst to the Lakota
warriors who had fired on the long knives at the river's edge, one of the
two shoulders shot was Custer. We're going to talk about that
in a minute. He had been wounded, and his men tried to protect and care
for him. Custer was one of the first to fall at the Battle of
Greasy Grass. Now I'm going to go
to the end here. The victory celebrations were held in all areas
of the large camp. There was much feasting and dancing, but it did not bring
joy to Tatanka Itaka. He was again in mourning for his son and
saddened for the actions of the people. They had taken the spoils of battle, and
in doing so, the people cursed their descendants.
They would suffer under the Wasuku's
laws, rules, and policies. The most devastating was when the Wasuku
government created a law making it illegal for the Lakota people to live
in the ancient spiritual way of life. Everyone had freedom of
religion in this country except the indigenous
people.
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
Just on the face of it, just on the face of the fact of. Of
the statement, not. Not giving it more weight or less weight than.
Than anything else. Now, of
course, the question becomes,
why would you not allow freedom of religion? What are you
actually afraid of? Because that's the more important question
than anything else. And I think it's important
to realize that in the 1870s, in
a post Civil War America, most people don't realize this in
a post Civil War America where
no where in every, in every historical cycle,
except for the historical cycle that was around the Civil War, there are typically three
generations, right? So there's an older generation or four
generations, actually, there's an older generation. There are usually two
maintenance generations, one older, one younger, and then there's a younger
generation, right? And that's how the cycle begins. Again, this is a historical
cycle you can track back, honestly, throughout Western history, all the way
back to like the 16th century. But you can track it
just in human society back to the Greeks and actually even back to the Romans.
The Romans even noticed, noted this during the Civil War,
however, in the United States of America,
that that third maintenance generation was
actually ground out. It was actually ground out in the battles of
Antietam and Gettysburg and in all those
places. And it was ground out by the two older generations
that were screaming for the blood, the blood of
retribution around slavery or states
rights or abolition or whatever. So
two generations ground out a third, and
they ground out a third, marching quite frankly to the drum
of religion. The kind of
religion that in our post World War II, postmodern,
secular mindset, we don't really understand. We don't really understand.
Even religious people these days, even Christians these days don't understand how deeply
Christian people were back in the day.
And we don't understand. So we don't appreciate
why the Native Americans
and the Native peoples were deprived of their religion.
Because back then the dominant society
understood very deeply the power of
religion, whether we understand it or not, is actually an
irrelevancy. They got it and that's why
they banned it. I am not saying that this was a good thing
or bad thing. I'm merely pointing this out as a historical fact.
By the way, just so that, you know, it wasn't just the Native
Americans that were deprived of freedom of religion. It was also the African Americans that
were deprived of freedom of religion, as were the
Irish when they showed up a little bit later. They were deprived of, not
deprived of, but they were severely curtailed in their Catholicism
and the Italians were also severely
curtailed in the practicing of their Catholicism.
Let's not, let's not forget one of the. One of the races that
were suppressed probably more than. I wouldn't say more
than any of us, but it goes under the radar
quite a bit. Is that the Chinese influence in, in the United States
during that time frame and how much they were suppressed and, and
really not given. They were definitely not given religious freedom either?
Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. They were allowed to build the
railroads and shut up. Yeah, exactly.
So we have to, we have to sort of put these things
in the appropriate context of
the times in which people. People lived
and the things in which they believe. Doesn't mean that we have to adopt these
beliefs. It just means we have to put them in the context of it so
that we understand it. So with that being said in the Battle of the
Greasy Grass occurring, what
was the big, I guess, lesson for
the Lakota that came out of this battle and the
subsequent things? We'll talk a little bit about this in our next section here as
we sort of wind down. But what were the big lessons that the Lakota
learned from. From this, from this battle?
Well, I think the, the. One of the biggest.
Well, first of all, the lesson. One of the lessons is,
is very guerrilla like warfare, right? Meaning, like, you know
this area better than anybody else, so you have an advantage.
This is where the whole term home field advantage comes from, right?
And that, and that no one person is bigger than
the group. So the fact that Custer always felt
he was superior and always thought that he always had the upper hand
because he had numbers and technology and all this other stuff
didn't matter. When you have, when you have the quote,
unquote, the home field advantage on, on your side and the,
the, that whole, the whole thought process
of, of, you know, we are stronger together than we are
apart, right? So the, the idea that they're separating their, their
battalion natives didn't do that. We were able to fight. Like, I just think
that there was a lot of lessons to be learned. And again, you can look
back, there's a lot, there's a lot of written
content and contextual references
to literally that particular Native
battle and subsequent battles afterwards
and how our military leaders viewed a battlefield,
right? Like whether it was Eisenhower or, you know,
Patton, like a lot of those guys were taught about,
about those battles because some of the, some of the military,
and even to this day, they say that Sitting Bull was probably one of the
best military leaders ever, right? Because
knowing your people, knowing where they should be, knowing how to manip.
How to manually. How to manipulate. Not manipulate,
how to maneuver them. Sorry. Being able to
maneuver people in, in massive quantities all at once
and structure the, the battle and the
battle just played out exactly the way they expected it to, right? Like having
that predictive analytical brain, not necessarily predictive analytics
the way we think of them today, but having that mental capacity to be able
to say, I'm looking at this thing as a whole and how to do that.
Now, a lot of that went away with a very
particular invention that was not readily
available to natives and that the wars of the west, so to speak.
So from 1870 to 1890, when they basically concluded,
which was the Gatling gun. Right. So being able to, instead of having
rifles that you're caulking and shooting and reloading, you know, 12
bullets or eight bullets at a time, whatever it was, and then shooting, out
comes this military technology that just says,
we're just going to spin this wheel and we're going to shoot a thousand bullets
in a matter of minutes. That, that really just changed the
landscape of the west, because if that gun was never invented, I think we might
be living in a different time. I think. I think things would be a little
bit different. But there was no way for anybody to compete against that. Like,
you know, this wasn't. I mean, we literally had
warriors on horseback with bows and arrows that can shoot arrows almost
as fast as a gun, as a person could shoot a six gun. Right. Like,
so they're going, bam, bam, bam. You're going
like, I, I understand the gun was faster. I'm not suggesting it was, but
the speed in which we could shoot arrows was he. Like, it was
essentially a fair fight at that point. Right. So it was more about
military strategy and positioning and how you could maneuver things.
And once that Gatling gun came in, it was pretty much the end of the,
the war in the west, so to speak. And, and even, even cannons,
by the way, because somebody would, Somebody had said to me one time recently,
well, what about cannons? Because cannons, you shoot that cannonball, and it's.
Right. Remember what the cannonball did at that point in history? It just
basically went through. It did not explode. Like we think of
AS missiles and RPGs and stuff like that today. Right. Like, you fire
an rpg. Yes. It launched, it hits a building, blows up the building. A
cannonball would have just went right through the building. Like, it wouldn't blow up
the building. Right. It would just go right through. So, yes, if you have a
field of people, you could take out a, a straight line of people
with one cannonball. Sure. But if you
know that cannonball is coming and you just move 6 inches to the left
or 6 inches to the right, you're safe. With a Gatling
gun, that didn't happen. You could literally spray and pray.
Right. Like, you just literally spray the field and you could take out
dozens and dozens and dozens of people, whether they move 6 inches left or right
or not. It didn't Matter, Right. So I think, I think to your point,
what we learned like on that battlefield was that
we, we had, we had power. We had power. As long as we stood
together, we could beat the U.S. cavalry. If we stood together, if
we had enough numbers and we matched them one for one, we could win. As
a matter of fact, there were other battles before greasy grass
that you'd, you'd learn about, you know, 40
native warriors taking out a hundred U. S.
Cavalrymen. Those battles actually happened again, home field advantage.
We knew the area better. We knew how to, we know where and when to
pop up and how to get from point A to point B without being seen
and all this stuff. That was easy. So as long as we stood together and
we can coordinate, we can coordinate through the, the,
the playing field, we would be okay between the Gatling gun and the,
the telegraph, those two things, because again, we didn't have a way to communicate
with each other outside of messengers, but these guys
were able to communicate from fort to fort with telegraph. So those two inventions
alone literally changed the way the west was won,
so, so to speak. Right. So, so it
becomes a thing where. And, and by the way, the, his entire history of
warfare is a technology gets invented
and then, you know, somebody gets basically the
enemy, whoever the enemy is on either side of that technology, that
technological advance, the enemy is
surprised or the enemy is, is shocked, the enemy's taken
aback. And then they, they, they either steal the technology
and try to use it for themselves, or they ignore the technology
and go about their business, or they
try to overcome that technology with some technology of
their own. We're seeing this currently with the Ukrainian and Russian war. I
mean, the use of drones in that war is going to
set the tone for the next 25 years of warfare.
We are now entering the period of drone warfare.
Do you still need a human being on the ground, boots on the ground, to
occupy a space? Absolutely. For sure, a robot
won't be able to do it, an LLM won't be able to do it, and
a drone won't be able to do it, but you could sure as hell use
those tools. And again, we're seeing this in the Ukrainian Russian war.
You can surely use those tools to
advance tactically and logistically across
a battlefield space, including, by the way, cyberspace and
information space. Right? To dominate that. Talking about the telegraph,
that's, that's the beginning of domination of the information space. And so you can
dominate the information space, you can dominate the cyberspace, and you can dominate the
physical space, particularly with drones, then you can just move
your people in. And now you have less. But this is again, this is,
this is what's going to end. There will be, there will be responses to that.
You know, and we've mentioned this several times in this podcast,
Hasan, the more things change, the more things stay the same, right? It's like so
the Gatling gun, telegraph. Then we moved into World War I with
the, the tanks and everybody was like, what the hell's a tank? And then all
of a sudden the tanks winning wars and then World War II, it becomes
nuclear. Although I would argue even before the nuclear
there were some advanced technologies that were playing the game. When it came to,
you know, air, you know, dogfights in the
air and stuff like that. There was some technological advances that were starting to
put an advantage to one side or the other before the, even nuclear. But
then after, after that came stealth, stealth
technology. And then after stealth came. But to your point, it's every
war and conflict, it's, it's, there's something that pops up
that says, well, so now we know who's going to win this war. Like
it's just, like, it just happens like that, right? Like we, like, we know, we
know and then. Exactly. You know, there's other so. And, and
there. So. Yeah, so. So I think.
Did we learn something from greasy grass? Yes, I think it was short lived though.
And I think the reason it was short lived because of those technology advances that
we had on the other side of the coin. And we were so adamant about
staying true to our tradition and culture that we weren't worried about the technological
advances. No, that didn't mean we didn't trade for guns. I guess we went and
trade for. Right. Oh yeah, that seemed normal. It seemed like it was
like, you know, we can shoot guns from a, from the horseback. So it seemed
normal when once we started using or seeing weapons that came without
horseback, it didn't seem normal to us. So we just kind of kept
to your point. We just kind of kept doing what we're doing and tried to
use our advantages to our advantage, which would have been element of surprise, knowing
the landscape, like all that stuff would have still given us at least a slight
advantage in, in, in skirmishes, but not
necessarily in the overall war. Well, and I was having a conversation
with somebody and then we'll go back to the book here for our last segment.
So I was having a conversation with somebody a couple weeks ago
and I had to sort of remind them that, that
the west didn't really quote Unquote, close, such as it
were, until the 1920s or even the 1930s
in this country and that.
And. And they sort of. Because they're not from America, so they sort of made
the leap. They went, oh, so you guys are still a young
country? And I said,
well, okay. I mean, that. That's short. That's one way
of interpreting that. That's. I guess that's one interpretation among many interpretations.
Sure, you could say that. Yeah. From
a continental
landmass, sort of, for lack of a better
term, ownership perspective. Sure. Okay. Or unification perspective.
Sure. Okay. Yeah. You can. You can say that I
tie that idea deeper into,
you know, the current challenges that we are having with our.
Our. And I think this is also part of what's at the root of our
anxiety and depression, our boredom, because there's. There's.
If we're not going to fight somebody else, we're going to fight each other. And
we get real bored real quick. We saw this with COVID with people. Like, people
were bored. Like, literally a month after lockdowns, the
riots started because people were bored. They got to the end of Netflix
to a previous conversation we were having court. Like, people got
to the end of Netflix within like a month. And then they were done. And
they were like, get me the heck out of here. I need to go. This
is. I mean, this is. This is. This is. This is the
strain. This is a combination of the strain of Patrick Henry and
like, all the people that push west off the East Coast. It's.
It's that. It's that. That cussedness that
I live up in the Great Smoky Mountains. Don't come bother me, Ness. Like,
it's. It's all of that. And you could only lock that up in a
bottle for so long or narcotize it with.
With drugs or bad food or the chemicals in the food
or TV or pornography or stock quotes
or whatever the distractions are. You can only bottle that. That thing up for so
long before Americans will do in general,
one of two things. They will either turn on themselves, which
we have done that in the past, or we will turn on each other. We
will figure out reasons to fight each other. And I think that's
fundamental to.
Well, I think of the bit from. I think I sent this to you
on July 4th. The bit from Bill Murray and Stripes. Right? That
whole bit and stripes. We're mongrels. We're the
worst of every single country came here. We were the people that
could not get along the other countries. Like, no, you got to Go. You got
to get out. You can't stay.
Even, Even the ones that came here unwillingly, Even my ancestors that came
here unwillingly, we were brought to the
shore because the slave traders didn't go in. They didn't go into
Africa. Everybody knows this. They stood on the shore and
people were brought out to them. Right? We were brought out to them.
You gotta go. And I'm making a joke about this, but it's.
It's absolutely. I'm the descendant of people who had to leave,
and we all came here. And so because we're
a bunch of mongrels on this continent
and. And Tom's descendants are the only people. He's the
descendant of people who. Well, I mean, you know, they came over Landbridge and then
the land bridge flooded, and then, like, I mean, what are you going to do
for 25,000, 2,500 years, whatever the heck it is, you're just going to hang out,
right? Because how are you going to get back? Right? Like, we walked across.
We're not going to build a boat. It's. It's a big ocean.
That's a lot of. That's a lot of effort. We might as well just stay
here and build the entire civilizations that we could build here.
My point is, people like this, people like us,
you got to give us something to do. You got to give us something
to do. Whether it's manifest destiny, cultural myth,
something. And so this gets to my question, which we actually didn't talk about in
the. In the last episode we did on Sitting Bull, but we mentioned it in
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. We sort of talked about it as a counterfactual
question. But I'm going to ask it again because we always have new listeners, always
have people listening who aren't going to go back and go through the archive. It's
fine. I'm gonna ask the
counterfactual. The Gatling gun shows up.
Okay, I grant you that. That was the Gatling gun and the telegraph. Those were
the two things. If I could build a back to
the future time machine, build a DeLorean, Tom and I are going to go
back. We're going to go back to 1868.
All the warriors, a bunch of AK47s. Exactly. We're going to give
them. No, no, we're going to give them the AK47, so we can't give them
cell phones because the infrastructure doesn't exist. That'd be pointless. But
we're going to give them AK47s and we're going to give them,
I don't know, but we're
gonna, we're gonna explain in the concept of Morse code. That's because that they have
to have the concept first before the technology comes. So we're explaining the concept of
dot, dot, dash and then we're just gonna, we're just gonna come forward now
obviously because of time travel and
creating divergence and we're not gonna come back to the same spot in the timeline.
I might not even exist. You may not even exist. You may not even be
here. Which is the great thing about time travel. My, my 8 year old
boy is now sort of futzing over this in his head. It's fascinating to him.
Would it have worked out differently
between the native tribes and the US cavalry
in the West? This is the counterfactual question. If
everything had been equal, if the technology had been equal,
would it have worked out differently? Would we be living in a different America? Would
we have a mini country like Quebec right inside of our own
country? I mean, I would like to think so. I mean,
obviously this is all speculation. And you can't, it's a counterfactual. Yeah, you
can't, you can't know for sure. But I would, I would like
to think that, I mean think about it right now, like even, like our
least populous state is like South Dakota I believe, right?
Yes. We fought so hard to take the natives out of there, but yet
we didn't really want it. Like we didn't
do anything with. Okay, so like, so if we, I think, I think it
has less to do with, with weaponry and equality than it
has to do with greed. Because let's just say for, for,
let's just say for, for shits and giggles that we did go back in time
and we informed the US Government that there's no gold there,
there's no reset there that you really want. And the government
went, yeah, you're right, never mind, forget it. We're just going to go back down
to San Francisco, right? And we're just going to make a straight line across it.
Even that would have been, I mean, and that wouldn't have been warfare to do
so. That wouldn't have been equal equality in warfare. That would have just been equality
of information. Because the re. One of the
reasons is this whole. They, they push natives
out because they thought there was gold there. They wanted, they wanted the
resource, let's face it, they didn't want land. How many farms
do you see in north and South Dakota that are big enough that can
sustain A significant amount of life. Right. Like not, not
at that part of the upper Midwest. That's not. The winters are too harsh.
The, like, it's, it's. They, they didn't want the land for, for the right
reasons. They wanted, they just wanted access to the, to the, the, the
resources like, like gold and, and timber came later. I
get like, you know, there was some timber things there. But, but again,
if, if you take that equation, take that out of the equation, I think
we would add a very different landscape there and natives wouldn't have been
restricted to these fractions of, of land that
we're, that they're currently restricted to, you know, in the
Dakotas and Montana and that, that area of the country, the upper
Midwest in general. So, and again, like I said, it's not like we have a
lot of Eurocentric people that move there. I mean
if you look at, I, I find the same thing
in the Southwest, by the way. So the areas of like
Nevada and, and south Nevada, Arizona,
New Mexico, where there's still a very heavy native population, where,
I mean, let's face it, a lot of people don't want to live there. It's
hot. It's too dang hot. Like Arizona, Phoenix,
Tucson, it's 120 degrees right now. Why? Well,
one skin, like you don't want this
for yourself, right? So it's like so, so, but, but,
but again we have population there because at one point or another we thought the
resources were there. We were gold, gold mines all over the place down in that
area of the country. So I think that if we said
there's no gold there, you're never going to find gold there. And there
would, there, there would have been, there would have been maybe a couple of pass
through towns, right, Getting to San Francisco.
But even the population density of this country, if you look at it, it's all
on the coastline. Yeah, it's essentially all on the coastline,
including Texas. By the way, if you look the coast, Texas is way more populated
than the inland part of Texas. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. West Texas. West Texas is
a nightmare. I mean, until all my listeners in West Texas. I get it, like
you're living there, you make it a life. It's fine. It's ridiculous.
Anything away from the fact that you love it, you can still love it. It's
fine. You can still love it. It's fine. It's fine. Think about
it. Our country is really settled on the coasts. So I
think if we were, if we were able to get that information to people early
on and said, there's no gold in them. There's like, just stay away from.
I, I think it would have been very different. I don't even think it would
have been. I, I, the, the fighting and the battles and all that stuff. I
just think it would. I don't think it would. It wouldn't been worth it. It
would have been. It would not have been worth it for anybody to fight. Well,
and I wonder if.
So one of the harder ideas that you come to
when you real. When you read the history of native
tribes in America and their engagement not only with the US Government,
but also their engagement with the US Cavalry and
then moving backwards through time into their
relations with the French and the British and then even
the Spanish, who, by the way, just as a side note, the Comanches ran the
Spanish around for 200 years in the American Southwest, and the
Spanish could never conquer those people. Switch to Tom's
point. Partially, it was the weather and the environment and the
desert coming out of Northern Mexico, but it
was also the fact that the Comanche are horse people. And they just,
they just knew if you didn't have a horse, you're dead in the
desert. Well, and they were also a lot more agile, if you think about the
horse, because Spaniards were horse people, too. The conquistadors all were on
horses. Yeah, but not like the Comanche. Right, that's what I'm saying. They were heavily
armored and they were very slow, whereas the command, very agile
on horses. So it was a lot easier for them. It was,
again, a lot easier to maneuver, you know, the territory better. You can get in
and out of places without them seeing you. Like, there's a lot of advantages that
they had. But just remember, the Comanche were horse people because
of the Spaniards. They. The Spaniards were the ones that brought the horses back.
Correct? That's right. That's correct.
And so when you look at the long,
for lack of a better term, sordid history of
European peoples and native
peoples, starting with the decline and fall of
the Aztec empire and Hernando de
Cortez, you know, marching inland after burning the boats,
it is a story of.
And this is the brutal truth. It is the story of civilizational
destruction, Decline and destruction. That's what is the story of.
And it is a. It is a brutal story, and
it is a story that is full of sadness
and tears. Yet
it is a story that, and we talk about this a lot on our podcast,
is a human story because it has been repeated throughout
multiple civilizations and multiple cultures in humanity.
Does that make it right or wrong? No, it merely makes
it a fact how we
learn from it or don't, which is usually the case.
We're going to cover BH Liddell Hart's book. Why don't. His small
book, it's got a yellow cover on my bookshelf called why Don't We Learn from
History. We're going to cover that book on this
podcast. Oh. Oh. Bha Delhart was
a. He was a veteran of World War I, and
he. He was tasked, and I believe he was tasked by the
British, I remember correctly, with designing strategy for World War II based
on his experiences in World War I. I might have that a little. A little
bit squirreled up with him. Might be confusing it with somebody else, but either way,
he was an amateur historian and a military tactician, and
he was constantly frustrated. I do have this correct. He was constantly
frustrated by the lack of people listening to him about the
historical precedents that had been set and the historical
patterns that had been set based upon certain decisions that were made
in the past in various annals of military history, which he
was very well educated about. And people just wouldn't take his advice. And they kept
right on just doing stupid things, stupid stuff that would clearly not work. It
drove him crazy. And so he wrote. He wrote this book,
why Don't We Learn from History? And I love it. I've got. I have a
feeling I'm going to love this. I'm going to love this book.
And we see that playing out here with.
With the Native American tribes. You know, we just. We see this decline of
civilization and this destruction of a civilization. And
I don't know what to say about it other than that. I think you have
to look at it, and I think we have to face it. I think
individuals have to draw their own conclusions based on where they
sit in the boat, quote, unquote, as it were, of the United States. On
this. You know, if you can trace your ancestry back to the Germans
who came over on some boat in the 1880s, after the
Civil War and after the wars of the west, and then
you immediately got into your Conestoga wagon and
drove out to Nebraska,
this may not mean anything to you. If you're the descendants of those folks, it
may not, because you showed up too late.
If you're a person of African American descent listening to this,
and I know many African Americans that struggle with Native
American history, many, because it becomes a
weird race to the bottom on who can compete with being
oppressed the most. The oppression Olympics then kick in
and it's like, okay, what are we doing here?
So you may struggle with this. If you're a person who can trace your
ancestry back to the Puritans or back to
Mayflower or Jamestown or. Or the Plymouth Compact,
you may have a sense of guilt, or you may experience nothing at all.
Or if you are a person who can trace your ancestry back to
folks who came out of Russia in the early 20th
century as part of the immigrant waves that came over from central Europe,
this may have no resonance with you at all.
It may just be a historical thing that just happened. But either
way, we should at least look at it right. That way we can
mark what civilizational decline
actually practically looks like. And that gets me to
the end of this book or close to the end of the
book. And I'm going to
read some pieces. I'm going to kind of jump around a little bit, but
the historical accounts. So I'm going to pick up here. This is going to be.
This chapter is entitled the Murder. The historical accounts of
the death of Tatanka Iotake present us with a narrative that flows smoothly from
point to point, often glossing over some. Some glaring discrepancies.
These accounts are from a single source. Stanley vestal, who in
1930 came to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation to look for the descendants of
Tatana Itake. Wanting to write a biography of Tatanka
Iotake, he interviewed One Bull. The accounts provided by One
Bull are not accurate. One Bull adopted Walter Campbell as his son
so Campbell would not doubt his story. To
make their father more credible, One Bull's daughters fabricated the story that he was adopted
as a son by Tatanka Yutake through the
Hunkaipi Yankee. Yeah. Honkapi ceremony.
No Lakota person would go through the Hanyakopi ceremony with a person who is already
a blood relative. The had acted as
a mentor to his sister's son in the same way that his father's brother, Four
Horrens, had taught him. Stanley Vestal never spoke of
any. Spoke to any of the direct descendants of Tatanka Iotake. Vestal believed the words
of One Bull and penned the book Sitting Bull, champion of the
Sioux, from One Bull's accounts. Every book author and historian since that time has
treated this novel as a historical document, but in reality is a work of
fiction. The story of the death. Oh, go
ahead. I was going to say you're breaking up a little bit. Oh, okay.
Sorry. The story of the death of Tatake Itake,
written by and from the point of view of Anon Lakota, does not Correspond to
the reports of three eyewitnesses to the event. These witnesses were the children of
Hatake who were present when their father was. And this
is. This is the terrible part. Am I. I'm still coming through.
Good. And this is a terrible part. Who were present when their father was
murdered. Now here
we gonna enter into a little bit of. A little bit of the controversy here.
Arnie lapointe's mother learned of these stories from her mother, Standing Holy
and from her uncles, John Sitting Bull and Henry Little Soldier.
Standing Holy was the youngest daughter of Tatake Iotake
and seen by her nation. John Sitting Bull, whose Lakota name
was refuses them, was a deaf mute and was the son of seen by her
loose before they married Tatanka Iotake and each had a son from their
first marriage, Itaka Iyotake treated the boys as his own. They
were present when Tatake Itake was murdered on
the morning of December 15, 1890.
Their story is quite different from the One Bull version.
So this is where controversy really
begins, Right? So the Lakota,
between the battle of Greasy Grass and the murder of Tatanke Iotake
were basically running away from
the U.S. cavalry, traipsing back and forth over the
Canadian border, the American border. And. And they got caught, right?
Going. Going back and forth across the border.
Once they were caught, they were put on a reservation. And thus the
decline really does. The decline really
began. Hold on.
Go. All right, let's pick this up
after Libby's waved his hands around.
3, 2, 1.
Tatanka Iotake was murdered on the morning of December
15, 1890. Their story is quite different
from the One Bull version. All accounts
agree that 43 metal breasts Indian police came to the
sleeping camp of Tatan Iotake in the early morning hours of December 15th.
From that point on, however, the accounts diverge. Some of the more dramatic reports say
that the police burst into the cabin and forced Yotake from his bed,
then dragged the naked elder out into the road. Since it was a
December winter morning, this seems highly unlikely. Instead, according
to his stepsons, the police knocked on the door and asked him to come outdoors.
They waited for him while he got dressed, putting on his shirt and leggings. In
support of this, the Smithsonian Institution has returned
to ernie lapointe. In December 2007, the leggings taken off the
corpse of Tatanke Iotake. Inside the cabin were
Tatanka Iotake's wives and children, including his two stepsons and his son
Crowfoot. Crowfoot was a young man of 17 at the time, not a 14 year
old boy. As is often reported, when
Tatanka Iotake walked toward the door of the cabin,
Crowfoot also jumped up and picked up his weapon. He told his father he would
protect him. I will stand with you. At the door,
Tatanka Itake paused and turned around and sang a farewell song to his
family. He sang, I am a man and wherever I lie is my
own. As he turned and stepped out the door.
Crowfoot walked behind him carrying his weapon. Those
inside the cabin said it seemed like forever. When the gunfire
erupted, Tataka Iotake fell in front of the door and
a few seconds later, Crowfoot fell next to his father. Six silent eaters of
the Midnight Strong Heart Society died along with their friend Chief
and Sundancer that cold December morning.
Here is the final discrepancy in the story. Many reports, especially those of the surviving
Indian police, say the Crowfoot was hiding under a bed in the cabin. The police
hauled him out, crying and pleading for his life. Bullhead, the leader of the Indian
police, ordered Crowfoot's death and his police officers killed the boy.
This is similar to the fabricated story of Tataka Iotake being dragged
naked into his yard. It seems it seeks to humiliate the memory of
his son. Crowfoot died outside the cabin. There
was a crying child present, but it was 12 year old William, his
older half brother. Crowfoot had already died with his father.
It is not too hard to understand why the boy was afraid for his life.
The other story is a complete fabrication.
The immediate family members were all horrified witnesses to the death of Tatanke
Itaker. As the United States army unit assigned to back up
the Indian police moved into the camp, the family of the other residents fled for
their lives. Now there were not only the metal breasts
to fear, but also the soldiers.
As they fled across the Grand River. The family and about 200 other members of
the camp were intercepted by army forces which were sent in pursuit. They were
put under the protective custody at Fort Yates. The males,
ranged from 16 to 50 years of age, were incarcerated at Fort Sully
until the spring of 1891. McLaughlin, fearing the strong
Heart Society, feared the Strong Heart Society. And he assumed these males are part of
the society and would retaliate for the death of Tatanke
Itake. Even the army have been a bit surprised the intensity of
the reaction by the other Hunkpapa against Tataka and Itanki's family.
Many of the people were angry because their loved ones had died in the process
of arresting Tatanka Itake. In one case, a father and son
fought against each Other, the son on the side of the police and the father
with his old friend, the chief. By this time, many of the Hunkpapa had
relented to the demands of McLaughlin and wanted to be, quote, unquote, good
Indians. They adopted Christianity and they
followed the white man's way, opposed the
white man's way of life. He and his followers wanted to be left alone to
live the old way. This rift within the Hunkapapa was
devastating. It is more than a little ironic that the United States army
became the guardians of the family of one of their most steadfast
opponents, protecting them from their own
people.
And that is where the.
Such as where the legacy, I guess, of Tatanke Itake
begins to be involved and begins to be embroiled in. In
controversy. Now, just as a note, there are two.
No, almost three. Is it three? No,
there's two. There's two appendixes in the back of this book.
One appendix covers a letter, features a letter
from Ed Mossman, superintendent of the Standing Rock Indian School, to the Commissioner of
Indian affairs in Washington, D.C. written on August 25,
1922. And then the second appendix includes
a partial copy of the repatriation document regarding a lock
of hair and leggings belonging to Sitting Bull.
And this was a repatriation document that was created in
compliance with the National Museum of the American Indian act of 1989.
And this was generated in
2007 for a
reparation. A repriation. Sorry. No,
not reparation. Repatriation. Sorry. Repatriation
request for a lock
of hair and leggings that were obtained as a loan from Dr. Horace Dieble
in 1896. Archival evidence indicates the
items were acquired from Sitting bull's body by Dr. Diebel, an army surgeon at Fort
Yates, in 1890. In 1999, the National Museum of National
History of Natural History informed all federally recognized Sioux
tribes that a lock of hair and leggings of Sydney Bull Run loan to the
National Museum of National History to initiate consultation with the tribes
on the items. And that is where some modern
controversy begins.
So
I have little to say
about that particular aspect of
this. I think the repatriation piece is part of the modern
controversy that Ernie Lapointe is having with his. With his.
With one side of the family versus the other side of the family.
Maybe the best question here to ask as we round the corner
is,
and maybe the context of framing it is this. Many
natural history museums, many not just in the United States, but
globally, right. Have
returned items that
colonialists, colonializers took
from native lands right back to
their countries. The biggest case in point of this is the French,
right? So Napoleon, when he was walking around Egypt
looking at the Sphinx and shooting the nose off of it with his troops,
took a bunch of, not a bunch, but took numerous items
out of the great pyramids. And I believe the Egyptian government has
gotten back several of those items and is still in the process of
getting more. We also have items that were
returned that were stolen recently
from museums in Iraq and even
museums, interestingly enough, in Kuwait and other
places in the Middle east by Americans
when the, when the wars of the last 20
years, the Iraq War and the Afghanistan war were going on, right?
And so we have this sense, right, that
people should return, or governments anyway should return
items that belonged to people
that were colonized or that were, or whose civilizations were destroyed
or impacted. Now, what those people. This is a huge
piece of the controversy. You see this
in cases where items are returned to
particular places and then those items which were of
historical or anthropological significance begin to deteriorate
and eventually decline because they are not taken care of by the people
who originally wanted them back.
I'm not saying that this is happening with anything in with Native American tribes.
I'm merely saying that this is something that you see. So
what is your posture as a person who's knee deep in this
on the returning of items to Native American,
for lack of a better term, Native American tribes or Native American peoples?
And how should the government,
particularly the US Government, either work with those tribes
to preserve those items and how should they be
displayed? What's the best way to do this? I have no insight into this
at all. I have zero insight into this. I don't know what to think because
I don't know enough about it beyond merely what I read and
what I've been able to see just from the popular culture.
So what are some of your thoughts around this?
I think this is a really hard, a
really hard question to answer,
to answer simply, right? Like, it's really
not like. So I'll give you an example. There's
a, there was a, there was a building
here in the city that I live in locally that
when they were building the foundation, this was probably back in the middle 80s
or middle early to middle 80s. So I think it was like 80, 80, 45,
somewhere around 86. As they were digging the foundation, they
found four bodies. And
of course, because they're digging deep into the ground, this is a foundation for
a building that's going to stand, you know, 10, 20, 10, 15 stories
tall. So this is not a foundation that they're digging three feet. So these
bodies were definitely ancient, right? Yeah,
yeah. Their first reaction was, I should
probably preface this by saying that this building was being built by one of the
local universities. So their first
instinct was, oh, we found ancient
bones. We should run a lot of tests on these.
And instead of. Instead of their first reaction
being we may have just disturbed a
burial site that was for, you know, like, we
should probably handle this with care. That wasn't there and
that wasn't there. That. That wasn't their instinct. Their instinct was, oh, this
will be fun. Let's. Let's run some tests on these. Let's carbon date them. Let's.
Blah, blah, blah, whatever. So they did
that. They actually took the. The bodies to
the university's testing lab, whatever. They did all the. All the tests they wanted to
run on them, and they said, well, now what? Well, they stuck them in a
drawer somewhere for another decade, and then they went
to a museum for another decade, and eventually somebody
went, hey, should we give these back to the people that they
belong to so they can, like, again,
repatriate them, like, put them back into the ground where they. Whatever. So
eventually. Eventually they got around to contacting us and saying,
we have these four bodies. Here's where they came from. Here's where they, you know,
here's what they've been through. Would you
like, you know, what do you want us to do with them? And we said,
well, we want them back so we can bury them
the way that they're supposed to be buried by our culture, by our
tradition. So that's what they did. They gave them to us, and we went and
we did ceremony and blah, blah, blah, whatever,
which. So in the one hand,
so I. I have this debate with people all the time because there's, like,
there's value. There is. There's a certain amount of
value to knowing what you don't
know and being able to. Being able to go
to an archaeologist or an anthropologist and saying, what do you see here?
What can you learn from this? Versus,
like, like, like the. The Egyptian. The
Egyptian thing. That bothers the crap out of me. Okay, you
found a burial site, and now we want to open it up and explore
it and run a bunch of tests on what it's. You're. It.
If somebody went to a Catholic cemetery
and just said, oh, but this body hasn't been uncovered for a hundred years.
Let's dig it up and see what we can find out, like, nobody would be
okay. With that. That nobody would be okay with
that. But yet the older and older and older that
we get, the more likely it is for us to be okay with it. Because
you use the ed. You use the foundation of education to be the. The. The
bad guy. Right. We want to learn. We want to learn. We want to learn.
Fine. That I. That's understandable. If you
uncover a body in the middle of nowhere that you
didn't think anybody lived, but when you're. When you're in an area,
that's the foundation of the area. You already know again,
here in the northeast, we had a tremendous native community up here. You
knew for a fact that, like, it's been historically
documented that there was a native village here. You already know what you need to
know. There's no excuse that in my brain to go and
desecrate those bodies. Same thing with, like, okay, the very
first Egyptian burial. I understand you didn't know anybody
lived there. So you want to unbury. Like you want to see what you see.
Once you're done with that, why do you have to uncover every single sarcophagus that
ever existed like that? At some point, the educational
value decreases to the point where it's not good enough anymore. You need
to leave those things alone. Right. Like so now, now, mind you,
now the other side of this. So which, by the way,
the idea in the story, like what you read in the book, that
anybody was naked and all that, well, then how did the doctor take the
leggings off his body to put him in the museum? Right, yeah, okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's that. But anyway,
which tells you which side of the story you really need to believe. Right. Like
so, you know, there's obviously some exaggeration going on and something which you and I
talked about this. I think we talked about it before we hit the record button
where we did. Yeah, like, you know, there's.
There's this weird thing that happens with storytelling that when you're looking
at a. At an event, if there are five people viewing the same
event, you're going to get five stories of how that event
out, you know, portrayed and how it end. That doesn't mean that there's not
factual data in there. The factual data. Right.
Happened on this day. The factual data was. Sitting Bull was killed outside
of his cabin. The factual data, like, there's facts in there that you cannot
deny. One side of any one of those perspective, finger
pointing, but. Or story, sorry, storytelling. But.
But you start learning as you sift through some of the minutiae and again, like
I said, so a doctor in 1896 gives away what he took off the
body of the dead body of sitting Bull, which is the leggings and the lock
of hair. Well, then obviously he wasn't naked. So you, you start to understand which
side or which story is more likely to be believable
in scenarios anyway. But get back to your question. So
I, I fight with this question. I fight with this question a lot about
how to handle the, how to
handle the reappropriation of it is. Is a lot easier than how to
handle something being uncovered. Right, right. Being uncovered.
Again, depending on where you are and what's being. If you've never
seen life again, you're in the middle of the Sonora, the middle of
the desert or whatever, and you, you uncover a body and you can tell that
it's an ancient body and you've never seen bodies here before. I get it. You
have. There's an educational value to that. As much as I don't. I
still don't like it, but I understand and I appreciate the fact that there's some
educational value to learning and understanding what, who was there and
what people were there. But once you do that, give the
people. Give the. Give the. The. Now
there's a problem in the United States here with being able to
reappropriate certain
pieces, archival data
baskets, like, you know, leggings, things like that.
Because according to certain U. S, According to u. S. Law,
you have to give these back to a federally recognized tribe. Well,
if the tribe they find them at, like, is not the federally
recognized tribe and the closest tribal affiliation is a few hundred
miles away. It's not the same. You can't
give, you can't give remains or tribal
content to a tribe that it doesn't belong
to and expect them to treat it the way it's supposed to be treated. Like,
it doesn't make this. There's a disconnect there, but the US Government has no way
of doing it other than, well, then we'll just keep it. Well, like, we'll do.
We'll just keep it so they don't go to the next level, which is, can
you find the people who belong in that area
that have descendants in that area that belong to a native group? Like, maybe
they're not federally recognized, but maybe it's a group that, that is
well respected in the community that they know, like, there's no
foundation for them to get federal federally recognized, but they're
there. Right. Like, and I'll just give an example up Here in the Northeast, the
Abenaki do not have a reservation in the United States, but they
covered most of the Northeast, Northern Massachusetts, and above
Vermont. Vermont and New Hampshire were almost all.
All Abnaki. Northern Massachusetts was Abnaki, Western
Maine. But there's no federal, federally recognized tribe. The
closest federally recognized tribe is the Wampanoag in the Mash, in the Mashpee area,
which we're not the same people. So if you found something in. In
Nashua, New Hampshire, and it was native,
or in Lowell, Massachusetts, which was native, they're all. That's
Abenaki. But you're going to give it to the Wampanoag. There's a disconnect there.
That doesn't make sense. It just doesn't make sense. Right. So
I. I wish there was better ways to do this. I really do. I. I
don't have the answer to it. At least I don't think I have the answer.
I think if I. I think if we were.
And that's the other thing that kind of goes back. Like,
we all. Saying that we are Native
American is like saying that somebody from France is European,
right? Like, it's. It's somebody from France, somebody from.
From Ireland, somebody from Portugal, somebody from Italy. They're
all European, but they're not the same. That's the same idea here.
Like, people here in the Northeast were very different than the Lakota. Right. In
the western part of the country, we didn't speak the same language. We didn't interact
at all. We had no idea. So. And even here in the Northeast,
again, reappropriating content, whether it be shirts,
leggings, beadwork, you know, whatever, bones, for lack
of a better term, you can't just go and say, oh, it's
Native, so we can just give it to the next native group. They'll treat it.
It's the same thing. It doesn't work that way. So, like it.
There's. There's some hard questions to be answered. Now, that being said,
do I think that Sitting Bull's artifacts or Sitting Bull's
material or, Or. Or possessions should go back to his direct
descendant? Absolutely. There's no reason that you can
tell me that that, like, why would they not. If you're going
to say, well, because Sitting Bull lived at
Standing Rock and his direct descendant does not live on the
reservation. They live. That's not a good enough reason for me.
Now, if you. So why, as a government official
or if you're. If you're the. The tribal government at Standing
Rock and You want Sitting Bulls
belongings to, to be, to be buried there or to
be rested there or, or even to be put back in a museum there, then
you should be required to petition the direct descendants. You should be able
to like what? It's my family's history. I understand it's the
history of the people too, but it's my direct descendants
family. It should be up to me what happens to that. So I think,
I think there's a. But I think there's a lot of maneuvering and I think
there's a lot of political stuff that happens and like, I don't know. And by
the way, Ernie Lapointe is still alive. I mean
he's, he's still. I, I don't know if he lives at Standing Rock or not.
I don't know enough about him personally, personally to know if he lives there or
not. But, but yes, I believe that his grant, his great
grandfather's thing should belong to him. I, I have, I
have items that I wear in my regalia that belonged to
my ancestors. Why would I not expect him to be able to. Could
you imagine what the amount of pridefulness or the amount of.
I, I don't even know what the feeling I could think of would be
for him to be able to take Sitting Bull's leggings and turn them into something
that he could wear today at and into ceremony or to, or to powwow or
something like that. Like that would be ridiculously
impactful. So I, I, I, I think it
belongs with him. I, I, I, I don't think there should be any controversy there.
I think this ties into,
so I already mentioned on this episode our, our sort of
lack of understanding of the power of religion in the past.
I think this ties into that. Because
you mentioned a Catholic cemetery, right. I can
easily see a future not
very many years from now where
a building will be put on a Catholic cemetery
and no one will raise a.
I could easily see that happening in America. And the reason
why I can easily see that happening. And this is perhaps
some pushback on your point.
I think there are pockets obviously of our culture that treat death seriously and
treat remains seriously. However,
I think overall the way
in which we deal with aging starts with
aging. But aging, being elderly,
dying and then death itself
is very much
in the direction of, and has moved. It has stayed in the
direction of just put the person in the box or
in the wall or in the ground and move on to the next.
I see this when, okay,
one of the things I used to do is I Used to do real estate.
And one of the, one of the things, one of the hacks of real estate
is you can go to estate sale so you could talk to people about selling
the help, right? If you go to estate sales, very interesting.
Because what you see is all the stuff you talk about Egyptians with
sarcophagus, you see
what people collected in the course of their lives
that they attached a lot of value to,
but that now has a price tag on it so that their relatives can
pay for the funeral. Or
has a price tag on it because the relatives didn't want it.
Or has a price tag on it because the
relatives wanted to make some money.
And you sort of, when you go to enough of those, and you experience enough
of those experiences and I've gone to enough of them,
I've had enough of those experiences and you sort of start
to understand that
the draining of the sacred from the world,
which came through in a, in a sort of community
understanding of religion,
which also concluded a community understanding of aging,
a community understanding of dying and a community understanding of death
itself. To your point about people being
populated along the coasts, I don't know that that is
collectively and societally as strong a point
whole as it used to be. I can easily see in a hundred years
someone, I hate to be this
person. But in desecrating my grave
now, now I take the posture of I'm fine with that because I
won't be here, the things that are me will be gone. All that will
be left is the sack of whatever and that'll
be rotted in the ground. Maybe the femur will be left, but
whatever. And if I get to go out the way that, the way that I
want to go out, if I get to be done, if people actually follow what
it is that I'm going to be putting that I'm going to be, that I
have in my will, I'm going to be,
you know, burned with all my stuff.
So nobody has to worry about selling anything. Because the only thing that people are
going to care about again, I've been to a lot of estate sales. The only
things that people care about are the house maybe,
but really the money and the property, that's really all they care about.
And otherwise they're just going to take a bunch of my crap that I collected
in my life and they're going to put it in a four ton dumpster.
That's it. Yeah, I'm gone. So
that's me. But that, but that's me, right? I don't know how we can
collectively as a society move
back towards a sacred sense of death and dying,
which would then translate into. And this is a really hard
question, I don't know what the answer to this is, but would translate into
us treating the remains of people, regardless of what
ethnic group they came from, with a little more respect. Yeah.
And a little more honor. And I don't know how we get back to that
as a society and culture without, without some sort of religion, return to
religion. Religion or something that's transcended or sacred. Yeah. Well, fortunately
for us, like the, the way that we. There's a lot, There's
a lot that goes into dying for us, like the ceremony, the, the
present, the way the body is prepared, things like that. There's
a lot to it. So, like that's never left us. So
for us, I mean. I know. But again, here's. Here we are the, the,
you know, to say where the minority is like an understatement.
Like our population in the US today is less than 3%.
So I think the next closest. I think the next
closest population I, I actually think is African American. I think it is like somewhere
around 13 or 14, 15.
Depends upon who you're talking to. Yeah. You ask. So like, think about
that. That discrepancy in numbers. That's like, like where
nobody cares about. Like nobody cares. Right. We're not
a big enough voting population, really care about us, so.
But we care about ourselves. So I do think that in our community,
what you're talking about still exists and which is why I take so much
offense to this. I, I still have a, I have a problem. I have a
visceral problem for with it. Like, I don't like the idea
of somebody digging up other. And again, I don't care if it's ours. I, like
I, I mentioned Egypt. I know that the same thing has happened in Australia with
the Aboriginal people in Australia. It bothers me. It just bothers me that we
desecrate those areas and like areas that
we. That, that indigenous populations, again, what. Regardless
of what part of the world. Because Indigenous, Indigenous people are where they
are. Like United States that have. So.
But those areas that they deem as special or sacred or
religious or whatever, they're the only ones that care about that
the rest of the world could care less about it. Right. The rest of the
world could care less what the Native American or the indigenous American people
find to be sacred. As a matter of fact, there have been
many sacred areas to Native Americans that we now have
cities built on. Right. Like so, you know, it's.
And listen, I'm not, arg. I'm not complaining about something that happened, you know,
300 years ago. That's not my point. But what my point is is that is
still happening today, is my point. And why can't.
Why, why are we doing that? Why are we doing that to each other? Why
are we doing that to people? Why are we doing that? It doesn't make any
sense to me.
Yeah. I don't.
I think to your point about a minority of a minority. Right. It's
a. It, it requires for the change
or change to occur that
would positively impact a minority of a minority. The
majority has to change for sure. And this, and this is
something that I understand folks who are, who are campaigning
for political or civil rights get
viscerally. It also applies
to spiritual things, right? Yes.
And I would assert that it is probably
not probably. I would assert there's no qualifications here. I would assert it's
more important to apply such a majority change
to spiritual things. We don't have to
agree on the transcendent. I would prefer that we agree, but we
don't have to. Let's just acknowledge that there is a
transcendent and that
there is a requirement among us collectively,
majority and minority. There is a requirement for us to treat
not only the end of life but also the process of aging
with infinitely more respect than what we do, because we will.
All or some of my younger listeners who don't believe if you're
in your 20s and 30s, you don't believe you're going to get old. I didn't
believe I was going to get old. You're going to get old.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news because we're all nice people. You
certainly do not want the alternative, which is you're not going to make it to
old age and you're going to be dead. That's right. That's correct.
But we have a culture, and we've had this since the 1960s with
when the baby boomers began to reach their, their, their
apotheosis of their summer. We've had a culture that glorifies
youth and, and does everything
possible to ignore or diminish
aging, illness, dying and
death. And maybe that's one of the things in our next
upcoming historical cycle that we can afford to put away.
Yeah. For all of our sakes, not just the minority
of the minority. For all of our sakes. And to your, to your point, Hasan,
I think we, and we've talked about this several times too Aging
to the point of illness or death. What about the, what about the middle part?
Right, right. Like that 45 to 65 age
group that somebody in their 20s just views that as, oh, they're just old people.
They don't get it, they don't get it anymore. They don't view us as people
who hold wisdom anymore. Right. Which, so
again, I, I, this starts, all of this starts at home because I had
the opportunity last weekend to spend a little bit of time with somebody who's
a little bit older than me. Not by a lot. Not by a lot, but
he's a little bit older than me. And I, I view as a
trusted advisor in our community and it's, this
was a cultural, cultural person. The first thing my daughter
said was, can I go? You're going to go talk to that person. Can I
go? I want to listen. Came and she's 23 by
the way. She came and she listened to our conversation and
the only time she ever said anything is when one of us asked her something
specific. Just sat there and by the way, this was not
a five minute conversation. We were there, we left the house at 8 in the
morning, did not get back until 6:30 at night and
she willingly volunteered to go and just sit and listen
at 23. There's
not a lot of other cultures out there that that would happen.
And again, because the elder sat there and said, well yeah, because you
know, you taught your kids, right, you taught them to value the wisdom of the
elder, not to look at them as somebody that just you can throw away
because they don't understand, they don't care. It's, it's
our, it's our, it's our responsibility. It's our Fault if our 20
somethings are not reacting the way we want them to. We're, we wants to raise
them and we're the one that we're the only ones that can help them. Course.
Correct. Yeah. You see something in your 20 something that you
don't like you better. Hey, see something, say something. You know, like
it works there too. I'm just saying it works there too.
Well, on that note, I've held Tom Libby long enough. We
have, I think we've thoroughly covered Sitting Bull, his life and
legacy, and talked about the new perspective on an
iconic legend, this
touching, poignant oral history put to paper. Yeah, I agree with that.
I'd recommend going out and getting this book, reading it and absorbing the
lessons from it as a leader, but also as a
person with a community, with a family and who is part
of something bigger than yourself. You're not just an
atomized, floating individual with no connections.
No man or woman, for that matter,
is an island. Like to thank Tom Libby
for coming on the podcast today. And with that, well,
we're out.