Standing Bear’s court victory had ‘human rights’ significance

Within days of the federal judge’s decision in 1879, issued in Omaha, Neb., to free Chief Standing Bear and the Ponca people who were being held illegally at Fort Omaha, the ruling became national news.

The Omaha Daily Herald complimented U.S. District Court Judge Elmer Scipio Dundy for “awakening the people to a new sense of importance” for the plight of Native Americans.

Assistant editor Thomas Henry Tibbles (shown below), who had assembled Omaha attorneys John Lee Webster and Andrew Jackson Poppleton as the legal team to represent Standing Bear, thanked them for their pro bono work on the case.

 

Yet another key player in the courtroom drama was the 23-year-old interpreter Susette La Flesche, eldest daughter of Joseph La Flesche (shown below), who was known as “Iron Eyes,” former chief of the Omaha Tribe.

 

Raised on the Omaha Reservation, Susette attended the Presbyterian Mission Boarding School on the reservation where she learned to read, write and speak English.

After Susette expressed a desire to further her education, her father arranged for her to attend the private Elizabeth (N.J.) Institute for Young Ladies in 1869. She became a talented writer. After graduation in 1876, Susette returned to the reservation and became a schoolteacher.

 

In 1877, Chief Standing Bear and the Ponca Tribe (friends and allies of the Omaha people) were forcefully uprooted and removed from their homeland along the Niobrara River valley in northeastern Nebraska and sent to Indian Territory in Oklahoma.

Susette’s paternal grandmother was a Ponca, so Susette accompanied her father on a trip to Oklahoma to investigate living conditions there. The father-daughter team found the situation to be totally deplorable. When they returned, Susette shared their observations with Tibbles and aided him in publicizing the Poncas’ woes

 

In this painting of the trial scene, 

Susette is shown at the left of Chief Standing Bear.

After Standing Bear’s trial, Susette took the Indian name of “Bright Eyes.” Tibbles organized a speaking tour of the eastern United States for Standing Bear, Bright Eyes and her brother, Francis La Flesche, who was trained as an ethnologist.

 

Thomas Tibbles and Bright Eyes La Flesche were married in 1882. (His first wife, Amelia Owen Tibbles, died of peritonitis in 1879.)

The couple remained dedicated to the advocacy of Native American concerns through their writings and speaking engagements. She often presented testimony before the U.S. Congress. Bright Eyes died at home in 1903 at age 49. No cause of death is cited.

She is remembered for having written: “Peaceful revolutions are slow but sure. It takes time to leaven a great unwieldy mass like this nation with the leavening ideas of justice and liberty, but the evolution is all the more certain in its results because it is so slow.”

Bright Eyes fully understood that Judge Dundy’s 1879 ruling stopped short of granting “citizenship” status to Indians. However, his decision was a catalyst for far-reaching changes in federal Indian policy affecting thousands of Indians throughout the United States – yet to come.

One would occur in 1924, when Congress approved the Indian Citizenship Act, conferring full U.S. citizenship on all Indians.

Following the death of Bright Eyes, Tibbles got involved in politics. He was the 1904 vice presidential candidate of the Populist political party, the running mate of Thomas E. Watson of Georgia (shown below).

 

In the 1904 general election, the Populist ticket received 114,070 votes (0.84%). The Republicans retained control of the White House, with incumbent President Teddy Roosevelt easily elected to a second term.

 

Tibbles returned to his private life as a journalist and continued writing until his death in 1928 at age 87.

 

A statue of Chief Standing Bear is located inside the U.S. Capitol to honor his legacy and courage.