Introduction

Long before Europeans arrived in North America, Indians from the Atlantic to the Pacific populated what would become the United States. They lived a life of relative freedom, able to maintain their traditional culture and practice their religious beliefs as their ancestors had done. This freedom, of course, was not absolute. American Indians’ movements were limited by the availability of food, water, and other necessities such as materials for constructing their homes. They also had generally defined areas for living and hunting, and if they crossed into other Indian people’s traditional areas, conflict was possible. Life was not easy, nor was it necessarily peaceful. Many Indian nations had traditional Indian enemies, and warfare was not uncommon.

Nonetheless, within these limitations, each Indian nation enjoyed considerable freedom. No nation told another nation what to do, and even warfare seldom threatened a people’s very existence. From generation to generation, Indians lived according to their traditions and beliefs and were able to maintain a clear identity.

Then came the Europeans. With their arrival in the New World, life gradually— and in some cases suddenly—changed for the native peoples. A major cause of that change was the Europeans’ desire for land. Land for Europeans was something to own, whereas Indians, although exercising territorial rights to traditional homelands and hunting grounds, did not own the land. They certainly did not individually own portions of the land. In their view, the land was to be reverenced, and one would no more cut open the land as European farmers did than one would cut open one’s parent or grandparent. Likewise, no one would claim to own something that was viewed as essentially a spiritual entity.

As Europeans and their Euro-American descendants steadily moved westward from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, they took the land that they wanted, often by national policy. When Indians were in the way, they did their best to remove the native peoples. That removal might be by killing the Indians or, later, forcing the survivors onto reservations. These reservations usually consisted of land that the Euro-Americans did not want, typically the poorest of land. If they later decided that they did want some or all of the land set aside for reservations, they simply forced the Indians to move again. Illness was an effective ally of the Euro-Americans during this process of removal, and diseases such as smallpox that migrated to America with the Europeans wreaked great destruction on Indians, who had been unable to establish any immunity to them.

Euro-Americans, also by established policy, tried to remake the remaining Indians in their own image. They sought to change how Indians dressed, worked, worshipped, and were educated. As the United States grew and extended itself from Canada to Mexico, and from one ocean to the other, it attempted by national policy to effect, if not total annihilation, at least cultural genocide of the native peoples.

Yet Indians throughout these centuries of the new nation’s expansion did not yield easily. Many Indian nations fought hard to maintain a way of life that to them was sacred, given to them by the Great Spirit. Leaders arose who used their intelligence, organizational skills, courage, and commitment to traditional values to resist Euro-American expansionism. If such efforts appear through a retrospective lens to have been doomed from the start, that simply makes the struggle even more heroic.

Later, as the twentieth century passed its midpoint, new leaders arose who attempted resistance once again. These modern leaders set out to resurrect much of past tradition, to secure the rights of Indians as citizens of the United States as well as their basic right to be Indian, and to create cultural, spiritual, and economic opportunities to make a better life for themselves. That better life looked forward to the future while also turning back to their ancestors’ values. Something of the past, in fact, had survived, and the calling of the modern leaders was to build on that survival within the context of a very different world.

Survival in earlier centuries—not mere physical survival of an individual person, but survival of a people—had required resistance. In the modern world, survival and resistance also went hand in hand. Events such as the takeover of Wounded Knee in 1973 have been about both resistance and survival, even more so than individual political issues or government policies. They have also been about freedom—the freedom to live one’s identity with pride and the opportunity to possess those qualities of life long granted to Euro-Americans: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Legends of American Indian Resistance examines the lives of 12 such leaders, ranging from Metacom (more commonly known as Philip) in the seventeenth century to three twentieth-century figures: Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Mary Brave Bird. Each chapter explores especially that individual’s method of resistance and his or her accomplishments. Biographical context is included to help readers come to know these Indian leaders more thoroughly.

The arrangement of chapters is designed to offer readers a coherent narrative of the Indian resistance movement. The approach is generally chronological, although some overlapping of individuals’ lives regarding their dates occurs, as well as some overlapping of events. Both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, for example, played important roles at the Battle of Little Bighorn; years later, Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Mary Brave Bird did the same during the takeover of Wounded Knee.

The narrative begins with Philip in the seventeenth century and the conflict commonly known as King Philip’s War of 1675-1676. A discussion of Pontiac, who lived during the eighteenth century and is best known for his role in what is called Pontiac’s Rebellion during the 1760s, follows. Tecumseh is the subject of the third chapter. Tecumseh was born in 1768, about a year before Pontiac’s death, and died during the War of 1812, bridging the old century and the new. Black Hawk is the subject of Chapter 4. Although he was born in 1767, almost contemporaneous with Tecumseh, he is most prominently remembered in history for the conflict named after him—the Black Hawk War of 1832—and thus follows Tecumseh in this book.

Osceola, the subject of the fifth chapter, is the first resistance leader discussed in this book who was born in the nineteenth century. He died young, in 1838, after leading resistance in the Second Seminole War, which began in 1835. The discussion of his life logically follows the story of Black Hawk, who died in the same year, but who was born 37 years earlier than Osceola.

Chapters 6 and 7 cover two Lakota leaders, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, both of them born well after Osceola’s birth (and in the case of Crazy Horse, after his death). Sitting Bull, almost a decade older than Crazy Horse, precedes him in this book. In addition to being older, Sitting Bull came to prominence earlier, and his influence in the nineteenth century extended farther than that of Crazy Horse, as reflected in the great gathering of Indians prior to the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

Chief Joseph appears in Chapter 8, after the two Lakota leaders have been profiled. Although born in the same year as Crazy Horse, he outlived both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, dying in 1904. The most memorable historical event involving Chief Joseph also followed the defeat of Custer at Little Bighorn—his long, heroic attempt to lead his people to safety in Canada in 1877. Geronimo is the subject of the ninth chapter despite having been born in 1829, earlier than Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Chief Joseph. This Indian leader lived a long life, dying in 1909, but he is an appropriate figure with which to conclude the narrative of the nineteenth century because he was the last prominent Indian resistance leader to surrender, doing so in 1886.

Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Mary Brave Bird—three twentieth-century resistance figures—appear in the final three chapters, in that order. Their relative positions are consistent with both the dates of their birth and the points at which they came to prominence in the resistance movement. Banks co-founded the American Indian Movement in 1968, Means joined the organization about a year later, and Brave Bird, still a teenager, became well known at Wounded Knee in 1973.

At the end of each chapter is a list of recommended readings. A much fuller bibliography divided into print and nonprint sections appears near the end of the book. A timeline of important events in Indian history precedes the chapters. In addition, sidebars within the chapters offer supplemental information by discussing people, events, and organizations either not mentioned in the chapters or mentioned only briefly.

Choosing the 12 subjects covered in this book was a difficult task. Other Indian leaders certainly could have been included if this volume had been larger, but all 12 discussed at length in this book thoroughly deserve their inclusion here. Some important Indian leaders, such as Washakie of the Shoshones, are not included because they spent much of their lives working with, rather than resisting, the U. S. government. Some individuals considered for their own chapters are described within chapters or sidebars.

Much of the history education that students within the United States have long received has been from a decidedly Euro-American perspective, from the early Pilgrims through military figures such as George Armstrong Custer. Regrettably, history textbooks in their treatment of the twentieth century largely ignore Indians, as if in the late nineteenth century they ceased to exist.

In the 1960s, however, that veil of invisibility began to lift through the efforts of organizations such as the American Indian Movement, and through the vision and sacrifices of many individuals, some of whom appear within these pages. It is this author’s hope that this book makes some small contribution toward creating a greater awareness of what Indians have endured throughout the centuries, what they have striven to do, and what they have accomplished by resisting efforts to deprive them of their identity and their way of life.