American History Hit - Who Was Sitting Bull?

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Sitting Bull, Jumping Badger, Slow - what do we know about the man who went by each of these names? How did he earn them and what was his role in the changing United States of the late 19th century?Don is joined by none other than Sitting Bull's great-grandson, Ernie Lapointe, to hear stories passed down in his family about this Native American icon of resistance.Ernie is a Vietnam veteran and author of 'Sitting Bull: His Life and Legacy'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sound/All3 MediaAmerican History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. June 1876, a Lakota holy man performs the Sundance in the Rosebud River Valley. Having fasted, he dances continuously for two days and nights, ritualistically offering

100 pieces of flesh from his arms, inflicting excruciating pain upon himself to attain a higher spiritual realm. Finally exhausted, in a trance state, blood dripping from his arms, the man faints. A vision comes to him. Soldiers descending from above. They appear to him like grasshoppers, falling headfirst feet to the sky. When he awakens, this man, Sitting Bull, rejoins his people and shares his vision,

foretelling victory against the invading U.S. Army troops. It will not be long before his vision becomes reality. And the name Sitting Bull becomes known the world over. Greetings history hit listeners. Welcome back. I'm Don Wildman. There's a real trap in the study of American history, ours being a legacy involving some dark chapters of persecution and oppression to characterize those who suffered as fallen pawns in the great American chess game. This reduces them to mere victimhood, a single dimension. And it is important and more truthful to try and see these figures in the fullness of their humanity. We are aiming to do this today as we tell the proud story of Sitting Bull, the Lakota chieftain who was Central, strategically and spiritually, to the resistance among Native peoples of the American Great Plains

against the U.S. government across what is today the northern states of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Sitting Bull was a star, a living legend within his culture and beyond, with a story spanning the last half of the 1800s and representing so much of what happened to indigenous peoples as our government laid the groundwork for white settlement across the continent. And doing so, we are in the company of Ernie LaPointe, author of LeBocke Sitting Bull, his life and legacy, who also happens to be the great grandson of the man himself. It is an honor to meet you again in life, Ernie. Nice to be with you. Thank you. Appreciate you. You and I met on camera when we were doing a television show about the Battle of Little Big Horn at a place called Deer Medicine Rocks, which is where your great

grandfather very famously did the Sundance, which created the vision that he saw about the victory at Big Horn. We spent the day together at this very holy and sacred place, very special day in my life. But today we're talking about the story of Sitting Bull, but let's start with your relationship with him. When I say great-grandson, this is proven in DNA. How did you first learn that you were connected to him in this way? Well, when I was about four or five years old, my mother is the one that's a granddaughter of a city. And she would basically tell us about his life and about our culture. You know, I didn't really know. She just talked about him as a grandfather.

So I didn't know he was famous or anything. He was just another person that she spoke about. She didn't talk to us like we're talking to each other now. She spoke to me in a Lakota language. so it doesn't take as much talking. It was just one sentence covered a lot in Lakota, and she used a lot of humor. She tells a story a couple sentences,

and then she'd say, do something or say something funny, and you would laugh. I just thought it was kind of funny stories she was telling us because she's making us laugh. But her reasoning for that was, she said, every time you laugh, it's like a store button in your brain. It stores the information.

So you always remember it in the future. I try to do that myself by using humor when I'm trying to talk to people. And I always tell people that when you listen to stories in a native language, it stays with you. And this language we're talking to each other. It's really hard because the language is too many meanings, too many words made up. So it doesn't stay like it does if you have a native tongue. So it stayed with me now. The stories I told you before, you know, those are very much in my memory.

So much of indigenous history is made up of oral storytelling, and you're carrying on that tradition. You mentioned Lakota language. Can you tell us a little bit about the Lakota people? The Lakota people make up over 500 different nations that were in this country at the beginning before the European nation came here. And we're basically one of a nation that we were like a nomadic. We followed the buffalo. That was our source of food and their house. We used every part of the buffalo, so, you know, it's basically the herds move further.

We followed it. We really didn't have one area that you stayed at forever. Like some tribes, they have hoggins and earth and huts that they built. They're permanent. With us, we just moved around. And while our nation consists of three, we call them the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota. And all different parts of, you know, like Dakota or Minnesota, the Nakota are down, we're down in Iowa, Nebraska area. The Lakhota, we covered North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana,

with bigger tribes than the other ones are. So we speak the same language. The only difference is, like I say, the Lakota, Noghota, the D, the N and L, is what distinguishes. That separates us from who we are. Now, Sitting Bull, your great-grandfather, is known the world over. If you had to summarize why that was, what would you say? Well, basically, he never knew he was going to be looked at as a historian or something,

but I have one story in my mother's telling that I think kind of touches on how come the world knows him. And it was at a first ceremony that he did, which is called the Sundance. And they pierced him on front and on the back and he slipped him off the ground. And he was probably six, seven inches off the ground. And he went into a trance. And he went back to when he was a little boy. In his vision, he's walking across his field. And he heard a voice, calling him for help.

So he went over to investigate. And there was a wolf laying there. And the bushes there, he had two arrows in his side. So the boy went over and removed the arrows. And in his vision, it was like time elapsed, you know. Boom, he removed the arrows, and he doctored his wounds. And the next instant, the wolf is healed a little bit. And he started to walk away.

And he's walking away. He stopped, turned around, look back at my great ground. father's a little boy and said, boy, he said, for helping me. He said, the nations know you, will know you just by your name and walked off. But he didn't realize that, you know, he thought it was just, you know, the nations that's around the tribes, didn't realize it's going to be around the world. People, he was a spiritual man. Most of his life, he did communicate with the spirits. And that's what I do myself. Right now is I have a ceremonial room I go into every morning every night, and I'll communicate with the spirit, and I ask him to give me direction and what

I'm going to have to do in this life. Well, basically, that's what he did. And I guess the reason people know him is because of the vision he had at the Sundance, just before Kuster came along in, what we're called the Prejislavokichi, the Battle of the Greas grass, which they call the Battle of Bighorn, or Custer and his men were defeated. But during the vision, he heard a voice to come to him, And these soldiers are falling into his camp upside down with no ears. They look like grasshoppers. And the voice told them, he says, I give you these because they have no ears. And then he told them, don't take the spoils.

Don't take their weapons, their food, clothing, or nothing. Just leave them as they lie. And he says, this will solidify what you're doing, protecting your way of life, your people, your culture. But evidently, the people didn't do that. So we had to suffer at the hands of the future generations of the Americans. Amazing. So Sitting Bull was born in the 1830s. Where was he born and how did he come by his name? It was in May of 1831 when he was born in a place called Orange Creek, which is the south of a town called Miles City, Montana, kind of like an eastern part of Montana.

When he was born, he had a childhood name. Most men who are born, our children are born to have a childhood name. Usually it comes from the father what he sees, the minute the child is born. and his father seen some badgers, little animals, they're jumping around out there. So then they told him he had a son. So he named his son jumping badger. In Lakota, we call it a whole copacidja. And as he got a little older,

he was already, in a way, a matter of speaking, he was born as a gifted child. So he always analyzed things before he acted as a young kid. So the people around him, the nation, the village called him, who kushin, you know, which is slow or weak, because he was always not done.

doing anything, participating in what the little kids are usually to do. He was older thinking. But actually, he was just learning things at a young age. And by the time he got old enough to go on a hunt, on raids and stuff, with the other men, he counted his first coup, as we call he had a stick. And he went and touched a crow chief. When they went to raid horses, and this guy came out of his team, he whacked him with the stick. And it turns out the guy he hit, well, it touched was a crow chief. So just to jump in here, a coup refers to an act of bravery during battle, bold bravery, usually where a warrior touches a member of the opposing side, usually with a stick during the conflict. This doesn't harm the enemy

except in pride, but demonstrates courage where the warrior has had to come into close contact with his opponent, risking his life. And since he did that, his father seen it, and he bestowed the name, sitting bold. He took his name and gave it to him. So he earned a name. He was name sitting bowl. So his father gave him the name his name. He called himself Silling Bull first, but he gave that name to his son. And then he took the second name. He had four names that was given to him by the Buffalo Nation. So the first name was Sitting Bull. So he took that for himself. Well, it wasn't real what Sitting was Tchukki Yotake. And then the second name was Tchukukh, which is Jumping Bowl. So he took that name for himself, gave his name to his son.

So that's how he became known around the world as. You know, it really doesn't mean sitting balls. It means a buffalo ball who starts to sit down. He isn't sitting yet. He just starts to sit. But the Americans in their translations, they put you the names.

But there were five sitting balls at the same time when my grandfather was there. I was alive, so I don't know if each name is not the same thing as his, but because there was Adalcada, Oglala, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and my great-grandfather. There's five guys named

Sitting Boat the same time. And what about his role? Would Sitting Bull have understood himself as a leader? Well, you know, the story of our culture. See, again, our cultures were the American historians that took the culture, our people, to kind of try to equate it to theirs, have leaders. And now, like, put away, each man is a leader of his team, of his home. And you have your spiritual pipe. So with this pipe, he communicated with his old spirits of how he should be with his family. He didn't have to be part of this camp. They just were together as a group to get along with each other. But in this camp, they had to have a spokesperson.

Somebody who, see, the women were the backbone of our culture. The women had the wisdom. They knew right from wrong, good from evil, good, all this. The men didn't have that. All we were were. You know, you look around, you see young boys, young men, the same way. You know, they're always doing something dumb or stupid. That's what women outlive men, I guess, you know.

So anyhow, and then see, men, we have to do a paraphrication lodge. They call it a sweat lodge. We go in there to try to understand the wisdom of a woman. And once a person starts to get that, it's a certain percentage of a wisdom of a woman. The women see this. And then they use the men to their council meetings. All men are council members. And then a chief, as they call in American language, a chief is a spokesperson.

He's a caretaker. He's a provider. It's a guy who shows his wisdom of a woman, but he's a man. And he takes care of those that need help. If they're hungry, he feeds them. If they need something, a TV, he gives them one. If they need transportation, he always has more than one horse. So he gives him a horse traveling.

And this is how the women see him as. As a man who's in councils of other nations, he's a son. spokesperson. He sits there without anger, without hate. He has to be neutral. And this person exhibits that same quality, a woman's quality, as a woman's wisdom. Yet, he's a provider and a protector. He's a man who earned his eagle feathers with valor. He didn't kill people. He touched them with his stick. So basically, when Americans came in and wrote books about him, the city was a chief. He was a leader. And he was just an inspiration. Terraceional tear-taker, a spokesperson for the people. And that's what most chiefs are.

And you have some that are like crazy horse. He was a warrior chief. He was a leader. And not a leader, but he was an inspirational leader. He always said strong hearts to the front, white guys behind. Let's go into battle and stuff. He was the main protector of the tap, the people. That's what he did. And my great-grandfather was a spokesperson. He tried to educate the Americans and all other nations, that our people were welcoming them into our society, into our area. We didn't have to do the fighting, but the Americans came in and interfered the natives,

so they started shooting and killing them. See, that's the two different sides. But the American storytellers glorify the murderers and the killers, more than the native side. They always call us noble savages, which is an oxymoron term. How can they be a noble and be savage at the same time? So basically, he was really a spokesperson for his tribe.

And actually, on the other hand, too, is as a protector and as a caregiver for the people, he was a sundance. Our sand dance is like the flashing in German. You know, it's a renewal of new life every year. That's what the sun dances for. When I sundance, that's what I did. I pray for the survival of our culture, but as a young, will grow up to understand our people's culture. Not the capitalistic world of the Americans, but the Lakota spiritual way of life, which we live, you know, we don't take life seriously. We don't have degrees.

We don't create each other. The only one that grades each other is you. You don't have to be greater than anybody out. Just be yourself. That's who we are. And the Americans the other night was watching a thunder heart. The guy said, they're defeated people. They never defeated us, not in the battlefield.

They never defeated us. We're still here. and they created their Second Amendment and carry a gun because of us. They feared us. So they wanted to kill us. That's why they had their guns. Whereas I would tell people, why you want to fear us? We were a spiritual people who lived

with harmony with nature and each other. So don't fear us. We tried to help you to survive to make it back to the spirit world. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Speaking of encounters, between the Lakota and the American settlers,

As I mentioned at the start, Sitting Bull was an icon of resistance against federal control. Why was that? How did that come to pass? Well, my great-grandfather and Crazy Horse were the only two guys that didn't believe in treaties because they knew, I guess they threw the ceremonies that a white man made these pieces of paper and most chiefs come in, most leaders, most spokesperson come in their swine in. sign it to put an X or whatever on that paper saying that they agreed. But they were told they'll never honor that paper.

They said they're going to say a lot of good things, but they're not going to live up to it. But their main goal here was done for gold. And that's what started the Little Big Horn Battle Hill. See, they came into the, well, in a treaty of 1868, they said the Lakota Nation, they gave them the Black Hills, which were their. right now. This is sacred land to the Lakota that has so many mysterious things that's in these mountains. This is the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which the United States entered into with the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota, and another nation, the Arapaho. The treaty was forged on the U.S.

side to put an end to the two-year campaign of raids and ambushes along the Bozeman Trail, a shortcut that thousands of white migrants were using to reach the goal. gold mines in the Montana Territory. The treaty established the so-called Great Sioux Reservation, a large swath of lands west of the Missouri River. It also designated the Black Hills as a, quote, unseated Indian territory, unquote, for the exclusive use of Native peoples, alongside focusing on the so-called integration of Native people into white settler society. But in June 1874, General George Custer led an expedition into the Black Hill. to search for gold. By 1875, year later, some 800 miners and fortune seekers had flooded into

those hills to pan for gold on land that had been reserved by the treaty exclusively for indigenous people. The United States went back on the agreement, broke the agreement, redrawing the boundaries of the treaty, and confining the native peoples to lives on the reservation. So can you tell me, Ernie, why the black hills are so integral to the Native Americans? African people. They give them the Black Hills, which is where I live right now, that constitute a spiritual realm. So many people who passed away are buried along the outer edge of some aren't inside. It's like a cemetery, a burial grounds, different places. And to us, it's sacred. Everything about this, because I'll take a step back and tell you about why they call this turtle island.

If you look at the earth from space, it looks like a big turtle. The right leg is a plurril. Florida, and his left hind leg is the Baja Peninsula, California, and his tail curves into the Central America, and its head goes up into Canada. And in the center, the heart of the turtale is the Black Hills. Again, taking another step back is the whole world was underwater. Basically, the Christians have that same concept, Noah and his boat and stuff. Well, on this, there was this water everywhere. And on top of the water was Volkan Khanka, the Great Mystery,

on a buffalo rope. And he was floating on top of the water like a boat. And then he heard a voice call it. Now, each storyteller tells us differently. So he looked up and he seen this. Some say it's an eagle. Some say it's a hawk.

Some say it's a crow. Everybody, depending on each nation, who tells the story, I use the eagle. This eagle was flying above him, and he He said, I'll lend down it to the Creator. He says that he's getting kind of tired of. His wings were getting tired, and he has placed a land, the light. So the Creator reached into his medicine bags, or he had a bag and put up sacred items.

He sent him took out an aloon. He was a little bird. He says, died to the bottom, bring me up some mud. So the loon dove. And he was gone for a while. Come back up and he says, man, he says, I came to the bottom. So he reached in and took out an otter. He says, you're going on.

So he drove. He's gone a little longer. And he came back up and said, man, he said, I can't see the bottom. He said, he took out a beaver. A beaver had a flat tail, so he said, propel yourself to the bottom. So he went. It was gone for all, and he'd come back up. And he says, man, he said, I could see the bottom.

He said, but my lungs were bursting. He said, I couldn't get to it. So he reached in his little bag and took out a turtle. He said, you die up to the bottom. So each time that each one of these guys told me, he had a drum. He had a hand drum. He'd sing sacred song for him. And his turtle, he was gone.

And the other three is sitting with him, said, he drowned. And also he came back up, he had mud all in the craft of his shell and his claws and his hair inside of his shell. So the crater took out some mud. He made a mud patio out of it, put it on top of the water, and clapped his hands, and he turned into land. He became what the United States is, the North American continent is. And then he took other mud pieces out, and made the humans, and put them on there. He stood on it and stomped his foot, and they all became man and woman. He told him, he says, no, he says, live on this island.

He says and take care of it. All living things that grows from it to balance the ecosystem. He says, and you will live. And from then on, he created other animals like the buffalo, the deer, the trees, green growing things. He said, all have a spirit.

He said, always respect and take care of it. He said, take care of nurture this turtala. So that's why we call this Black Hills the heart of the Turtala. See, everything has a story of our creation here. And it's a beautiful story. It's a beautiful way of life. For thousands of years, we lived on is Turtle Island.

We never destroyed. The breaking of the Treaty of Fort Laramie ultimately leads to the battle in 1876. You mentioned the Battle of Greasy Grass, otherwise known as the Battle of Little Bighorn at the beginning. So what is the Lakota's role in this battle? In 1876, when this battle happened, they're already separating the natives. they make promises to them. And you know, they have a lot of these natives that lived around these forts.

They call them hang around the forts. They give them beef to survive on. And then you had the non-treaty Indians, we call them. He's like my grandfather. And Americans call them hostiles. They weren't hostile. They just didn't want to gravitate

toward becoming part of the system of getting handouts from the white man. So they lived all over the areas where the white man feared to come in there because, again, fear. Instead of coming there was peace, they wanted to come and fight them and stuff. But their main goals in this whole existence was gold.

And gold to the Lakota is a worthless iron ore. It has no spiritual value. I mean, a rock has more spiritual value than a piece of gold or gold nugget. But they couldn't understand why an American would kill his own friend or sell his own grandmother's soul would go. And that's what they did. They discovered gold in the Black Hills. Right here where we live, where I live right here, we live in this place.

You used to call home state gold mine. They dug for gold. And they discovered it's gold. And when they did all that treaty thing that they give the Black Hills sacred to the Lakota went out the window. They broke their own treaty. So on the other hand, the word came to all the non-treaty native Sri Labastair. I mean, you talk about the Internet, you talk about the telephones and all this,

the Maccasin telegraph is a lot quicker. All the non-natives know about this in an instant, how they do it. Even now, today, it's still like that. My wife and I was talking about the other day, I said, you do something or say something out here. The people in Eastern South Dakota know what, you know. And they're not using telephones or computers or nothing. and they just know. They call it the Mocococcus and telegraph.

But that's how they knew. And word went out to all non-treating natives. My grandfather sent out. He wanted to do a council with the white man. How do they honor what they said on their treaty? He said he didn't believe that they were going to honor it anyway, but how are they going to protect it? Okay.

But on the other hand, the Americans didn't know about this. They heard that my great-grandfather was calling the meeting. a council. All non-treaty Indians are coming together up in Montana. So they created three columns soldiers, you know, one coming out of Fort Laramie and, you know, you had crew Gibbon, Custer, and all these guys' clusters coming out of Bismarck, North Dakota, to converge and to travel and to annihilate them. That's what their thing was. There's no consul or talking. They just wanted to go battle with them. But my grandfather was, they went up, I guess, way further east of where the big heart was at the beginning, what they called the Roosbund.

The Rosebud Creek was there, river. His camp was there. And the first one to get there was Crook, General Crook. And the crazy horse and his guys chased him out of there. So he went back to Fort Laramie. Well, the camp was getting too big. People were just showing up and they had more horses than they had humans. So the horses were eating up all the grass.

So they wanted to know where they could go to land more grass. And then the food was running short. So they sent Scots out in the poor directions to find a place where the grass is good. And the Scots came back from the west saying that there's a whole huge herd of Angloom along the greasy grass, I mean along the river down there. And the grass was plentiful. So the whole camp moved. And they got to the river and they crossed it and the trees there were the camp.

And they were waiting for others to come so they can hold this council. Well, Custer had left earlier. And he had a force march. He made his men ride day and night to try to encounter the natives. And so that's how the battle started. I mean, that's how it ended up when he came. And he was hot-hitted, he was egotistical. And he wanted to, after he killed off all the Lakota, he was going to be president.

He was a rep for president, you know. Yeah, he had already had division. Right. And he told the people to beware of it. And when Kruk came out, they thought that was division. He said, no. He said, this is not. not the vision, he says, it's coming. While when it came, again, I always emphasized the fact that

women are the wisest of the whole thing. So my grandfather went into his teepee, and he was in his 40s by this time, and he comes out carrying his weapons. And as he walked out of the tepee, his mother was waiting while, and she stopped him. She says, that you have done enough for the people. You have protected, provided. She says, mature. Let the young men show their worth, show their expertise in combat. She says, take the non-combatants to a safe place and, you know, take care of them their children, the old people, and everybody. So he did. He didn't have no, he listened to his mother. See, and this is, this is where, I mean, he already had all these, he had so much, he showed his own bravery on the battlefield, you know, against other natives, and even against the non-native, the white man,

but he listened to his mother and took the non-combatants, took them, So the younger men could do battle with custom. Of course, you know, the union, but again, there was no military thing. It is just each individual has his own style of fighting. They called it guerrilla warfare. I seen that in Vietnam when I was there. The guerrilla, that's how they were. They were guerrilla fighters.

I mean, they didn't fight as groups like the Americans did, like platoons and companies. And you had to follow one guy's orders. He had your own instinct on how to fight. He had your own instinct of knowing where they can hit you from. You had your own instinct of knowing how to do this. And that's what they used with Crook. See, if you read the history books on Crook, General Crook went at the Battle of the Rosebud. He said, man, it was probably 2,000 native lawyers.

But in actual reality, there was probably 60 warriors at the math that went after his column of soldiers for just 2,000 of him. And Crook thought he was a number, but it's guerrified. You hit him in strategic areas of their column, make it look like they're more than usual. And that's what made him turn back, see. And the same way, if you read about the customer, even today, the Custer boss are trying to find out why, or tell stories, why Custer laws? Because he was a great hero. And they said he outnumbered. He was outnumbered, which wasn't true.

But great uncles told me there was probably 6,700 men fighting age at Water Against Custer. There wasn't no 25,000 Indians. They have more horses and people. So the latest one I heard was in this little book that Chris Dixon, he's from Scotland. You know, he wrote this book. He may not have a good friend. You know, he's a professor. And he came and spoke with me many times.

And he wrote this little article about, he interviewed some people and they said, they told him that customer, and the happiest command had simplest. That's what I said. That's a bad little big word. Wow, that's a new one. Oh, gosh, that's definitely a new one. So the colonizers have lost the battle, but they continue to split the Lakota up and move them onto the reservations. Now, your great-grandfather doesn't agree to this.

He doesn't surrender. So what happens next? He was willing to have a council with the Americans, but they were pretty well entrenched in hate because the cluster lost. So he decided to take his non-combatants north, what they called the grandmother's down to Canada. And they crossed into Canada. He came up there, and before they crossed into the Canadian land, the people who lived up there were the Blackfeet people. They call them blood people now. In Canada, they call them Blood people, Blood Nation.

On this side of the border, they call them Blackfeet. And their head man was a guy in Croft. And they know the Lakota and the Blackfeet really were adversaries. But my grandfather went and had counsel with Croftwood, and they sat down and they filled the pipe and they talked. what he wanted to do. He wanted to protect his people because he figured that the Americans were going to annihil them. So he invited him to come across.

So they went across. He asked permission to come across into their land. They didn't look at it as Canadians or Americans. They looked at it as because they lived this land for years, centuries. So he agreed. So they took them in and they fed them, they took care of them and everything. The whole nations, I mean, there's thousands of people that kept showing up. Even after the battle, people kept showing up, non-treaty Indians.

So they followed them north. Aminawala, hulahas, hunknukhazos, you name it. Many different nations came, and they followed them across. But there were so many of them there, the Canadian government, didn't really want them up there because they were over-prouting their people, the Crees, and blood people and everything. So eventually started coming back, these other ones, and surrendering to the government. But my grandfather stayed up there. And he'd be a friend that his name was Major Walsh, James Walsh.

He's a Mali, real Canadian, Maudit police guy. And Walsh taught him how to sign his name and curse him, sitting there. And he shared with him many things, and he became friends. And he did his best to try to keep my grandfather up there. He went to Washington on his behalf, and he did everything. but the Canadian government still didn't want him up there because they considered him a troublemaker. I don't know why.

So, Wallace tried to keep him up there, but didn't help it. So he had to come back. But a lot of them stayed up there. I got a cousin. She still lives up there. She's related to me through Sitting Bull's uncle, Coalhorns. His people are still in Canada. And a place called Woodmont is a reserve for those that didn't come back

with the others. 1881 when he came back in July, surrendered a place called Fort Buford, North Dakota, and that's when they considered him a hostile. Well, on the other hand, they shipped him to Fort Randall, which is in South Dakota here, and the Americans said he was held there in protective custody,

but actually he was held prisoner-of-war, prisoner of being part of the... Because they blamed him for Custer's demise, which he wasn't even in the battle. He just had the vision, you know, of Custer calling the camp of no years. So basically they kept it for a couple of years there. You know, I like to say, a protective customer, he was prisoner, him and his people, until they eventually released him to Standing Rock Reservation, which he never was part of that.

So people from Standing Rock claim, oh, he's our chief, you know, he was and he wasn't. They killed him. His own people up there, there's the ones who murdered. saw. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Before we get to his death, is it true that he joined the Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show? It was right after he was released from Port Mewper, and it shipped him back to Standing Rock, him and his family. And what they did is when he got up along the Grand River there, there's a little cabin.

It was owned by his brother-in-law, Greigel. So he allowed him to stay there. And the whole camp camped with him there. And the first guy that come along was a guy named Alburn Allen. He was a showman. And he heard about this show people doing shows with natives. So he came to Standing Rock, and he inquired to McLaughlin, who was the Indian agent there.

If he could take my great-grandfather and some of his participants on his little trip. I mean, he had to have an agreement. So he did. she allowed him to. So his show, he called it a suitable connection. And they toured the northern hemisphere of the United States, Standing Rock,

which is in North Dakota there, along into northern Minnesota, into Wisconsin, up into the northern parts of Michigan, along the border there, a Canadian border. And then coming back, this is a little trip. It came along the edge of Lake Michigan came into what is now Minneapolis,

Minnesota, and they were doing a show there, and those scientists said, well, come see sitting on all this. That's where he ran into the Annie Oakley. She was a short white with something girl with a great shot with a gun. And she had these big guns that were bigger than she was. She could hit the targets. People threw something down and she hit it. So he was impressed by her, and he said, when he's seen her, she reminded him of his daughter who didn't come with him, her name's Waukes-Looking. And he said, she looked like my daughter, Wawkes-Looking, you know. So he went over and they introduced him.

So they had an interpreter, you know, that talked to both of them. And he says, he was impressed with her, but somebody who was short, that she was such a great shot. And he gave her a pair of moccasins, beaded moccasins as a gift. Because I met this Annie Oakley's great-grand-niece. She passed away now, but she lived in Ohio. She was telling me the story about the moccasins that my grandfather gave her.

And anyhow, he came back to Standing Round, and that's what Cody found out. So he came and asked McLaughlin. So McLaughlin allowed him to do it because he wanted the world, the country to see that Sitting Bull was a savage killer and all this kind of stuff. So he allowed Cody to take it. So they started out east, and by the time they got to halfway across the United States, you know, every time they had a show, people will come and hissed at him, spit at him, and yell derogatory marks at him.

He didn't understand what they're saying, but he couldn't figure out why are they doing this, you know? I mean, he had a whole group of natives with him, they were doing reenactments. And so finally eventually one of the translators came up, and he told my grandfather, he said, that big banner that sits over a gate. But Cody wrote and said,

Come see Sivingville, killer of custom. And they would spit at him and yell at him. So he started to realize that this wasn't really like the Albert Allen. show, you know, that people showed him respect to him. It was just using him as a prop to make money. People were paying money to come see him and they'd boo him and all kinds of stuff. But as he went along, they went further east and they got to the east coast and they were at the city, what they called the city of Brother Lee La, which is Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And they were there

and people of Philadelphia came and wanted to show him the city of Brother De La. So him and his group, they took Amali to the streets. And they were walking down the streets. And the minute they walked down the street, all these little white kids come out, they were dirty-faced, raggedy clothing, hungry, and they were begging for food. My grandfather was shocked.

He says, wow. Lakota, we call our children Wakansha, which is short for Wakunt Ichakar. Something sacred is growing. It never goes hungry, cold, or anything. You treat it in a little child because it's the feature of your people, the future of your nation.

And he couldn't understand what the white man was letting his children be beggars on the street. So the next day, he used to sign his name and cursed him, and they gave him $2. Take a picture of him to give $2. He had all this money. He had no use for it because La Carta people had no value for this piece of money or this gold coins. And then he got all this food together that they operated him. And next day, they went out on the street again, and he handed out all this food to these little kids and no money. He handed him out.

He said, by the time he got to two blocks down the road, he had it. He's like the Pied Piper, you know, had a thousand kids following him, you know, because and it's an article in the newspaper, you know, a friend of mine asked, he said, this really happened? And I said, our old story tells us. So he looked at it up, and he went to the archives of the Philadelphia newspapers. He put on this little article in the Philadelphia newspaper that had him on there doing this, you know, giving out money and food to the homeless kids or the little raggedy kids on the street

and blankets and stuff he gave them. And so he said, you really got to see, yeah, by the time he got back to Standing Rock, the American people respected him, they honored him for what he did. So the McLaughlin guy wouldn't let him go no more because he was, he turned the tables on him. He wanted the people to see what kind of savage he was. Turns out he was a respectable human being, you know, who cared for everybody, all children and stuff. So that's how come he didn't get to go to the second time. Only one trip was, Cody.

So he has returned to Standing Rock, and you mentioned a minute ago that his death was precipitated by the native people there. Can you tell us about that and about the vision that he has of this? Right after he came back from the Cody thing, the people were getting kind of, I guess, at the end of their rope, they were losing hope. And these two guys, chicken bear and shortbow was two native guys. And they heard about this guy who sent out word to all the nations. all people, the world, I mean, the United States. His name was Waboka. He was a Paiute Indian in Nevada.

He had a message. He had a vision. So they went to see what this was about. Even all religions showed up. Different Christian religions, the Mormons came and everybody. So they went to see this guy. He was a Paiute Indian. He's dressed in American clothes.

And he had this big black top hat. And it was a Beaver felt top hat. And he took it off and he showed him. the people that was there that inside this hat, he said he looked in there and he seen what the future of the world was like in the people, the country here, that all human beings would get along with each other, that they lived in harmony with one another inside this hat. And this was what he wanted to share to him. He says, you have to do this.

Wow, everybody sat there and listened to this. And, you know, most of these guys didn't really, especially the non-native ones, didn't really believe this, that he could look inside of a hat and see this. So he shared with them what they should do and all that. Well, these two guys kicking back short boat on their way back. See, they're on horses, you know, and they had a camp. So they're coming back, and they had to conjured up this story. See, their story was that they had to make certain items, a ghost shirt.

This ghost shirt had certain designs on her. And this idea was sprung from the Mormons. The Mormons had wear underwear. It's supposed to protect them, you know, the shirt and underwear, you know, that's certain ways that's supposed to help them understand the creation or something. I don't know what it's all about, but they took that idea and incorporated into the ghost that shirt. And then they created these songs coming back. And by the time they got the Wood River Indian Reservation in Wyoming or amongst Arapaho, they had it down pat. Because it took them, you know, days to get back here from Nevada.

And they told them, this is what they've seen. So it's not like the Sundance, but it's a ghost dance, you know, what they call the ghost dance. It's not a Lakota or Native Ceremony. These two guys have made this up. And these guys, the dance around this tree. It's sort of a tree, and they dance around singing these songs. They have these ghost shirts. They said these ghost shirts that protect you against the white man's bullets.

And if you do this, he said, all the white man will disappear. And the Buffalo knows that they kill will come back to life. It's what they told them. And they brought that back here. And they started this ghost dance craze. in 1890s. And it was going, and behind Sitting Bull's cabin on the Grand River, the people were doing this ghost dancing. And he couldn't understand what the heck they're doing. Well, he didn't really approve of it, but he couldn't say no to them because they're hanging on by the end of the rope. They didn't know

what to do with themselves because they killed off the buffalo. They took away all the ways to survive as humans. So he allowed him to do it. We started getting out of hand because people dancing on this tree and they'd follow him. And he said, we've got to do something about this.

It was in 1890. As he's walking along there, there's a little brook there. He stopped by his little brook and all of a sudden this meadowlark came along. And so meadowlark is a bird, the yellow chest.

And he was added next to him there by the little brook there and started drinking some of the water. And he looked at him and he looked at my grandfather and said, And Lakota, he said, Lakota, he said, Lakota, he Nikhtepikhta, he took up. He said, the Lakota people will kill you. And he said it twice, and took L'u-la.

So he said, he was trying to figure out, why would they want to kill me? Because I took care of him, fed him, protected him. And I'm still trying my best to try to do this. So he kept trying his best how to do this. And then it was fall. And then he's having counseled with his group of people there telling them, We need to do something because these people are dancing even in the wintertime, the cold. And he said, well, you know, this thing is into Pynarage agency, the South, Nogalas.

So he said, well, I'm going on there and have counsel with Red Cloud. They touch him to under, you know, and ask him, how can we get together and stop this, ghost dancing? People are just dying all over from this. Well, all this time before when he was doing this, told meetings he had his nephew there. And one of his nephews, his name was One Bull. And one bull was told by McLaughlin that he would give him so much gifts and stuff if he would tell him what the council meeting, what's said in his council meetings. So east of the camp, there was a little place called Little Eagle.

And there was a schoolhouse. School teacher had a telegraph. So one bull would go over there every night after every council meeting and tell this school teacher who spoke Lakota. So he would tell him what this is. So he telegraphed McLaughlin and tell him what the office. at the time with the plans that they were doing. And sitting ball started to realize, start to figure out, you know, this guy here is knowing everything I'm doing.

You know, how is he doing this, right? Well, he had a meeting and said he was going to have meeting. And McLaughlin Day went to sitting bull to leave the Standing Rock area. I kept him pretty much corral with no fence. And he wanted to go have meeting with Kyle with the Red Clown. So one boy went over to what little he goes to the schoolhouse, and the guy wasn't there. So from there, he wrote himself all the way to pull.

Forty-eight, North Dakota, to bring the message that Sitting Bull was leaving the next day to visit Red Cloud. But he didn't say it in their words, but, you know, kind of like the planning something, you know, kind of a deal. Actually, he was just trying to figure out how to stop the ghost dancing. And he wrote, and my mother said he rode that horse, he killed that horse, rode it to death. And he ran the rest of the way, got back into his teepee before he was missed. Just as he got back, gone was breaking in the Indian police. He had a teepee. He was next to the cabin. He snuck back in his teepee and then the Indian police showed up trying to arrest Sitting Bull. And the Strong Hearts, which was the protectors of my great

grandfather, they came out and told him not to go to resist because they figured they were trying to, they were going to kill him. And, you know, he just wanted to go find out why McLaughlin wanted him arrest. While then the shot broke out and they read Tomahawk and bullhead. So two guys who shot him. One shot him in head, one shot him in the heart, and they killed him. So all this came out with the ghost dance. So Sitting Bull is shot dead in December 1890, but his story lives on, particularly with you. Now, any final words on this subject for us today? I just wish that people will listen to someone by words that go fear, because fear is what makes people follow a leader, as they call it. They're a guy they choose to believe them. And all that leader does is it just wants to conquer people, conquer.

everything, the people don't realize that what's coming from the future is the most heinous thing in the eyes of some people. With me, it's their souls. I respect their souls. Like you, Don, everybody that I met. I look, I don't look at you outside. I look at your soul. I could see it. We all knew each other one time. We all came from the same place. And we come in different areas of the world, but we were all at one time spirits of the creator. And we come in, we come, and we're in, having a body that comes from Mother Earth. And Mother Earth is really doesn't want to destroy her children again. But we're head for it. What's purification? We're going to have a new world. But I didn't ask the Creator, are we going to have people again? And the souls of these

people who have hate, greed, racism, fear, that's what he is, are going to be on this earth screaming and hollering for eternity. There's no heaven or hell in our world. The only thing we have in the spirit world and what you create for yourself. Hell is what you create for yourself. If you let go of fear, you see how people can get along with just laughter and kindness instead of fear. Like I was taught as a child growing old, my mother told me to find myself. Chama'a, she says, you know, playing yourself on your inside. Listen to the stories of your elders. Take a little piece of their story. Incorporated in who you are. Create who you are. Be perfect in who you are. Ernie LaPointe. Besides being Sitting Bull's great grandson is a sun dancer, a veteran of Vietnam, and the author of Sitting Bull, his life and legacy. Thank you, Ernie. It's been great to talk with you again. Listeners, I will see you again soon.

Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements, to some of the big. battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.