By JOE DUGGAN / Lincoln Journal Star JournalStar.com | Posted: Saturday, November 20, 2010 11:30 pm |
A Wikipedia understanding of early relations between the Pawnee Nation and the United States says they got along fine.
After all, the Pawnee never declared war on the white government. Some even volunteered as scouts to assist the U.S. Army's war against the Lakota, Arapaho and Cheyenne, with whom the Pawnee had a history of conflict.
But conventional history oversimplifies reality, said James Riding In, a Pawnee and scholar who teaches at Arizona State University.
"I'm going to talk about some of the hard truths about why we are no longer here," he said last week during a public lecture in Lincoln that clashed with conventional views and challenged the so-called benevolent attitude Nebraska's settlers and their leaders held of the Pawnee.
It was the second in a series called "We the People, The Nebraska Viewpoint," which is sponsored by the Nebraska State Historical Society and partially funded by the Nebraska Humanities Council. Each of the nine lectures in the series will explore issues of civil rights and civil liberties.
The series takes its name from the U.S. Constitution, but rights and protections in the nation's most venerated legal document did not extend to the first Nebraskans.
"In the mindset of white America in the 19th century, Indian people stood outside the scope of humanity," Riding In said. "They were unworthy of respect and dignity."
Centuries before the arrival of settlers in the early 1800s, the four bands that made up the Pawnee Nation occupied a massive territory that extended from what would become north central Kansas through all of central Nebraska. They lived in towns consisting of earthen lodges. They farmed and hunted bison and other game.
At their peak, the Pawnee numbered at least 15,000, Riding In said, making them a force on the Great Plains. And they were unwilling to accept the blatant trespassing and land squatting by whites that ensued after the Lewis and Clark Expedition ended in 1806.
Pawnee leaders tried to appeal to Washington, D.C. In 1822, a chief named Saritsarish even made his case in person to President James Monroe, Riding In said.
"We have plenty of land if you will keep your people off it," Saritsarish told the president.
In 1831, a smallpox epidemic devastated the Pawnee, cutting their population by half, according to a 1999 article in Great Plains Quarterly by David Wishart, geography professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of "An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians."
Despite their military alliance with the U.S. Army, individual Pawnees continued to suffer at the hands of settlers, soldiers and Lakota war parties. By 1857, their population had dropped to under 3,000 and they had ceded their land to the government, although early on, Riding In contended, the government took more than the Pawnee agreed upon.
Finally, the Pawnee abandoned their Nebraska towns and moved to a reservation in Nance County under management of Quaker agents.
As more whites poured into Nebraska, the Pawnee and other Natives were increasingly characterized as bloodthirsty savages. Yet in his presentation, Riding In noted numerous cases of white violence against Pawnees.
In one of the most egregious examples, two settlers near Columbus shot a Pawnee elder for no reason other than to test the killing power of a newly purchased pistol. Despite identifying the killers, authorities refused to prosecute them.
But the Pawnee quickly learned the criminal justice system worked differently when a white died at the hands of Natives. Nothing better illustrated this disparity than what became known as the Yellow Sun case.
Yellow Sun was a Pawnee elder, reputed to be a medicine man, Wishart wrote. In the spring of 1869, he joined a group of Pawnees at a horse camp on a large, off-reservation island in the Platte River, not far from Columbus.
On June 20, 1869, the body of Edward McMurty, a white settler who had disappeared six weeks earlier, was found tethered to a log in a pond on the island. An autopsy showed he had been shot and stabbed multiple times, his ears and nose cut off and an arrow stuck through his throat.
The Pawnees' Quaker agents threatened to withhold their annuities -- payments used for food and clothing for the entire community -- if tribal leaders did not turn over suspects. The threat led to the arrest of Yellow Sun and three other Pawnees named Blue Hawk, Little Wolf and Horse Driver. A federal grand jury in Omaha indicted them on murder charges.
U.S. District Judge Elmer Dundy, who, 10 years later, would preside over the famed Chief Standing Bear trial, oversaw the Yellow Sun prosecution.
Government prosecutors produced no physical or eyewitness evidence linking the accused to the crime, and the men maintained their innocence. But they were convicted on Nov. 10, 1869.
The Omaha Herald, which covered the trial, called it a "mockery of justice" and reported the evidence would have been insufficient to convict a chicken thief.
But before the four Pawnees could be hanged, U.S. Circuit Court Judge John Dillion ruled the federal government didn't have jurisdiction because the murder occurred off the reservation. So the judge ordered them to stand trial a second time in state court.
Months of delays followed and the prosecution lost its only witness, a settler who said she saw a group of unidentified Natives on horseback chasing a white man on the island. Finally, in late 1871, two years after they had been arrested, the men were freed and the charges dropped.
All four died within months of their release, Riding In said, due largely to the inhumane treatment they received while in custody.
McMurty's killers will never be known. But years later an account surfaced of a Pawnee named Shooting Star, who made a deathbed confession to the murder after catching the settler stealing horses.
But the lesson to the Pawnee was clear.
"The noose of white dictatorship tightened," Riding In said.
Unwilling to assimilate to a new culture and religion, the Pawnee grew increasingly weary of the hostility they faced on all sides by their white oppressors. Whites frequently trespassed on the reservation, stealing timber, a highly valuable commodity on the Plains.
"When I lay down to sleep I have to lay my head on my revolver to save my life and property," said Pitaresaru, a Pawnee leader.
Another, Terrecawa, said, "We are surrounded by pale faces and cannot go out and kill game, and we want to go south and be free."
In October 1874, most Pawnee left Nebraska for Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Their population dwindled to a low point of 600 in the 1890s.
Now, the Pawnee Nation numbers about 3,000, Riding In said. Many live in the Oklahoma city that bears their name.
Their dealings with their former home state remained contentious throughout the 1980s and 1990s, largely over burial remains and artifacts. The Pawnee waged a successful legal battle against the historical society and later used state and federal laws to reclaim the remains of ancestors held by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
But more recently, the Pawnee have witnessed welcome gestures from the land of their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers.
Roger Welsch, the well-known author, has given his Loup River farm to the Pawnee, making them landowners once again in Nebraska. The past two summers, Pawnee dancers have returned for powwows at the Great Platte River Road Archway near Kearney.
And just a week ago, the same historical society that once bitterly refused to return Native skeletons to their descendants invited a Pawnee scholar to teach Nebraskans some hard truths.
A Wikipedia understanding of early relations between the Pawnee Nation and the United States says they got along fine.
After all, the Pawnee never declared war on the white government. Some even volunteered as scouts to assist the U.S. Army's war against the Lakota, Arapaho and Cheyenne, with whom the Pawnee had a history of conflict.
But conventional history oversimplifies reality, said James Riding In, a Pawnee and scholar who teaches at Arizona State University.
"I'm going to talk about some of the hard truths about why we are no longer here," he said last week during a public lecture in Lincoln that clashed with conventional views and challenged the so-called benevolent attitude Nebraska's settlers and their leaders held of the Pawnee.
It was the second in a series called "We the People, The Nebraska Viewpoint," which is sponsored by the Nebraska State Historical Society and partially funded by the Nebraska Humanities Council. Each of the nine lectures in the series will explore issues of civil rights and civil liberties.
The series takes its name from the U.S. Constitution, but rights and protections in the nation's most venerated legal document did not extend to the first Nebraskans.
"In the mindset of white America in the 19th century, Indian people stood outside the scope of humanity," Riding In said. "They were unworthy of respect and dignity."
Centuries before the arrival of settlers in the early 1800s, the four bands that made up the Pawnee Nation occupied a massive territory that extended from what would become north central Kansas through all of central Nebraska. They lived in towns consisting of earthen lodges. They farmed and hunted bison and other game.
At their peak, the Pawnee numbered at least 15,000, Riding In said, making them a force on the Great Plains. And they were unwilling to accept the blatant trespassing and land squatting by whites that ensued after the Lewis and Clark Expedition ended in 1806.
Pawnee leaders tried to appeal to Washington, D.C. In 1822, a chief named Saritsarish even made his case in person to President James Monroe, Riding In said.
"We have plenty of land if you will keep your people off it," Saritsarish told the president.
In 1831, a smallpox epidemic devastated the Pawnee, cutting their population by half, according to a 1999 article in Great Plains Quarterly by David Wishart, geography professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of "An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians."
Despite their military alliance with the U.S. Army, individual Pawnees continued to suffer at the hands of settlers, soldiers and Lakota war parties. By 1857, their population had dropped to under 3,000 and they had ceded their land to the government, although early on, Riding In contended, the government took more than the Pawnee agreed upon.
Finally, the Pawnee abandoned their Nebraska towns and moved to a reservation in Nance County under management of Quaker agents.
As more whites poured into Nebraska, the Pawnee and other Natives were increasingly characterized as bloodthirsty savages. Yet in his presentation, Riding In noted numerous cases of white violence against Pawnees.
In one of the most egregious examples, two settlers near Columbus shot a Pawnee elder for no reason other than to test the killing power of a newly purchased pistol. Despite identifying the killers, authorities refused to prosecute them.
But the Pawnee quickly learned the criminal justice system worked differently when a white died at the hands of Natives. Nothing better illustrated this disparity than what became known as the Yellow Sun case.
Yellow Sun was a Pawnee elder, reputed to be a medicine man, Wishart wrote. In the spring of 1869, he joined a group of Pawnees at a horse camp on a large, off-reservation island in the Platte River, not far from Columbus.
On June 20, 1869, the body of Edward McMurty, a white settler who had disappeared six weeks earlier, was found tethered to a log in a pond on the island. An autopsy showed he had been shot and stabbed multiple times, his ears and nose cut off and an arrow stuck through his throat.
The Pawnees' Quaker agents threatened to withhold their annuities -- payments used for food and clothing for the entire community -- if tribal leaders did not turn over suspects. The threat led to the arrest of Yellow Sun and three other Pawnees named Blue Hawk, Little Wolf and Horse Driver. A federal grand jury in Omaha indicted them on murder charges.
U.S. District Judge Elmer Dundy, who, 10 years later, would preside over the famed Chief Standing Bear trial, oversaw the Yellow Sun prosecution.
Government prosecutors produced no physical or eyewitness evidence linking the accused to the crime, and the men maintained their innocence. But they were convicted on Nov. 10, 1869.
The Omaha Herald, which covered the trial, called it a "mockery of justice" and reported the evidence would have been insufficient to convict a chicken thief.
But before the four Pawnees could be hanged, U.S. Circuit Court Judge John Dillion ruled the federal government didn't have jurisdiction because the murder occurred off the reservation. So the judge ordered them to stand trial a second time in state court.
Months of delays followed and the prosecution lost its only witness, a settler who said she saw a group of unidentified Natives on horseback chasing a white man on the island. Finally, in late 1871, two years after they had been arrested, the men were freed and the charges dropped.
All four died within months of their release, Riding In said, due largely to the inhumane treatment they received while in custody.
McMurty's killers will never be known. But years later an account surfaced of a Pawnee named Shooting Star, who made a deathbed confession to the murder after catching the settler stealing horses.
But the lesson to the Pawnee was clear.
"The noose of white dictatorship tightened," Riding In said.
Unwilling to assimilate to a new culture and religion, the Pawnee grew increasingly weary of the hostility they faced on all sides by their white oppressors. Whites frequently trespassed on the reservation, stealing timber, a highly valuable commodity on the Plains.
"When I lay down to sleep I have to lay my head on my revolver to save my life and property," said Pitaresaru, a Pawnee leader.
Another, Terrecawa, said, "We are surrounded by pale faces and cannot go out and kill game, and we want to go south and be free."
In October 1874, most Pawnee left Nebraska for Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Their population dwindled to a low point of 600 in the 1890s.
Now, the Pawnee Nation numbers about 3,000, Riding In said. Many live in the Oklahoma city that bears their name.
Their dealings with their former home state remained contentious throughout the 1980s and 1990s, largely over burial remains and artifacts. The Pawnee waged a successful legal battle against the historical society and later used state and federal laws to reclaim the remains of ancestors held by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
But more recently, the Pawnee have witnessed welcome gestures from the land of their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers.
Roger Welsch, the well-known author, has given his Loup River farm to the Pawnee, making them landowners once again in Nebraska. The past two summers, Pawnee dancers have returned for powwows at the Great Platte River Road Archway near Kearney.
And just a week ago, the same historical society that once bitterly refused to return Native skeletons to their descendants invited a Pawnee scholar to teach Nebraskans some hard truths.
