Land of the Spotted Eagle by Luther Standing Bear

And the body had a soul, also formed and moulded by the same master hand of harmony. With a physique that fitted, the man developed fitting skills-crafts which today are called American. He once grew a naturally as the wild sunflowers he belongs just as the buffalo belonged. He fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings. The American Indian is of the soil, whether it be the region of forests, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He is the man who through centuries has been moulded and sculped by the same hand that shaped its mountains, forests, and plains, and marked the course of its rivers. THE feathered and blanketed figure of the American Indian has come to symbolize the American continent.

S.: 1900–2000 Indian Political Life Indian Reorganization Act Wild West Show. See also Carlisle Indian School Indian Policy, U. A year after the publication of The Land of the Spotted Eagle, Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), legislation designed to return to Native Americans control of reservation resources, reduce disproportionately high unemployment rates, and restore the administrative authority of individual tribes. The author of four books about the effects of governmental negligence on Indian life, Luther Standing Bear was a member of the National League for Justice to the American Indian, a former star in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and an actor in several Hollywood motion pictures.

Much of his writing addresses the inequities and injustices of a system that consigned Indians to life on reservations without adequate schools, housing, or medicine. A hereditary chief of the Dakotas, and one of the first students to attend the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, Luther Standing Bear (born Ota Kte) was an advocate for reform in the United States government's often neglectful policies toward Native Americans.

EXCERPT FROM LAND OF THE SPOTTED EAGLE (1933, by Luther Standing Bear)įor many Americans in the early twentieth century, the problems of Native Americans too often seemed distant concerns.

Land of the Spotted Eagle by Luther Standing Bear