The Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude to Indian Reform. By Valerie Sherer Mathes and Richard Lowitt. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xii, 211 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-252-02852-X.)

Abstract

When he left the tribe's reservation in Indian Territory in 1879, the Ponca chief Standing Bear accidentally “walked into history” (p. 1). He and other Poncas were arrested as they returned to their traditional Nebraska-Dakota homeland, a place they had been forced to leave two years earlier. For Standing Bear, the return was especially painful; he was honoring a promise to his stricken teenage son to bury him on Ponca land. But Standing Bear's journey had larger consequences. It soon became a dramatic national story, pitting a small and peaceful tribe against a divided and seemingly cruel federal bureaucracy. As Valerie Sherer Mathes and Richard Lowitt clearly explain, Standing Bear's walk produced a series of events that soon had a major effect on Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes, writer-turned-reformer Helen Hunt Jackson, and a host of Boston reformers. Most important, these events eventually “changed the lives of thousands of Indians whose future would be determined in part by the dramatic shifts in federal Indian policy” (p. 9).