Standing Bear: the man who forced the courts to say “an Indian is a person” In the winter of 1879, Ponca chief Standing Bear (Maⁿchú-Naⁿzhíⁿ) walked more than five hundred miles through snow with a small party of his people and the remains of his son. The Ponca were a small Siouan people of the central Plains, closely related to the Omaha. For generations they had lived in earth-lodge villages along the Niobrara River in northeastern Nebraska, raising maize and hunting bison on lands that treaties once recognized as theirs. Two years earlier the United States had forced the entire tribe from those lands and driven them into Indian Territory. In 1877 a treaty error transferred their territory to the Lakota. Federal authorities then ordered the Ponca removed to present-day Oklahoma. When the chiefs rejected the land shown them, the army forced the relocation. Houses, tools, and livestock were seized. Standing Bear’s daughter Prairie Flower died on the journey. Nearly a third of the people died of disease and starvation within two years. Among the dead was his sixteen-year-old son, Bear Shield. On his deathbed the boy asked to be buried with his grandfathers on the Niobrara. Standing Bear promised. In January 1879 he and about thirty others left without permission, carrying the remains, and walked north. When they reached the Omaha Reservation, exhausted, the army arrested them. General George Crook delayed the order to send them back. He allowed a newspaper editor to interview Standing Bear. Two attorneys filed a writ of habeas corpus. The government argued that an Indian was not a “person” under the law and had no standing to seek the writ. At the close of the hearing Standing Bear rose, held out his right hand, and spoke through an interpreter: “That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man. The same God made us both.” He described a vision of his family standing before a rising river. A steep path led to the Niobrara, but one man stood in the way with soldiers behind him. He looked at the judge and said: “You are that man.” On 12 May 1879 Judge Elmer S. Dundy ruled that an Indian is a person within the meaning of American law and entitled to the writ of habeas corpus. Standing Bear and his companions were released. The ruling did not undo every injustice. It did establish, for the first time in federal court, that Native people were persons under the law. Standing Bear buried his son. A portion of the Niobrara land was later restored. He lived out his years there and was buried among his people in 1908. He kept his word to his son and, in the process, forced a court to say what should have been plain: we are all people, no matter the color of our skin.