Whose Image?

In the spring of 1879, Standing Bear, a chief of the Ponca, a Native American people whose homeland lay along the Niobrara River in Nebraska, stood before a federal judge in Omaha. He had come because he wanted to bury his son.

Two years earlier, the United States government had forcibly removed the Ponca people to Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. Disease and deprivation followed. Standing Bear’s son, Bear Shield, died there. His father had promised to bury him in the land of his ancestors, so Standing Bear set out with a small group, carrying his son’s remains hundreds of miles north through the winter.

They reached the reservation of their relatives, the Omaha, but federal officials ordered their arrest. The Army held them at Fort Omaha for return to Indian Territory. General George Crook, who was responsible for their detention, came to sympathize with them. With the help of a newspaperman and two attorneys, Standing Bear challenged his imprisonment in federal court.

The government’s…