Kicking Bear

Kicking Bear in the spring of 1891

Kicking Bear , Indian called Mato Wanaxtaka or Mato Wanartaka , (born March 18, 1846 somewhere in the plains of Nebraska , † May 28, 1904 in Manderson-White Horse Creek , Oglala Lakota County , Pine Ridge Reservation , South Dakota ) was a chief and medicine man of the Oglala - ( Minneconjou ) - Lakota - Sioux , who historically played a role in the life of his people. He stood out in particular as a major leader in the spirit dance movement of the Northern Plains Indians of 1890.

Origin and becoming

Kicking Bear belonged to a respected Lakota clan from which such famous chiefs as Sitting Bull (1831–1890) and Crazy Horse (1839–1877) came; Sitting Bull was an uncle and Crazy Horse was his cousin. His father was the chief Black Fox (1800-1880), also called Great Kicking Bear, his mother Iron Cedar Woman, a sister of the mother of Crazy Horse, Rattling Blanket Woman (1814-1844). Black Fox was married to another woman and so Kicking Bear had many siblings, including Flying Hawk (1852-1931), who was also chief and who later became quite well known for depictions of his life and Indian culture and history.

It is not known exactly where Kicking Bear was born. He was given some of the free life of the Plains Indians and as a young warrior he will have fought a lot against hostile Indians. At some point he married Woodpecker (Specht) Woman, a relative (daughter or niece) of the Minneconjou chief Big Foot (1815-1890); The marriage is said to have had three children. His wedding present was a herd of horses that he had stolen from the Crow , the traditional enemy of the Sioux alongside the Pawnee .

With the Minneconjou, Kicking Bear then became chief of a group of young warriors and, as such, fought against the advance of the Americans in the northern plains over the next few years. In the Red Cloud War he will certainly have taken part in many confrontations with his warriors, such as in the Battle of the Hundred Slain , called the Fetterman Battle by the Whites, where Crazy Horse also participated.

Battle of Little Bighorn painted by Kicking Bear in 1898

Kicking Bear's participation in the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876 is absolutely certain, and decades later he created an impressive picture of himself standing in a row with the chiefs Sitting Bull, Rain in the Face and Crazy Horse Has. Another testimony to his participation in this battle is a picture of Amos Bad Heart Bull depicting the fight against Reno's battalion, from which the battle began with an attack on the large Sioux village. In a description of the pictures, probably after Helen Heather Blish , Stanley mentions Vestal Kicking Bear among the three Indians who were the first to meet Reno's soldiers: The three who met them first were Kicking Bear, Hard to Hit, and Bad Heart Buffalo. And yet another confirmation of this can be found in another source, according to which Kicking Bear is said to have killed the Arikaree Bloody Knife with a headshot, which is known to have been killed early in this part of the fight. (The shot at Bloody Knife, Custer's most prominent Indian scout, was quite disastrous for the rest of the scene, because parts of his brain splashed in the face of Major Reno, who lost his nerve and hastily ordered a renewed retreat, which turned into a wild and loss-making escape.)

Reservation and ghost dance

After Little Bighorn, the Sioux were forced within a year to take the bitter route to the reservation. Kicking Bear lived in the Great Sioux Reservation from 1877 . (In 1889 this area was cut into seven parts and from then on he lived on the Cheyenne River Reservation .) In 1880, Chief Black Fox was killed by an arrow shot during a confrontation with Crow Indians, suggesting that there was life the Sioux had not yet fundamentally changed everything in the reservation and they were still in battle with their enemies.

But in the course of time the living conditions for the Lakota got worse and worse: the amounts of beef promised by the government agencies were often drastically cut and in a few years there were no crops in South Dakota due to drought, so that the Indians often went hungry. Persistent malnutrition resulted in many illnesses such as flu and whooping cough, and child mortality was very high. All this made the Lakota think that they should be systematically exterminated. When they heard in 1889 that far in the west among the Paiute a prophet was proclaiming the return of the old days, they hoped to find salvation from their predicament with this man. So they sent a delegation to the prophet Wovoka in Nevada to inquire, which included Kicking Bear, his friend and brother-in-law Short Bull, and about seven other people. And Wovoka taught them to dance in a certain way with which they should achieve salvation, and afterwards they returned and introduced the so-called ghost dance all over the reservations from around April 1890, in which they wore ghost dance shirts, the were provided with signs and symbols and should therefore be bulletproof. Since they soon gave the dance a martial form that did not go back to Wovoka, they were accused (and often especially Kicking Bear) of not having correctly understood the prophet and therefore falsifying it, which, however, according to the German ethnologist Wolfgang Haberland (1922–) can be ruled out with certainty and who blames the Lakota nature for it.

When the dance spread wildly among the Lakota, including many other Indian tribes, it was soon banned by nervous government officials, but hardly anyone obeyed. The atmosphere became more and more tense, and when Kicking Bear came to Sitting Bull's Standing Rock Reservation in the fall to teach the ghost dance there, he was soon forcibly removed from the reservation by Indian policemen on the instructions of the agent, something for them was not so easy, as it filled her prisoner's sacred aura with great awe. But such police operations were not very effective and so the uncomprehending government officials soon called in the military to finally eliminate the ghost dance, which they found uncanny. When this became known, many groups fled to remote areas, including Kicking Bear and Short Bull, who went to the Badlands with their more than 3000 followers .

The imprisoned Lakota leaders in Fort Sheridan in 1891: Kicking Bear sitting in the middle of the bottom row, with Short Bull lying next to him

Events escalated in December 1890: On the 15th, Sitting Bull, who had nothing to do with the ghost dance movement but was considered one of its leaders, was shot in the Standing Rock Reservation and two weeks later the massacre at Wounded Knee took place, with which the "dangerous" appearance of the spirit dance was officially eliminated. - On January 16, 1891, Kicking Bear and Short Bull together with their people surrendered to the troops of General Nelson A. Miles (1839-1925); Kicking Bear is said to have personally presented the general with his rifle. They were then imprisoned along with other leaders at Fort Sheridan near Chicago , Illinois . After an intervention by Buffalo Bill alias William Frederick Cody, they were offered exemption from prison if they would join his Wild West Show , which was soon to go to Europe, for some time. She and other Lakota agreed, and so they soon got to know a completely different world.

Europe and the last few years

In April 1891, the Wild West Show left America from Philadelphia on the Red Star Line's steamship Switzerland for Europe. The tour began in Belgium and then went through Holland , Great Britain and Germany, among others . Whatever the impressions in these countries for Kicking Bear, he found the Wild West Show itself to be degrading for himself and all Indians and did everything to end this unfortunate activity as soon as possible. And then he succeeded in influencing the other Lakota in this sense - Nate Salsbury, an employee of Cody, calls him rebellious and unrestrained (turbulent and lawless), and so the Wild West Show had to end prematurely and returned to the March 1892 returned to America.

The Fort Dearborn Massacre Monument: The figure on the right is Kicking Bear, the figure on the left is Short Bull

Since the Lakota prison term had not expired, they had to stay in Fort Sheridan for some time. There Kicking Bear and Short Bull stood the Danish-American sculptor Carl Rohl-Smith (1848-1900) model for a group of figures of the Fort Dearborn Massacre Monument, which was based on a dramatic event (Battle of Fort Dearborn) in 1812 between US troops and Potawatomi should remember and was set up in Chicago . Kicking Bear represents the chief Black Patridge in the group, who prevents the attack of a warrior (Short Bull) on a white woman (Margaret Helm). In addition, Rohl-Smith created a bronze bust of Kicking Bear.

Kicking Bear (seated right) in an 1896 group shot with Little Wound next to him

After his release, Kicking Bear settled in the Pine Ridge Reservation, where he also worked politically. In March 1896, for example, he traveled to Washington as a member of a three-person delegation and complained massively about the desolate conditions in Pine Ridge; his violent protests have been recorded in minutes.

In 1898, Kicking Bear painted the Battle of Little Bighorn , a rather impressive work that showed that there was also an artist in this man, who must have been a warrior all his life. (This work is of truly cosmic proportions, a vortex of erupting image discharges in a single condensed representation. It is thus the counterpart to a work by the Minneconjou chief Red Horse [1822–1907], who wrote a series of 41 sheets on this subject Kicking Bear's work was inspired by the American painter and sculptor Frederic Remington (1861-1909), who must have been very impressed by the personality of this Indian.

After his death in May 1904, Kicking Bear was buried somewhere near Manderson-White Horse Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

literature

• Werner Müller : Indian world experience , Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-608-93172-4
• Wolfgang Haberland, Frederick Weygold : Ich, Dakota: Pine Ridge Reservation 1909 , Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1986 ISBN 3-496-01038-X
• Dee Brown : Bury my heart at the bend of the river , Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg 1972, ISBN 3-455-00720-1
• Sam A. Madra: Hostiles ?: The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 , University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2008
• Kingsley M. Bray: Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life , University of Oklahoma Press, Lincoln 2006
• Peter Wild, Donald A. Barcley, James H. Maguire: Different Travelers, Different Eyes: Artists' Narratives of the American West, 1820-1920 , TCU Press, Fort Worth 2001
• LG Moses: Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians 1893–1933 , University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1996

Web links

Commons : Kicking Bear  - Collection of Images

Remarks

1. ^ Kingsley M. Bray: Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life (2006), p. 220
2. ↑ Among the Lakota, the ghost dance soon took a different turn; it became more militant according to their nature. It has not yet been clarified whether the many intermediate stages in the transmission played a role, the desperate situation or certain visions. It can be ruled out with certainty that the members of the delegation who had been with Wovoka falsified his commandments. (after Wolfgang Haberland in Ich, Dakota: Pine Ridge Reservation 1909 , [1986], page 41)
3. ↑ Dee Brown: Bury My Heart at the Bend of the River (1972), 419
4. ^ Terminus by Werner Müller in his book Indian World Experience in the chapter Image and Thought on page 68