Tatanka Yotanka

[2008]
Music by Olgostin
Album: The Story of History

« If we must die, we die defending our rights » Tȟatȟaŋka Yotȟaŋka said.



Born in present-day South Dakota, Tȟatȟaŋka Iyotȟaŋka (Sitting Bull) became a political, military and spiritual leader of the Sioux tribe. As a young warrior and later chief of the northern Sioux, he advocated firm resistance to white encroachment and settlement. Accustomed to a nomadic life of hunting, the Sioux fought attempts to force them onto cramped reservations. In 1868, Sitting Bull made peace with the U.S. Army in exchange for a sizable reservation free of white settlers. In the mid-1870s, however, an influx of gold prospectors and railroad crews outraged the Sioux, who left the reservation and joined with the Cheyenne and Arapaho in a renewed campaign of resistance.
In the summer of 1876, the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry under Custer tracked down and attacked the Sioux / Cheyenne camp at Little Big Horn, Montana, but the vastly superior Indian forces killed all 260 of Custer's soldiers. Forced again to flee the Army, Sitting Bull's band traveled to Canada, but fear of starvation forced their eventual surrender in 1881. After serving two years in prison, Sitting Bull returned to a South Dakota reservation. By this point a living legend in frontier mythology, he raised badly needed funds by posing for postcards and performing in "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show". In 1890, reservation police tried to arrest him for supporting the Ghost Dance movement, a religious revival which some feared would broaden into a new Sioux uprising. He was killed by an Indian policeman in the ensuing shootout, just weeks before the massacre at Wounded Knee".
[Sources: Encyclopedia of American Biography; Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography].