Standing on Standing Bear’s Legacy
■dád■wagi■e.
We speak often of Standing Bear.
We tell his story with pride. We repeat his words. We honor his courage. We point to
his struggle as proof of the strength and perseverance of the Ponca people. His name
has become inseparable from our identity and from the story we tell the world about
who we are.
But there is a question I believe we must be willing to ask ourselves:
If Standing Bear stood among us today, would he recognize what we have
become as the Nation he fought for?
That question is not meant as an attack on our leaders, our employees, our programs,
or the people who worked incredibly hard to restore our federal recognition.
Restoration was an achievement of enormous importance. Our health services, social
programs, offices, housing efforts, education programs, and other services matter.
They help our people every day.
But services and nationhood are not necessarily the same thing.
Standing Bear's struggle was rooted in something deeper than access to programs. It
was rooted in the relationship between a people and their homeland.
When his son Bear Shield was dying during the forced removal of our people to
Indian Territory, Standing Bear made a promise that he would return his son's
remains to the Ponca homeland.
Think about what that means. Even in death, home mattered.
The Missouri River mattered. The Niobrara mattered. The earth where generations of
Ponca people had lived, prayed, buried their relatives, raised their children, and
understood themselves as a people mattered.
And yet today, when some of us speak about rebuilding a stronger presence in our
homeland, restoring land, strengthening sovereignty, or imagining a different future
for our Nation, we sometimes hear a response that amounts to: That is the past.
This is simply what we are now.For me, that may be one of the most dangerous attitudes we can adopt. Because the
moment we begin treating our present circumstances as permanent, we stop
imagining what is possible.
Our current situation is not some natural conclusion to Ponca history. It is the result of
history—removal, land loss, allotment, termination, federal policy, and eventually
restoration. These things happened to us and around us. They do not have to define
forever what comes after us.
There is something deeply defeatist about believing that because history brought us
here, here is where we must remain. And I cannot reconcile that attitude with
Standing Bear.
Standing Bear himself was confronted with a reality that powerful people considered
settled. The Ponca had been removed. The government had made its decision. Our
people were expected to accept their circumstances and move forward within the
reality imposed upon them.
Standing Bear refused.
He looked at what others called permanent and said, through his actions: No. There
is still a way home.
That is the spirit we claim when we invoke his name.
So how can we stand upon Standing Bear's legacy while simultaneously telling
ourselves that our own circumstances cannot be changed? How can we celebrate a
man remembered precisely because he refused to accept an imposed reality as
permanent, while convincing ourselves that today's political structure represents the
outer limit of what the Ponca Nation can become?
That is the contradiction I believe our generation must confront.
Standing Bear did not struggle so that generations later we could simply become a
population receiving services across administrative boundaries. He belonged to a
Nation.
And a Nation is more than an institution. A Nation has people, but it also has place. It
has memory. It has responsibilities between generations. It has language, ceremony,
families, political life, economy, food, land, and a shared understanding that the
decisions made today belong partly to people who have not yet been born.That is why we should examine what it means when we continually say that we are
“standing on Standing Bear's legacy.”
Are we standing on his legacy? Or are we standing on his name?
There is a difference.
Standing on his name requires very little. We can place his image on a wall. We can
quote him in speeches. We can celebrate anniversaries and tell his story.
Standing on his legacy requires something from us. It requires us to continue
walking.
Federal restoration in 1990 was an extraordinary victory, but perhaps we have made
the mistake of thinking restoration was the destination. Maybe it was only the
doorway.
Our ancestors lost far more than federal recognition. They lost land. They lost political
power connected to place. Families were scattered. Ceremonies and institutions were
disrupted. Generations grew increasingly distant from the homeland that once formed
the physical center of Ponca life.
Federal recognition restored a legal relationship with the United States. It did not
automatically restore everything that had been taken from the Ponca people.
That work belongs to us.
Our service delivery areas may be necessary under the governmental structure we
inherited and rebuilt. They allow us to reach Ponca people wherever they live, and
those people are no less Ponca because they live away from Niobrara.
But we should never confuse the map of our services with the map of our Nation.
One answers the question: Where do we provide services? The other asks: Where
are we going as a people? Those are very different questions.
Perhaps Standing Bear's greatest challenge to our generation is not simply to
remember what he did, but to ask what we are willing to do with what he preserved for
us.
He walked home carrying the responsibility of his son. What responsibility are we
carrying for ours?Our children and grandchildren deserve more than programs designed to help them
survive. They deserve the opportunity to inherit something: land, language, culture,
ceremony, economic independence, political strength, a relationship with the
homeland, and the understanding that being Ponca means belonging to something
larger than an enrollment number or eligibility for a service.
This does not mean forcing our people to return to Niobrara. Our people live
throughout our service areas and far beyond them, and every one of them remains
part of us.
But a tree can have branches stretching in every direction while still needing roots.
Our people may live everywhere. Our Nation must still have somewhere from
which it grows.
For the Northern Ponca, that place has always carried us back toward the Niobrara
and Missouri.
Standing Bear understood that. His dying son understood that. And perhaps that is
why the story still speaks so powerfully to us.
A son wanted to go home. A father kept his promise.
Nearly a century and a half later, we should ask ourselves whether we have fully
understood the lesson.
We honor Standing Bear best not by living forever in his accomplishment, but by
continuing his journey.
The generation that restored our federal recognition did its work. Now our
generation has work of its own.
We cannot continually point backward and call that progress. We cannot allow what
happened yesterday to become an excuse for what we refuse to imagine tomorrow.
History should teach us. History should humble us. History should strengthen us. But
history should never imprison our imagination.
If Standing Bear had believed circumstances were permanent simply because the
government declared them so, his story would have ended in Indian Territory.
It did not. He walked north.Maybe restoration now means restoring land. Maybe it means rebuilding a permanent
cultural and political center in our homeland. Maybe it means creating opportunities
for families who want to return. Maybe it means agriculture, housing, language,
ceremony, businesses, schools, and institutions capable of supporting Ponca life for
another hundred years.
And maybe it means beginning to measure progress not only by how many services
we can deliver, but by how much sovereignty we can leave behind.
Because one day our grandchildren will inherit whatever decisions we make now.
They will either inherit our limitations or our imagination. They will inherit our
hesitation or our courage. They will inherit the boundaries we accepted—or the
Nation we rebuilt.
So when we say that we stand on Standing Bear's legacy, we should say it carefully.
Because Standing Bear's legacy is not a pedestal upon which we can stand still. It is
a path.
And perhaps the greatest contradiction of all would be to stand upon the legacy of a
man who refused to accept that his people's circumstances were permanent—and
then tell our own children that ours are.
The real question before our generation is not whether we are proud of the man
who walked before us.
Are we willing to walk as far for our grandchildren as Standing Bear walked for
his son?
Clinton Uhègaxe
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