From Father to Son: Affirming Lakota Manhood in Luther Standing Bear’s My People the Sioux

“I wanted to watch my father, because, as I have said before, he was my ideal” (79). This passage—from Luther Standing Bear’s autobiography My People the Sioux (1928)—refers to a moment in Luther Standing Bear’s childhood as he watched his father prepare to capture wild horses. Standing Bear’s sentiment—that his father was his “ideal”—permeates his autobiography as he recounts his childhood, boarding school experience, and postschool life. In fact, My People the Sioux underscores the centrality of Standing Bear’s relationship with his father and its role in the shaping of his Lakota manhood as he negotiated the challenges of the dominant culture and its gender expectations as it worked to “civilize” Natives through such policies as the Allotment Act of 1887 and the creation of Federal boarding schools.¹ Though white advocates of assimilation expected Natives to be fully compliant to Euro-American gender norms, Natives themselves often had a more complicated response to this goal. Such is the case with the Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear, who worked to find ways to maintain traditional Lakota male gender norms as he adjusted to the historical force of assimilation. Though assimilationist policies and institutions often caused devastating psychological trauma on Natives, particularly on boys and girls who attended boarding schools, Luther Standing Bear was not traumatized by his boarding school experience at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. For Standing Bear the key to maintaining this psychological stability was his close identification with his father. My People, in fact, is carefully structured to first establish how Standing Bear absorbed Lakota masculine norms from his father before he was immersed in Euro-American culture. As the narrative progresses and Standing Bear describes his transition to and education at Carlisle, he describes how his father continued to play a key role in how he measured himself as a Lakota man, a dynamic that continued throughout his life. As My People illustrates, Standing Bear’s relationship with his father provided the cultural anchor that allowed him to proactively sustain a distinctly Lakota manhood despite the pressures of assimilation efforts on the part of Euro-America.

My People the Sioux is carefully designed to appeal to the sensibilities of a white readership, as Ryan Burt and Daniel Moos have both argued. Burt states that Standing Bear’s central goal in the narrative is to dispel white stereotypes of Natives as bloodthirsty savages (629). According to Moos, Standing Bear takes liberties with his early life in order to idealize Lakota life before “contact” to appeal to his white audience’s romantic conceptions of Plains Indians and to portray himself as someone who has successfully “bridged the gap of pre-contact and post-contact culture” (189).² I argue, however, that Standing Bear’s autobiography is also a window into how the transition into the “post-contact” era was not necessarily a one-way street for Native peoples. His idealization of his life under the tutelage of his father is constructed to underscore how Standing Bear’s manhood was not only shaped by Lakota cultural expectations before “contact,” but also how his upbringing prepared him to negotiate the “post-contact” world in accordance with those expectations.

As a student at Carlisle, Standing Bear was subjected to a curriculum that was designed to eradicate any vestige of Native cultural identity. Specifically, the superintendent of the school, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, hoped that “[i]n an isolated institutional setting, [he could] destroy what he termed ‘savage languages,’ ‘primitive superstitions,’ and ‘uncivilized cultures,’ replacing them with work ethics, Christian values, and the white man’s civilization. In sum, Pratt created Carlisle as a space to take ‘the savage-infant to the surroundings of civilization’” (Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc, “Origin” 13). Though eradicating “savagery” was the goal of Indian boarding schools such as Carlisle, Native children did not necessarily succumb to this assault on their respective heritages. As David Wallace Adams explains, the success of the assimilation process at boarding schools was not seamless; rather, “the acculturation process itself could involve...