Standing Bear and the Right to Be a Person

In the winter of eighteen seventy-eight to eighteen seventy-nine, a Ponca chief named Standing Bear led a small group of people north from Indian Territory in Oklahoma. They were walking home to the Niobrara River. The journey covered roughly five hundred miles in bitter cold. Standing Bear's son had died in the unfamiliar territory to which the Ponca had been forcibly moved the year before, and Standing Bear had promised to bury him in his homeland.

The group was arrested by the Army near Omaha in the spring and held at Fort Omaha. An Omaha newspaper reporter named Thomas Henry Tibbles took up their cause. Two lawyers, John Lee Webster and Andrew Jackson Poppleton, filed a writ of habeas corpus on Standing Bear's behalf, demanding to know by what legal authority the government was holding him.

The case, Standing Bear versus Crook, was heard by federal Judge Elmer Dundy in Omaha. On May twelfth, eighteen seventy-nine, Dundy issued a ruling that changed American law. He held that an Indian is a person within the meaning of the law of the United States. He ruled that Standing Bear had the right to leave Indian Territory and could not be returned by force.

It was the first federal court ruling to recognize a Native American as a legal person with rights before the court. Standing Bear returned to the Niobrara, where he is buried. A statue of him stands in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol, representing Nebraska.