Native American Blood

Mary "Te Ata" Thompson Fisher
1895 - 1995
Te Ata Thompson Fisher, whose name means “Bearer of the Morning,” was born Dec. 3, 1895, near Emet, Oklahoma. A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, Te Ata was an accomplished actor and teller of Native American stories.
She received her early education in Tishomingo, and eventually went to the Oklahoma College for Women. While there, it was evident Te Ata had a natural talent for drama.
Her career as an actor and storyteller spanned more than 60 years. She worked as a storyteller to finance her acting career. She would tell Chickasaw legends, myths and chants, including performing rituals in native regalia.
Te Ata attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for one year. From there, she moved to New York City, where she met and married Clyde Fisher. During the 1930s she performed at summer camps in New York and New England.
In the prime of her career, she performed in England and Scandinavia, at the White House for President Franklin Roosevelt, for the King and Queen of Great Britain, and on stages across the United States.
Although Te Ata worked as an actor and drama instructor, she is best known for her artistic interpretations of Indian folklore, and for her children's book she co-authored on the subject.
Her world-renown talent has won her several honors including induction into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1957, being named The Ladies’ Home Journal Woman of the Year in 1976, being named Oklahoma's Official State Treasure in 1987, and having a lake near Bear Mountain in New York named in her honor.
She is also the subject of a video, God's Drum, the proceeds of which have supported the Te Ata Scholarship Fund for Indian students at her alma mater, the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha, Oklahoma.
Te Ata died Oct. 26, 1995, in Oklahoma City, though her legacy and influence on the Native American storytelling traditions continues to this day

In the final months before his surrender in 1877, Crazy Horse retreated alone to the Powder River country and pleaded for a vision that would show him how to preserve his people and their homeland.

Compounding the Lakota war chief’s grief during that long winter was the ill health of his wife, Black Shawl. As he fasted and prayed in the hills near the present-day Montana-Wyoming line, a red-tailed hawk, his spirit helper, descended with an eagle.

Crazy Horse took the eagle’s message to holy men and together they created a healing ceremony. Although Crazy Horse was killed within months of his surrender, Black Shawl — thought at the time to have tuberculosis — lived to be an old woman.

The eagle, chief of birds — the one who could fly the highest and carry messages to and from First Maker — was intricately woven into life on the Northern Plains.

Two Leggins, a chief of the River Crow in the last of the buffalo days, was protected by the medicine of an eagle feather painted with six white spots. It gave him the power to direct the wind, he said in his dictated autobiography.
“After the proper ceremony, the wind would blow from the direction pointed by the feather in my hair,” he said. “The six spots meant the owner could cause a sudden hailstorm between myself and a pursuing enemy. Later I used the feather many times and it always worked.”

Who could doubt the spiritual power of such a magnificent bird?

Once, on a hunting trip in the Bighorn Mountains, Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg watched as an eagle swooped down on a buffalo calf and carried it far up a cliff to its nest.

“Ordinarily a capturing eagle would drop its prey from high in the air, so that it would be killed by the fall to the ground,” Wooden Leg told his biographer Thomas Marquis. “But this did not happen in this case. As long as we stayed there watching, we could see the buffalo calf standing up there on the cliff and wiggling its tail.”

In 1875, at the end of his grueling vision quest on Otter Creek in southeastern Montana, the 17-year-old warrior was presented with an eagle wing bone flute by his father.

“It was to be worn about my neck, suspended at the mid-breast by a buckskin thong during times of danger,” Wooden Leg said. “If I were threatened with imminent harm I had but to put it to my lips and cause it to send out its soothing notes. That would ward off every evil design upon me. It was my mystic protector. It was my medicine.”

Warriors sought the courage and protection of the eagle in battle and wore eagle feathers as a testimony of honors earned. Each tribal group had its own traditions.

“An eagle’s feather worn in the hair was a mark of distinction and told the world that the wearer had counted coups,” Crow Chief Plenty Coups said in his biography by Frank Linderman.

If a Crow warrior was wounded counting coups — a lesser honor than returning from the field of battle without a scratch — the feather would be painted red to show that he bled, Plenty Coups said.
Four eagle feathers were attached to the shield given to Sitting Bull by his father after exploits against the Crow at Powder River. The four feathers boasted of his success in all four directions.
Warriors couldn’t just claim to have counted coups. The deeds had to be witnessed and attested before the right to wear an eagle feather was earned.
Even after intertribal warfare ceased and tribes have been relegated to reservations, the eagle continues to hold its power.
Joseph Medicine Crow, a Crow historian and World War II veteran, wrote in “Counting Coups” that before he went to war, a Shoshone sun dance chief gave him a white eagle feather. When battle loomed, he stuffed it inside his helmet. He credits the feather with protecting him during the bloody invasion of Germany.
Then he passed the feather on to one of his cousins.
It was carried by members of Medicine Crow’s family to Africa, Germany, Italy and later to Korea.

Photo: Crow Chief Plenty Coups in eagle feather headdress.

"Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men,
we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents.
Without a prison, there can be no delinquents.
We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves.
When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket,
he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift.
We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property.
We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being
was not determined by his wealth.
We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians,
therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another.
We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don't know
how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things
that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society."
- John (Fire) Lame Deer, Sioux Lakota - 1903-1976

Russell Charles Means (November 10, 1939 – October 22, 2012) was an Oglala Lakota activist for the rights of Natives, libertarian political activist, actor, writer and musician, who became a prominent member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) after joining the organization in 1968 and helped organize notable events that attracted national and international media coverage.

Means was active in international issues of indigenous people, including working with groups in Central and South America and with the United Nations for recognition of their rights. He was active in politics at his native Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and at the state and national level.

Beginning an acting career in 1992, he appeared on numerous television series and in several films, including "The Last of the Mohicans" and released his own music CD. He published his autobiography "Where White Men Fear to Tread" in 1995.

In August 2011, Means was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. His doctors told him his condition was inoperable. He told the Associated Press that he was rejecting "mainstream medical treatments in favor of traditional Native remedies and alternative treatments away from his home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation". In late September, Means reported that through tomotherapy, the tumor had diminished greatly. Later, he said that his tumor was "95% gone." On December 5 of that year, Means stated that he "beat cancer," that he had beat "the death penalty."

The following year, however, his health continued to decline and he died on October 22, 2012, less than a month before his 73rd birthday. A family statement said, "Our dad and husband now walks among our ancestors''.

OUR PEOPLE ARE NOT POOR.....THEY BEEN ROBBED....
I did some research on gold mining in the Black Hills (Khe Sapa).
There was approximately 31,207,892 ounces of gold taken from the Black Hills up to 1965. The value of gold has fluctuated over the years but today it’s valued at about $1,204.50 an ounce.
That equates to $37,589,905,914 (thirty-seven billion five hundred eighty-nine million nine hundred five thousand nine hundred fourteen dollars) worth of gold that was taken from the Black Hills by today’s market value. That’s also not counting gold that was taken after 1965. I bet it’s in the trillions.
Reminder: under the Fort Laramie treaty (and treaties are the supreme law of the land according to the U.S. Constitution), the Black Hills belong to the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) and the Supreme Court of the United States held in U.S. vs. Sioux Nation of Indians that the theft of the Black Hills from the Oceti Sakowin was a wrongful taking without just compensation.
I never want to hear another person question why our reservations are so poor again. Poverty was absolutely imposed upon us. Another realization- this theft likely propped up the U.S. economy for decades.
pic: Blackfoot Couple