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Marrin, Albert Sitting Bull and His World Dutton, 2000 246 pages, b/w photos, b/w illustrations grades 5-8 Lakota

It is absolutely astonishing that anyone could, at the beginning of the 21st century, write a book that incorporates nearly every stereotype and misrepresentation about Indian peoples ever uttered. Albert Marrin has.

His book contains six and a half pages of bibliography, only half a dozen titles of which are Native sources. The rest are the tried and true collection of archaeologists, anthropologists, and Indian experts. Thus, Marrin can hardly have claimed to have added anything new to the body of information already available on Plains societies in general, and Sitting Bull, Tatanka Iotanka, in particular. What he has done is create another apologia for "westward expansion" and the destruction of Native cultures and lives, as well as what was probably the richest land mass in historical times.

Indians and whites lived in separate worlds... .Having almost nothing in common, each used the standards of their own society to judge the other. This opened the way to misunderstandings and, finally, to countless tragedies. (p. 63)

There was no misunderstanding. To paraphrase Red Cloud, the white man kept only one of his promises to us. He said he would take our land, and he did. At the investigation after the Sand Creek massacre, Colonel John Chivington, when asked to account for what he had done, said, "Kill "em all, large and small, nits make lice." And General Phil Sheridan publicly remarked, "The only good Indian I ever saw was dead." By using terms such as "common humanity," "common land," "common history," "common destiny," "decent and responsible" and "misunderstandings" to link together Indian peoples and whites by pretending to be objective Marrin whitewashes the genocidal assault by whites on the Indian peoples of this hemisphere.

After misrepresenting Lakota spirituality and belief systems, Marrin engages in inappropriate and defamatory speculation about Sitting Bull's motivations and character:

Native Americans believed that the Great Spirit God visited people in dreams. During such visits He might give them magical powers and show them the future. Others might say that Sitting Bull believed so strongly in his mission that he convinced himself that the Great Spirit had chosen him before his birth. Or, perhaps, he made the story up simply to show his devotion in a dramatic way. For whatever reason, he spent his entire life "studying' his people and serving them. (p. 9)

This statement shows absolutely no understanding whatsoever of Native cosmologies, spiritual practices, or the responsibility such a leader would carry to his people, the land, and the Spirit World.

For 500 years, the people in the Americas have been regarded as heathens because we did not have a "religion." Marrin takes every opportunity to dwell, in loving detail, on themes of mindless and bloody savagery. Artfully, he couches these themes in a sort of pseudo-sympathetic language:

In actual fact, from time to time a dead enemy might be brought into camp, particularly if he had been especially brave, and the young boys might be encouraged to count coup on the warrior. (Counting coup was done with a stick, specifically designed for this purpose, called a "coup stick." Among all the Plains cultures, it was considered a far braver act to count coup upon an enemy rather than kill him.). Had Marrin not decided to emphasize (or invent) these gruesome details, that is all he would have had to say.

Further, Marrin states,

There was not, there has never been, any honor to be obtained by killing women and children. In a battle, they might die, but no warrior would deliberately claim the death of such ones and expect to be honored for it.

What?! If any kids were sneaking off, it was to go hunting, not to find someone to kill. This, by the way, was not generally looked on with approval by their elders. Sometimes teenagers would sneak off and go on a horse raid by themselves, and the results were frequently disastrous to them. Marrin's spin on Lakota life in general is always designed to portray it in the most negative way possible.

White people did not bring war to the Great Plains. Long before they arrived, the Plains tribes themselves participated in what seemed an eternal cycle of violence... Later, even as they fought white invaders, they continued to expand their holdings by conquest. (pp. 39-40)

One misconception still commonly held about Native nations was that they all had one chief. In fact, there were a variety of leaders. Use the word "chief" since everybody knows that. There were war leaders, hunting leaders, and peace chiefs. People fought for various reasons. Peace was important to survival; to hunt, to make clothing, to raise children, to have ceremony, to plan for the future, all activities that were made difficult if not impossible by the invaders. Because it was an invasion, as truly as any of those that happened in the recently ended war-torn 20th century. Marrin mentions none of these.

When Marrin does refer to a Native source, he deliberately distorts it.

Of course, warriors died. That was natural, and the younger they died, the better... .

Fathers repeated proverbs such as "The brave die young." "Son," they would say earnestly, "I never want to see you live to be an old man. Die young on the battlefield. That is the way a Lakota dies."... (pp. 40-41)

The footnote for this information cites Luther Standing Bear, from Land of the Spotted Eagle. What Standing Bear really said was this:

Contrary to much that has been written, warfare with the Lakota was not a tribal profession. They did not fight to gain territory nor to conquer another people... .As a matter of fact, the philosophical ideal of the Lakota was harmony, and the most powerful symbol was that of peace. So powerful was this symbol that the wise men or chiefs had but to present it to the warriors and they obeyed its mandates, no matter how reluctant they might be. (pp. 40-41)

One could almost say that this book was written with criminal intent. To cite every instance would be a review as long as the book itself. There is, however, one other issue that must be dealt with, and that is the "battle" of Wounded Knee, because it was such a watershed event for Native people; and was, for all extents and purposes, the end, the place at which, finally, we were truly conquered.

Two weeks after Sitting Bull was murdered by government troops, the 7th Cavalry Custer's old command was called in. Big Foot's band was coming in. Big Foot's band of Minneconjou Ghost Dancers was coming in to surrender. The band consisted mostly of women, children and elderly men. They had been disarmed. It was about 40 degrees below zero, the people were starving, and Big Foot was dying of pneumonia. There are conflicting reports of what happened next. But when the bluecoats opened fire, some 300 women, children and elders were killed. As far as anyone has been able to determine, the bluecoats who were killed that day died from what is now called "friendly fire." From reports of the time, it is clear that Custer's men were out for revenge, and they got it.

And yet Marrin has chosen to place the full blame for what he calls a battle on the victims themselves:

Yellow Bird immediately threw a handful of dust in the soldiers' direction. Then it happened. Warriors sprang to their feet, pulled rifles from under their blankets, and aimed at the soldiers... .Both sides fired at once... .The warriors could not have been thinking clearly or aiming carefully. Every one of the bullets that missed a soldier slammed into the lodges behind them, striking women and children.

Warriors escaping from the council area followed close on the fugitives' heels. Now mixed up with women and children, they handled their Winchesters with deadly effect. In reply, the Hotchkiss guns poured a murderous fire into the ravine. The shells exploded on all without regard to age or sex. Troopers also rode along the rim, firing downward with carbines and six-guns. Since both warriors and women wore ghost shirts, they could not be told apart amid the smoke and confusion. Warriors also shot at the troopers from between the women and children. They were not deliberately using them as shields, but the soldiers fired at innocent people in order to get at the warriors. (p. 223)

Accounts of the massacre, both by people who survived it and those who arrived at the scene immediately afterwards, are available and totally refute Marrin's interpretation. His use of language hints at objectivity, but it doesn't change the truth of what happened. All the even-handed language in the world does not change the fact that Wounded Knee was a massacre:

There are people still alive whose grandfathers fought Custer. There are people still alive whose parents survived Wounded Knee; they are called the Wounded Knee Survivors Association and they are located on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Marie Not-Help-Him was the president not very long ago; she may still be. They know what happened at Wounded Knee, because they hold the stories in their memories. As well, there is an association of descendants of Sitting Bull at Standing Rock Agency, North Dakota. There is no evidence that Marrin contacted any of these people. Nor did he use sources such as Charles Eastman's Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains or Indian Boyhood, Luther Standing Bear's My Indian Boyhood or My People the Sioux, or Zitkala-Sa's American Indian Stories. All three respected Indian authors were contemporaries of Sitting Bull's.

Readers ought not to consider this a historical biography of Sitting Bull. It is not. Rather, Sitting Bull and His World tells far more about its author than it does about its subject. Sitting Bull and His World has received a number of starred reviews. It doesn't deserve any of them. It is no better than any of the yellow journalism about Native peoples that came out of the 19th and early 20th centuries. To consider this book worthy of an award is shameful.

—Doris Seale (Santee/Cree) and Beverly Slapin

We thank Nina Lindsay for her understanding, her support, and her good heart.

For additional comments about Albert Marrin’s Sitting Bull and His World, see the accompanying essay Turning a Battle Into a Massacre.