Memorial to Sitting Bull stirs a backlash over Sioux legacy

You have to travel back in time to get from the nearest town to the chipped and wind-whipped little stone face that peers over the Missouri River and the plains beyond.

The drive from Mobridge, S.D., takes you from the Central Time Zone into the Mountain.

Beneath a modest monument lie the remains of Sitting Bull, the Sioux chief said to have foretold the defeat of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

The resting place of one of the best-known American Indians in history has been in a state of extreme disrepair. It has been shot, spat at, and worse. On the surrounding grounds, people set bonfires and shattered beer bottles. Someone tied a rope around the feather rising from the head of the bust, rigged it to a truck and broke it off.

The site is within the boundaries of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe but privately owned. Two years ago two men -- one white, the other a tribesman -- paid $55,000 for it and began cleaning it up. They have plans for a $12-million monument complex they hope will honor Sitting Bull’s memory with the dignity missing for so long, and let new generations learn about him.

But these plans, like Sitting Bull himself, are not so simple. And they have torn open a wound over who will control the great Sioux chief’s legacy.

Chief’s vision

By 1868 there was relative peace between the Sioux and the U.S. government. The Second Treaty of Ft. Laramie had secured for the tribe a patch of land in southwest South Dakota.

Then gold was found in the Black Hills. Whites rushed in, and the Sioux were ordered back to their reservations. Sitting Bull, having retreated into Montana, was said to have had a vision of a slaughter of soldiers.

It was not long afterward that Custer and his cavalry were slain at Little Bighorn.

Little Bighorn also is known as Custer’s Last Stand and, to some American Indians, as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.

The United States prevailed in the Indian Wars, but Sitting Bull became, and remains, a hero to his people. Later in his life, he may have taken up -- the point is disputed -- the “ghost dance” movement, which foretold that dead Indians would return to life and that white domination would end.

This spooked U.S. authorities. They went after Sitting Bull, who had settled back at Standing Rock. He was killed in a battle with Indian police and U.S. soldiers on June 15, 1890.

There are pictures of Sitting Bull in the home of Ernie LaPointe, in the Black Hills town of Lead, S.D. A great-grandson of the chief, he is furious.

His mother always told him never to stand on Sitting Bull’s back. Never boast of your heritage, she said. LaPointe, 58, thinks the plans for a memorial atop his great-grandfather’s grave are doing worse.

Speaking for himself and his three sisters, he says: “They want to use our grandfather as a tourist attraction.”

In February, he wrote to an assortment of Sioux tribes, including Standing Rock, which claims Sitting Bull.

“North Dakota, South Dakota and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe have not honored their promise for proper care and maintenance of our grandfather’s burial sites,” he wrote.

He called for a “final reburial” -- in Montana, at the site of Little Bighorn -- “so that he may spend eternity at the sacred place where his vision had predicted the greatest victory for our people, the victory at the Battle of the Greasy Grass.”

Pair’s proposal

The pair who want to turn Sitting Bull’s resting place into a memorial complex are Rhett Albers, an environmental consultant who is white, and Bryan Defender, who owns the sanitation system for the Standing Rock tribe and is enrolled there.

They say people who come to the banks of the Missouri to see the site are confused -- wondering: Well, where is the rest of it?

Their plan would stream visitors through an “interpretive center” focused on the four Sioux ideals they say Sitting Bull represented: fortitude, generosity, bravery and wisdom.

Other features under consideration are a snack bar, offices and meeting rooms, a gift shop and a restaurant.

Confronted with LaPointe’s suggestion that this would cash in on Sitting Bull’s legacy, they look perplexed.

“We are not wealthy people,” Albers says. “We’ve donated our time and expense and money to do this, pursue it, do it in a positive way.”

Defender, 35, says he and Albers have met with groups on the Standing Rock reservation and received an overwhelmingly positive reaction. (The tribe’s chairman did not respond to requests to be interviewed.)

Albers says they hope someday to recoup their $55,000, but have no plans to draw salaries from the tourist center.

“It’s not about the money,” says Albers, 45. “It’s about the man. And the tribute.”

Remains moved

This is not the first struggle over Sitting Bull’s remains.

The Standing Rock Sioux reservation, where the great chief lived his last years, straddles the Dakotas, and for the first half of the 20th century, his remains lay at Ft. Yates, N.D.

In the early 1950s, a group of businessmen from Mobridge, S.D., approached North Dakota authorities about moving the remains south of the state line. North Dakota balked.

In 1953, during a blizzard and in the middle of the night, a South Dakota group dug up the remains and absconded with them, with the blessing of the Standing Rock tribe.

Ernie LaPointe says his mother, Angelique Spotted Horse, consented to the 1953 disinterment, and was assured that the remains would be treated with dignity.

Polish sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski contributed the granite bust that marks the remains today. For a time, volunteers mowed the grass and cleaned up. But those efforts waned, says Larry Atkinson, publisher of the Mobridge Tribune. Into the vacuum stepped vandals, drunks and partying teenagers.

Raising funds

The aspects of the plan that anger LaPointe are the very attractions Albers and Defender say are most needed to sustain a fitting memorial to Sitting Bull -- the visitors’ center, the amphitheater, the snack bar.

The pair are in the early stages of raising an estimated $12.7 million to make the memorial a reality. For guidance, they have consulted the operators of a monument to Crazy Horse, carved into South Dakota’s Black Hills, about 200 miles southwest of the Sitting Bull site.

More than 1 million people a year visit that still-unfinished sculpture, begun by Ziolkowski in 1948, which features the Sioux warrior atop his steed.

LaPointe says that he has the backing of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument to move the bones of Sitting Bull to Montana, and that an environmental assessment is planned.

He is backed by Darrell Cook, superintendent of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, where memorials and markers recall the 1876 battle.

If LaPointe is successful, expect nothing like what Albers and Defender are trying to do in South Dakota.

“Sitting Bull, he was a humble man,” Cook said. “I don’t think building memorials and visitors’ centers and that type of stuff is appropriate.”

Mysteries remain

It is difficult to nail down any aspect of the dispute as provable fact, particularly in a culture that for centuries has relied on oral history. It is not even possible to be sure that Sitting Bull’s bones are buried on that bluff.

One story that persists in North Dakota is that his remains are still buried at Ft. Yates, that fakes were placed atop them, and that the fakes were taken to Mobridge in 1953.

Another story goes further, holding that Sitting Bull’s remains are somewhere in Canada. According to that legend, the great chief himself ordered that fakes be planted at Ft. Yates.

That story holds that he foresaw a bitter fight over his bones once he was gone.