Chief Sitting Bull
45” x 25” Spray Paint on Deep Edged Panel with Resin
• His father relinquished his own name, Sitting Bull, to him at the age of 14 after knocking a crow warrior off his horse with a tomahawk during battle.
• He was credited with several acts of bravery including sitting in the center of a battle field and calmly smoking a peace pipe while being narrowly missed by bullets during a clash with the army. After this, his fellow warriors would yell “Sitting Bull, I am he” to intimidate their adversaries.
• He was the first man to become chief of the entire Lakota Sioux Nation.
• He was a holy man and was believed to have powers of prophecy and spiritual insight. During a trance Sitting Bull reported seeing soldiers tumbling into his camp like grasshoppers. Shortly there after his tribe of warriors claimed the lives of Colonel Custer and over 200 soldiers during the Battle of Little Bighorn.
• After the embarrassment at Little Bighorn the army was determined to defeat the Plains Indians and force them into exile. Sitting Bull refused to submit and led his followers into Canada where they spent the next four years in exile.
• Years after his surrender Sitting Bull was hailed as a minor celebrity rather than the outlaw he was once branded as. He toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. During his travels he met Annie Oakley. He nicknamed her “Little Sure shot” and unofficially adopted her as his daughter. To seal the arrangement he supposedly gifted her the moccasins that he wore during the battle of Little Bighorn.
• He was killed over his involvement with the “Ghost Dance Movement”. This was a movement that spoke to a messiah that would supposedly bury the white man’s world under a layer of soil and allow the Indians to return to their old ways. This frightened the authorities and a party of Lakota policeman was dispatched to arrest Sitting Bull and bring him in for questioning. The commotion caused a group of his followers to converge on the scene. A shot was fired and during the confusion over a dozen people were killed including Sitting Bull who was shot in the chest and the head.
• The location of his gravesite is still debated today. Two days after his death Sitting Bull’s body was unceremoniously buried at Fort Yates, North Dakota. There it remained for over 60 years until a descendant and his party secretly removed the body and moved it to Mobridge, South Dakota. It is rumored that the descendant and his party may have dug up and transported the wrong body at that time. A plaque at the original Yates Fort site reads, “He was buried here but his grave has been vandalized many times”.
