While there have been many notable accounts of the destruction of the Native American tribes of North America—Wounded Knee in late 1800s to the Alcatraz standoff of the 1960s––there is less that’s known about the small Ponca tribe of Niobrara, Nebraska, and how their struggle against relocation by armed US military forces led to a courtroom drama that determined if “an Indian was a human being.” And while Schmidt touches upon the facts of the Ponca’s battle with the US government, the trial of Standing Bear and judge Elmer Dandy’s judgement May 12, 1879, it’s up to the reader herself to hunt down the full transcript of that trial’s proceedings. Yes, it was an actual court case in Nebraska, 1879.
With author/filmmaker Schmidt’s modest book, INSHTA THEAMBA (“BRIGHT EYES”) AND THE INDIAN RING, he has urged the reader to focus to this tragedy, one-of-many that numerous American Indian tribes had endured in the nineteenth century. In the Ponca’s case, it was mostly through the efforts of a young. bi-lingual Ponca woman translator, Inshta Theamba/”Bright Eyes,” and her newspaperman friend, later husband, author, Thomas Tibbles (“Buckskin and Blanket Days”), plus some dedicated lawyers and writers of the Midwest, who carried word of the Ponca struggle to the Eastern US Papers (also to England) while on tour with chief Standing Bear. And ultimately, it was due to Schmidt’s reading the book, “Ploughed Under, The Story of an Indian Chief, Told by Himself,” that set Schmidt on this quest. “It occurred to me more than once that it was no accident you found the one Indian story which never fully evaporated from my memory years after you told me about it, which made the American judicial system admit to the fact that the original native people of this country are fully human and deserving of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.”
––Writer, director, producer William Farley, I WANTED TO BE A MAN WITH A GUN––THREE AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN WWII