Today we interview Joe Starita about his book, I Am A Man. The narrative non-fiction book describes the real life story of Ponca Chief Standing Bear. He was a man who just wanted to live peaceably, with his tribe, on their ancestral homeland that was deeded to them by the U.S. government in a treaty. However, government mistakes, prejudice, and people following orders from their superiors led to the Ponca being stripped of their Nebraska homeland in 1877, many deaths on their journey to a reservation in Oklahoma, and eventually Chief Standing Bear’s suit against the federal government, the first time a Native American had been allowed to testify in a US courtroom. And he won. Join us to learn more about this remarkable, heartbreaking, and inspiring man.
I Am a Man by Joe Starita documents the heartbreaking exile of Chief Standing Bear from his homeland to his journey to establishing the personhood of Native Americans in US courts. Chief Standing Bear promised his dying teenage son that he would bury him in the ancestral graveyard back along the Niobrara River in northeast Nebraska. On his journey home with his son’s body, he was jailed for leaving the Oklahoma reservation and for visiting his friends and relatives on the Omaha reservation. The US Army intended to force him to return to Oklahoma. However, a newspaperman and two attorneys in Omaha
helped him file a suit against the US government. He ended up being the first Native person to testify in a US court and his case established that Native persons have the same rights as the nation’s White and Black citizens, which was not clear in the muddle of the way Native Americans were treated. His most famous lines are from his testimony in court about his personhood. He stood and held out his hand and said: “That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same God made us both.”
Dr. Margaret Jacobs joins us on the front porch to investigate how the US has forcibly removed children from their parents, a policy expanded in Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts. In Our Missing Hearts, a Choctaw grandmother reminds Noah’s mom that taking children away from their parents is not unprecedented in US history and she alludes to indigenous child removal, as well as the separation of children from their parents who have illegally crossed the country’s southern border. In this episode, we learn about the reality of these past policies and also Indigenous and Non-indigenous people working together to forge a reconciliation over these past wrongs.
To what lengths would you go to protect your child? In Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng introduces us to Bird, a 12-year-old boy whose mother has left him and his father years earlier. His father disavows her and her poetry that is being used by resisters standing up against an authoritarian government in the United States. When Bird receives a mysterious letter, he goes on a journey to find his mother.
It’s Mother’s Day as we record this episode about Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon. This nonfiction book explores the differences that separate children from their parents, often in damaging ways. Solomon believes that parents have children to perpetuate themselves and when the children are different from them, parents often react negatively. Six chapters deal with categories of difference that have been long-classified as illnesses: children who are deaf, those who are dwarfs, and those who have down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, other disabilities. Four chapters deal with more socially-constructed difference: children who: are prodigies, the product of rape, commit crimes, and are transgender.
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