This is part of a NiCHE series that investigates if rivers can be heritage, and if so, what kind of heritage. A companion to our series on Canadian Heritage Rivers, authors focus on the epistemological, historical, and cultural place of rivers with lessons and parallels for Canada, including comparative stories and/or lessons.

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In 1877, the United States government forcibly removed the Ponca tribe from their reservation territory on the northeast border between Nebraska and South Dakota. For generations, they had lived near the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers.¹ This land had been a heritage site for the tribe—a place they returned to after their annual buffalo hunts. They buried their dead on this land, and they planted a variety of vegetables at the river confluence to supplement their hunter’s diet.² Because the river confluence offered the Ponca alluvial soils for agriculture and prime hunting grounds, the tribe had long associated the place as their home, their heritage where their ancestors lay at rest. In the span of a single day, however, the U.S. federal government determined to remove the Ponca from this important land. As a consequence, over the course of 55 days, 710 Poncas marched to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) in the early spring. It was a 500-to-600-mile trek, and the march would ultimately claim 158 lives.³ Life in Oklahoma was bleak and hard, as the tribe received little assistance from the federal government. After 18 months of hardship, one Ponca leader defied his displacement and took a party of 30 people back to their home in Nebraska. His name was Standing Bear.

Standing Bear’s Story

Before they could reach their home, Standing Bear and his party were arrested by the U.S. military in Omaha, Nebraska. However, before they could be forcibly returned to Oklahoma, Standing Bear made the monumental decision to challenge his illegal removal from northeast Nebraska in court. It was the first time an Indigenous man would be considered a person of legal standing in the United States.⁴[4] Many Indigenous and white American leaders in Omaha came to Standing Bear’s aid by providing his party with food and shelter. Two prominent lawyers, Andrew J. Poppleton and John L. Webster, took up the chief’s defense. Bright Eyes, an Omaha woman and Indigenous rights activist, served as Standing Bear’s translator. And Thomas H. Tibbles, a journalist in the town, reported on the case for the nation to read. The 1879 courtroom trial became a significant event in Indigenous legal rights history. But the most enduring moment from Standing Bear’s trial is the speech he delivered on May 2, 1879, after court adjourned. In his speech, quoted in part below, the Ponca leader speaks to his heritage and ancestral home, citing the importance of riverways in several ways. Before the judge and jury, Standing Bear explained,

            I seem to stand on the bank of a river.

            My wife and little girl are beside me.

            In front the river is wide and impassable, and behind are perpendicular cliffs.

            No man of my race ever stood there before.

            There is no tradition to guide me.

            A flood has begun to rise around us.

            I look despairingly at the great cliffs.

            I see a steep, stony way leading upward.

            I grasp the hand of my child and my wife follows.

            I lead the way up the sharp rocks, while the waters rise behind us.

            Finally, I see a rift in the rocks, and

            I feel the prairie breeze strike my cheek.

I turn to my wife and child with a shout that we are saved. We will return to the Swift

Running Water that pours down between the green islands.

There are the graves of my fathers.

There again we will pitch our tipi and build our fires.

But a man bars the passage!

He is a thousand times more powerful than I.

Behind him, I see soldiers as numerous as leaves on trees.

They will obey that man’s orders. I too must obey his orders.

If he says that I cannot pass, I cannot.

The long struggle will have been in vain. My wife and child and I must return and sink beneath the flood. We are

weak and faint and sick.

I cannot fight.

You are that man!⁵

At the end of his speech, Standing Bear looked directly at presiding Judge Elmer S. Dundy of the U.S. District Court of Nebraska, identifying him as the man “a thousand times more powerful” barring the passage of escape. In these pivotal courtroom moments, Standing Bear conceptualizes the U.S. legal system as an unsettling space between rising river waters and stony cliffs where his tribal traditions serve as no useful guide. Essentially, the Ponca chief admitted in his speech that his very survival was predicated on a far more powerful U.S. government system. The turbulent waters stand for settler expansion and Indigenous removal, both of which threatened to sink Standing Bear’s family beneath the flood. In this way, the courtroom speech was a condemnation of the federal government’s cruelty toward the Ponca tribe as well as an admission of U.S. legal suzerainty over indigenous peoples.

The Waters of Standing Bear’s Courtroom Speech

Standing Bear’s speech intimates that settler expansion and reservation policy are an uncontrollable floodtide that erode the foundations of Ponca traditions rooted in the landscape. For example, in an early stanza, the chief suggests that his own precarious position between the “impassable” river waters and the steep cliffs are completely novel to his cultural experience. He explains, “No man of my race ever stood there before. / There is no tradition to guide me.” His cultural tradition was of no use to him in the contemporary circumstances because the swirling waters were too swift and unpredictable. He stood on new, unstable ground. Because he was the first Native American defendant in a federal courtroom, the Ponca chief quite literally was standing on unstable ground. He had no underlying basis to form his experience because his very presence as a person of legal standing was controversial. As Lawrence Dwyer notes, the federal prosecution built their entire case upon the idea that Standing Bear had no right to sue the government as a member of an indigenous tribe.⁶ To them, he was a “ward of the government” rather than a “person.”⁷

Niobrara as Heritage: Burial Grounds of Standing Bear’s Fathers

The river waters clearly signify the floodtide of settler expansion, the erosive nature of Indigenous reservation policy, and the sweeping relocations of tribes to Indian Territory, but this metaphor signifies the enduring presence of Ponca temporalities in particular ways. First, in his metaphor, Standing Bear places himself on the banks of a wide, impassable river as if he has happened upon it during a journey. The waters and cliff ledges barricade him from access to his homeland, which he describes as “Swift Running Water running down between the green islands.” Further, he explains, this homeland holds “the graves of [his] fathers.” The territory he describes in these lines is northeast Nebraska, where the Niobrara River intersects with the Missouri River. According to Ponca history, the confluence that forms between the Niobrara and the Missouri has been inhabited by the tribe since before the 1804 expedition of Lewis and Clark,⁸ who encountered one of the tribe’s abandoned villages on their journey to the Pacific.⁹ Swift Running Water, as Ponca members call this land, provided the tribe with a fertile valley for crops of corn, wheat, potatoes, squash, cabbages, and onions for generations.¹⁰They also fished in the intersecting riverways and engaged in buffalo hunts on the nearby plains. As Beth R. Ritter claims, even when the Ponca adopted nomadic hunting tendencies, they never abandoned their homeland at the confluence of the two rivers.¹¹ To them, this region was sacred. Standing Bear’s reference to the graves of his fathers buried near Swift Running Water indicates an indigenous temporality that extends back to an era before settler expansion took root in Nebraska. To Standing Bear, Swift Running Water was so culturally significant that he was willing to defy American law to return to it. While the land offered fertility and bounty, Standing Bear sought to return so that he could bury his son at the ancestral burial grounds of Maizi. Hence, as much as the Niobrara-Missouri confluence offered the Ponca material sustenance, the primary reason the small band defied the U.S. government was to honor their tradition by burying the chief’s son in his homeland. As the Northern Ponca historian Peter Le Claire has noted, the Maizi burial ground overlooks the Missouri riverway, which signifies the import of water to Ponca cultural life.¹² Therefore, the Crook v. Standing Bear trial that ensued in spring 1879 was because the Ponca man refused to neglect his tribal heritage site at the Niobrara-Missouri confluence.

Niobrara as Heritage: A Refuge for Agriculture and Buffalo Hunting

Second, Standing Bear’s metaphor also emphasizes the centrality of riverways to Ponca cultural experience. The intersecting currents of the Niobrara and the Missouri produce a fertile region for horticulture and semisedentary life where Ponca members could live and die. In this context, water becomes the predominant metaphor of Standing Bear’s speech, much as his tribe long relied upon the flowing currents of the two midwestern riverways. In fact, before Standing Bear’s ancestors became the independent Ponca peoples, they were once a small band of the Omaha who settled south on the Missouri near what is the present-day capital of Nebraska.¹³ “Omaha” (“U-ma-ha”) means “up-stream people,” a name first taken by the tribe when they journeyed north upon the Mississippi in centuries past.¹⁴ As such, the Ponca tribe stems from an ancestral lineage of river peoples, as do most of the Great Plains tribes.¹⁵ Like their ancestors and cousin tribes, Standing Bear’s people relied on the vast network of waterways to travel, fish, and produce crops. They also followed the vast buffalo herds that migrated south and north by way of the Missouri River tributaries running through the plains—the Niobrara, Platte, Republican, and others. By referencing the land of Swift Running Water in his speech, Standing Bear unveils a much different temporality than that of the American pioneering enterprises of the late nineteenth century. The land of Swift Running Water is an ancestral place of his fathers, but the wide, impassable river of his speech keeps him from reuniting with his home.

Watershed Moment in U.S. Indigenous Rights History

Third, despite eventually winning the trial and returning to his ancestral lands, Standing Bear’s famous 1879 court case brought to light more issues for Indigenous peoples and tribes than it did solutions. As he admits in his speech, the Ponca chief had to break with his cultural tradition and submit to the U.S. government’s legalese to attain the right to a courtroom trial. Webster and Poppleton, Standing Bear’s lawyers, partially won the case because they ingeniously argued that the Ponca leader left behind his tribal position when he departed Indian Territory.¹⁶ In other words, he relinquished his Ponca membership to pursue legal recourse for his removal from northern Nebraska. An ingenious argument it may be, but it seriously damaged the future of the Ponca tribe. American law, the turbulent waters of the Standing Bear’s courtroom speech, thus literally cut him off from tribal reunification and with those who he left behind in Indian Territory. For this reason, Beth R. Ritter defines Standing Bear’s victory as a “hollow” one.¹⁷ The Ponca tribe remains two separate entities to this very day: the northern Poncas still reside near the confluence of the Niobrara and the Missouri; the southern Poncas remain headquartered in Oklahoma.¹⁸ Therefore, Standing Bear’s lawful resistance to the U.S government may have been perceived as admirable by the American public, but the result still depicts the scars of nineteenth century indigenous policy. Nonetheless, the story of Standing Bear illustrates the Niobrara-Missouri confluence as a crucial heritage site for the Ponca people. These rivers were so important to the chief that he was willing to challenge the powerful American government in court. Even though his victory did not solve any issues between Indigenous Americans and the US government, it does tell us how vital the Land of Swift Running is to the Ponca tribe.

Featured Image: The confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers. Photo courtesy of Ansley West Rivers: https://bittersoutherner.com/issue-no12/the-confluence-of-the-niobrara-missouri-rivers.

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Acknowledgments:

I want to thank the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Archives & Special Collections for their assistance in offering me materials related to Standing Bear and the Niobrara Valley. I want to thank the Nebraska State Historical Society for offering me materials related to Standing Bear and the Ponca tribe. I want to specifically thank Eric Saxon and Josh Caster at UNL Special Collections and Tom Mooney at NSHS for their assistance. This article was written in part by assistance I received from the Willa Cather Collaboration Grant at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the National Willa Cather Center.

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1. The Ponca called the Niobrara “Niubdada,” which means “broad water”. See Louis V. Headman, Walks on the Ground: A Tribal History of the Ponca Nation (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 12. They also called it “ni obhatha ke,” which literally translates to “spreading river water”. See Paul A. Johnsgard, The Niobrara: A River Running Through Time (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 6. ↩︎
2. Standing Bear collection, RG 1429. Nebraska State Historical Society. ↩︎
3. Lawrence A. Dwyer, Standing Bear’s Quest For Freedom: The First Civil Rights Victory for Native Americans (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 41. ↩︎
4. Paul H. Carlson, The Plains Indians (Texas A&M UP, 1998), 173. ↩︎
5. Dwyer, Standing Bear, 110 – 111. ↩︎
6. Dwyer, Standing Bear, 98. ↩︎
7. “Personhood,” according to legal definitions, encompasses all individuals who have inherent rights, free will, and the ability to make one’s own decisions. Citizens of the US and even noncitizens of the US are granted “personhood” in the legal sense (Dwyer, 14). This means that they have certain rights that cannot be infringed upon. A “ward of the state” means that an individual or group of individuals have their decision-making rights transferred to the government. Many indigenous tribes were “wards” in the nineteenth century, which meant that they could not make their own decisions but had to rely on U.S. rulings (Dwyer, 95). When the government displaced tribes to Indian Territory, then, the leaders had no legal recourse to defend their rights to the land. As Dwyer notes, the U.S. rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness did not apply to the original inhabitants of the North American lands (14) ↩︎
8. “History,” Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, accessed March 10, 2026, https://poncatribe-ne.gov/culture/history/. ↩︎
9. Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriweather Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (Simon & Schuster, 1996), 155.  ↩︎
10. Dwyer, Standing Bear, 5. ↩︎
11. Beth R. Ritter, “Poncas,” in Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians, ed. David J. Wishart (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 157. ↩︎
12. Standing Bear collection, RG 1429. Nebraska State Historical Society. ↩︎
13. David J. Wishart, Great Plains Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 157. ↩︎
14. Dwyer, Standing Bear, 3. ↩︎
15. Robert W. Larson, Red Cloud: Warrior-Statesman of the Lakota Sioux (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 23. ↩︎
16. Dwyer, Standing Bear, 94. ↩︎
17. Ritter, “Poncas,” 158. ↩︎
18. Ritter, “Poncas,” 158. ↩︎