Luther Standing Bear
1868–1939 1 entry
Biography
Luther Standing Bear, in Lakota Ota Kte, was an Oglala Lakota chief, writer, teacher and actor. Born in 1868 in Dakota Territory, he was among the first pupils of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, opened in 1879, where Native children were taught to give up their own ways. He later worked as a teacher and a clerk on the reservation, travelled to England with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1902 and became a chief of his band in 1905.
He then moved to California, where he acted in Hollywood westerns and worked to have Native characters shown truthfully. In his books, among them My People the Sioux and Land of the Spotted Eagle, he described the life and wisdom of the Lakota and argued that Native children should learn their own history, languages and customs. He died in California in 1939.
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