Coming to the Table

Before I immigrated to Canada, I helped a University of Nebraska journalism professor research a book about Standing Bear, the Ponca chief who sued the U.S. federal government in 1879. Argued pro bono by Union Pacific’s chief attorney, his was a ­landmark court case  —  the one that finally recognized American Indians as “persons within the meaning of the law.”

Standing Bear’s story revolves around the government’s order, in 1877, to forcibly remove the relatively small and politically inconsequential Ponca Nation from its homeland, at the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers, to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. The move, bureaucrats believed, would make it easier to transport treaty provisions to the Great Sioux Nation. And so the Ponca Nation came to find itself in oil-rich lands, more than 700 kilometres to the south, which are today criss-crossed by pipelines and dotted with refineries. While some chiefs were content to stay in this new...