Rare Indigenous eyewitness account of Battle of the Little Bighorn found in Ontario

When Samantha Thompson read the first line of a long-lost letter, she knew that her work to authenticate and transcribe the mysterious set of rolled-up documents, packed away for some future archivist, was worth it.

"I remember where I was sitting at my desk and I started reading: 'I was born in Montana, my father died when I was four years old and so I lived with my mother and sister and my grandparents and my uncle,' and my heart started beating faster," said Thompson, an archivist at the Peel Art Gallery Museum and Archives in Brampton, Ont.

A few months earlier, Thompson had been going through one of 60 boxes donated to the museum. She came across several pages of thick paper — on one was a detailed watercolour painting, and the others were made up of what looked like two letters, one lengthy and the other short.

While there were some English names like "Reno," "Custer" and "Montana," the letter was written in Old German, a rare dialect that fell out of use around the Second World War.

"Right away we had this mystery. Why is somebody writing in Old German about what seems to relate to a possibly significant event in U.S. history?" Thompson told Rosanna Deerchild in an interview for Unreserved. 

As luck would have it, a colleague's mother could read the rare dialect and agreed to help with the translation. It took several months, but when it finally arrived in January 2020, Thompson was looking at a first-person account of one of the most significant battles in U.S. history: the Battle of the Little Bighorn. 

The account comes from Lakota leader Standing Bear, who was just 17 years old on June 25, 1876, when Lt.-Col. George A. Custer and his troops descended on the Lakota and their Cheyenne relatives who were camping along the Little Bighorn River in Montana.

That battle, known by the Lakota as the Battle of Greasy Grass, is celebrated as a victory for Indigenous people who stood their ground and resisted their forced relocation onto reservations. Its anniversary is a tribally recognized holiday in the United States, with many ceremonies beginning on or ending June 25.

In Standing Bear's letter, written in the early 1930s, he tells of how his uncles took him hunting as a boy, and how they would often swim across the Missouri River. One day, his uncle told him they would attend a Sun Dance near the Rosebud River, and that legendary Hunkpapa Lakota leader, Sitting Bull, encouraged many people to attend.

Standing Bear says he witnessed this ceremony and included a painting of Sitting Bull leading the Sun Dance with his letter. The sacred ceremony, according to Standing Bear, lasted three or four days. One more day passed, and that's when Custer's men arrived.

Then I heard a man shouting that the soldiers were coming. They had shot a boy that was on his way to get our horses. I ran back and saw that another man was bringing our horses, I sprang onto a horse but I didn't have time to dress, I had only my shirt but no shoes. I rode with my uncle in the direction toward Reno when on the hill we saw Custer advancing. Before we got closer we saw hundreds upon hundreds of our people around us. A few of them had guns and most of them had bows and arrows. 

- Standing Bear, in the letter he dictated in the 1930s

Standing Bear's account of that battle offers a rare written account from an Indigenous point of view. While there are many oral accounts of these types of historic events, very few written accounts are known to archivists. It's one of the reasons Thompson wanted to see the documents repatriated to the Lakota community as soon as possible.

"This was a voice that our archives team unanimously agreed needed to go home. It would speak to us better in its own community, and there was never any doubt about that," Thompson said.