Download "I Am a Man": Chief Standing Bear's Journey for Justice AudioBook Free

In 1877, Key Status Bear's Ponca Indian tribe was forcibly removed from their Nebraska homeland and marched to Oklahoma - known then as Indian Territory - in what became the tribe's own Trail of Tears. "I Am a Man" chronicles what took place when Standing Bear set off on the 600-mile walk to come back your body of his only kid with their traditional burial grounds. Along the way, it examines the complex relationship between the United States authorities and the small, peaceful tribe and the legal repercussions of land swaps and damaged treaties, while never shedding eyesight of the heartbreaking voyage the Ponca endured. It really is an account of people left for lifeless who survived injustice, disease, overlook, hunger, humiliation, and termination. On another level, it is a tale of life and death, despair and fortitude, freedom and patriotism; a tale of Religious kindness and bureaucratic evil; a tale of hope, of a people still in our midst today, painstakingly conserving a cultural identification that had suffered them for years and years before their face with Lewis and Clark in nov 1804. Before it ends, Standing Bear's long voyage home also explores important issues of citizenship, constitutional coverage, cultural identification, and the nature of democracy - conditions that continue to resonate loudly in 21st-century America. It really is a tale that questions whether local sovereignty, tribal-based societies, and ethnical survival are appropriate for American democracy. Standing Bear efficiently used habeas corpus, the one liberty contained in the original words of the Constitution, to get usage of a federal court and finally his freedom. This accounts aptly illuminates how the nation's delicate system of checks and balances worked almost just as the Founding Fathers envisioned, a system probably out of whack and under siege today.

Category: Biographical