I Am a Man by Joe Starita documents the heartbreaking exile of Chief Standing Bear from his homeland to his journey to establishing the personhood of Native Americans in US courts. Chief Standing Bear promised his dying teenage son that he would bury him in the ancestral graveyard back along the Niobrara River in northeast Nebraska. On his journey home with his son’s body, he was jailed for leaving the Oklahoma reservation and for visiting his friends and relatives on the Omaha reservation. The US Army intended to force him to return to Oklahoma. However, a newspaperman and two attorneys in Omaha helped him file a suit against the US government. He ended up being the first Native person to testify in a US court and his case established that Native persons have the same rights as the nation’s White and Black citizens, which was not clear in the muddle of the way Native Americans were treated. His most famous lines are from his testimony in court about his personhood. He stood and held out his hand and said: “That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same God made us both.”
