STANDING BEAR WAS ARRESTED FOR TRYING TO GO HOME – THEN HIS CASE FORCED A U.S. COURT TO DECIDE IF A NATIVE MAN WAS A “PERSON”

The third is the implication that Native peoples were legally nonexistent before 1879 until a white judge declared them human.

That is also misleading.

Tribal nations possessed their own political identities, laws, diplomacy, and systems of belonging.

The scandal revealed by Standing Bear v.

Crook was not that Native humanity began in Judge Dundy’s courtroom.

It was that the United States had created a system powerful enough to detain a Native man while arguing that he could not use an ordinary legal mechanism available to “persons.”