Youth connect with the sacrifice of their ancestors
The Annual Fort Robinson Outbreak Spiritual 400 mile run is held every year from January 8th to the 14th, to commemorate the attempt by members of the Cheyenne Tribe to return to their homelands. Starved, sick and without proper clothing they fled in the sub-zero temperatures. Lynnette Two Bulls, the executive director of Yellow Bird Lifeways and one of the co-founders of the Run said that participating runners recreate the break out. “This marks the 28th annual Spiritual Run, to finish the journey that our Northern Cheyenne could not. So, our youth run to finish the journey.
Giving updates on Facebook, Two Bulls said that the runners for the 28th annual run broke out from the rebuilt barracks at Fort Robinson the night of January 9, just as they did 140 years ago. The next day, they ran from Crawford Nebraska to just outside of Custer South Dakota in the Sacred Black Hills. They stopped for the night in Deadwood. Even though it was frigid in South Dakota, the runners managed to miss the winter storm that was ramping up in Nebraska dumping up to 11 inches of snow in some areas, with blowing and drifting snow, wind chills plunged into the 30 to 50 below range according to weather.gov.
January 12 they left Deadwood and reached the Montana line. The following day they ran from Hammond Montana to Broadus and on to Ashland Montana, where they had a meal at the St. Labre Indian School. The final day, runners departed Ashland, ran through Lame Deer and ended the run at a gravesite in Busby Montana where some of the Fort Robinson victims’ remains have been buried. The Smithsonian, under the Native American Graves Repatriation Act returned those remains to the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in the 1990’s.
We are told to just forget it, the hundreds of years of oppression the impacts of which are still felt today. We are told to get over it, this history that is so horrific to tell, how colonial rule meted out the most grisly cruelties imaginable upon the First Nations, so horrific even they have attempted to omit its existence, wipe it from any history books, crush any knowledge of it. Most recently, the efforts to retell American history accurately have been labeled as “woke.” And besides, it’s just too uncomfortable for descendants of colonists to hear, after all, they aren’t responsible for any of it, so they shouldn’t have to live feeling terrible about something they didn’t do.
Until recently, American history has been told from a mono-cultural perspective, often omitting the presence of Native Americans entirely. Denial of history does not change the fact that our own tribal communities today continue to suffer from the impacts of colonialism in much the same way that our ancestors did. We are still suffering from the degradation of our environments, spread of disease, removal from our homelands, starvation and other human rights violations. We will not forget because we know to remember and grieve are part of the healing process.
So, we run, which is a tradition going back thousands of years.
The Outbreak run is like many others held around the region –the Wounded Knee Memorial Motorcycle Run, the Big Foot Memorial Ride to Wounded Knee, the Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run/Walk, the Dakota 38+2 Wokiksuye Horse Ride, the Wounded Knee Survivors Run – to remember and commemorate those who were murdered during the Indian Wars of the mid to late 1800’s because they wouldn’t renounce their tribes and submit to assimilation and relocation. These memorial runs and rides inadvertently serve a larger purpose by telling American and Indigenous history, which cannot be separated as much as the colonist descendants would like. Each of the events commemorated in the aforementioned run/rides cannot be separated.
Settlement and expansion of the United States has been driven by Manifest Destiny, a settler-colonial belief that God had made the continent for white settlers, to conquer and prosper. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries Native Americans, who had been cooperative in the early years of European contact, began to resist the colonial oppression. During those two centuries Native Americans were decimated by Eurasian diseases. Their resistance and anger to being forced to cede land caused conflict and eventually forced removal, enslavement, imprisonment and war.
By 1800, Texas and California were highly settled, but the West was considered the “Great American Desert.” The United States government’s westward expansion began in earnest after President Thomas Jefferson negotiated the purchase of 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi from France for $15 million dollars, according to the Smithsonian American Art and Museum.
The majority of this land was occupied by Native American tribes and just a small portion belonged to France. The deal was considered politically shrewd because as historian Henry Adams put it, “ it cost almost nothing”(the Journal of American History).
Merriweather Lewis and William Clark were quickly dispatched with their Corps of Discovery, to find a route to the Pacific Ocean, returning by 1806. But efforts to open up the vast area to settlement and economic development were hampered by the presence of Native Americans.
Between 1865 and the 1890s 430-million acres in the Far West were settled, more land than during the preceding 200 plus years of American history.
Northern Cheyenne Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf, signers of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had expected they would live on the reservation with the Sioux at Fort Robinson in Nebraska, but shortly after they arrived in 1877, the United States ordered they relocate from the northern Great Plains to the Darlington Agency on the Southern Cheyenne Reservation in Indian Territory in Oklahoma.
They had begun their journey with 972 people but arrived in August of 1877 with 937 people – some elderly had perished along the way and others had slipped away to go back north. Upon arrival they noted the poor and impoverished conditions. Rations were inadequate as was medical care and many were suffering from strange infection diseases. An investigation into conditions was launched but when conditions didn’t improve, the Cheyenne were given authorization to hunt but the landscape was devoid of anything to hunt because U.S policy to starve out Native Americans by slaughtering bison had wiped out the herds.
A measles outbreak in 1878 struck the Northern Cheyenne so by the fall of that year, the chiefs decided to return north. After running for six weeks, they held council and split into two groups. Dull Knife wanted to stop running and go to Red Cloud Agency, while Little Wolf continued to the Powder River.
In late October, surrounded by the Army, and concerned about the weather, Dull Knife decided to go to Fort Robinson, and by December had decided to fight no more if his people would be allowed to live at Pine Ridge but by early January of 1879, they were ordered to return south. When they refused, bars were put on the windows, food rations and wood for heat were halted.
On January 9, 1879, at 10 p.m., the Cheyenne escaped and fled west, pursued day and night by both soldiers and civilians. About 27 Cheyenne were killed including Dull Knife’s daughter, whose body was mutilated. Over the following days, a few were captured, others were killed or died of exposure, according to the Wyoming State Historical Society.
Two Bulls said that the run had begun originally as a tribute to the Northern Cheyenne ancestors but has now become a way for youth to connect with the sacrifice of their ancestors, to learn about leadership, language preservation, environmental justice and social change.
(Contact Marnie Cook at staffwriter@nativesunnews.today)
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January 19, 2024