Lost Bird Wounded Knee

ZINTKALA NUNI Lost Bird of Wounded Knee
~ Millie Chalk

Take a look at the portrait to your right. 

What do you see?   The picture is old and the man no doubt is a U.S. military officer who is holding a Native American baby dressed in an infant’s dressing gown as fine as the uniform worn by the man holding her. 

Now what if I told you that this baby was one of the few survivors of the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 and that she was found amongst the dead, protected by her mother’s body after four days of a horrible blizzard and temperatures that dropped to -40 degrees. 

If you’re like me, when I came across this picture it sent my mind into overload imagining all the possible scenarios.  Who was this man?  Was he at the massacre?  Was he responsible for it?  And the most burning question of all… what became of this child?

I became obsessed with all of these questions but it didn’t take me long to discover I was not alone in my fixation of the subject.  A quick search had uncovered a Renee Sansom Flood, a social worker in the Dakotas who was the person that first stumbled upon the picture many years ago moving her to spend a good portion of her life documenting the story of this little girl and the family that took her away from her people.  Renee’s efforts resulted in a book; Lost Bird of Wounded Knee and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

As she explains in her book, her job for the state was being one of the many responsible for taking Lakota children from their mothers and adopting them to white parents.  She instinctively hated that the methods used to secure the children utilized just about every subversive effort short of forcibly tearing the child from its new mother’s arms. 

For her what had started as a career intending to help others had morphed into a monstrous campaign to tear families apart and rob generations of their identity.  Making all of this worse was that she herself had married a full blood Lakota man and had given birth to her own Native child, experiencing firsthand the racism and hatred toward those outside of her white society.

When Renee saw the picture, not only was her curiosity peaked but she felt compelled to search out the story behind it hoping to find a happy ending illustrating that perhaps someone out there had experienced success with the integration of the two cultures causing her to feel justification for the lives she knew she had shattered.

Because the portrait is quite lovely she had high hopes of finding a wonderful story of parental love and nurturing but what she found was a horrific tale of greed, deception, dishonor and betrayal.  The officer in the picture was a General Leonard W Colby who came upon the scene only days after the Wounded Knee massacre.  Renee was relieved to know he wasn’t one of those that were responsible for it but his behavior in securing ownership of the child was just as despicable as he referred to the little girl as “a most interesting Indian relic”.

In the few hours past the time she had been found and barely pronounced to be alive the possession of her little body had already crossed hands numerous times culminating in a bidding war between Buffalo Bill, the General and a merchant with the General coming in with the winning bid.  He felt he simply must have the child because he saw it as a good move politically as well as wanting to follow in the footsteps of Andrew Jackson who himself had adopted a Native child for the same reason of wanting to convince all of his benevolence.

The baby was placed into the care of a woman who promptly escaped and returned her back to her people where she was quickly discovered the next day by the General’s scouts.  He orchestrated an elaborate deception of pretending to be a native himself and being escorted by a wagon of much needed food he went onto the reservation to plead his case.  He told a heartbreaking story of him and his wife and how they had lost their child not long before, that he had heard of the orphan and would give the reservation the food if they would allow him to adopt the child. 

The people were desperate as their own children were dying of the cold and starvation.  Colby seemed sincere and promised to care for the child, that he had the money to give to her a good life. Although there were still some that were not convinced, more decided they had no other choice but to give him what he asked and before they could recognize what had occurred Colby took possession of the baby and never looked back.

It was a miracle the baby had survived to begin with, but she continued to teeter on the brink of death because of the constant viewing of thousands of curious onlookers as she was put on display with hundreds of receptions and special appearances causing her to contract pneumonia numerous times from so many people breathing upon her little face with the germs she had no immunities to fight. 

The infant managed to stay alive but grew in spite of illness to be a sad and lonely child without the attention of a mother because her adopted mother was too dedicated to the women’s suffrage movement to warrant being home with a family.  Her adopted father the General was a scoundrel with no intention of being burdened by her as a daughter for any reason other than his own personal gain.

She bounced from one relative to the next tended to by nannies and spent time in native boarding schools laying the foundation for a horrible life of abuse both at the hands of her father and later several husbands.  She suffered continuous raciest attacks as well as grave illnesses to finally die at the young age of 29 and be buried in a pauper’s grave with no headstone in a remote, desolate town in central California.

I’d like to say the story of Lost Bird is not typical of the experience of our Native children living outside of their community but the truth is at best they can only adapt.  Some are fortunate enough to be a part of a loving family but even if these are their circumstances often they grow up to be lost and alone.  They suffer great depression and disconnection not knowing who they are, where they belong or to whom.  At worse our Native children grow up experiencing hatred through racism and often abuse as well as a disconnection not only to who they are but to life itself. 

Some would justify the practice of taking Native children from their mothers because they have so little to provide for their child but they need only look at the example of Lost Bird.  She was raised with all the trappings of a princess but what she really needed growing up was missing.  All she and any child needs is the love of their family and the support of a community but Renee argues that for Native children it runs deeper than that.  Because of the ways a child is raised in a traditional Native manner the bonds of family are far greater, threads of connection that weave an entire nation into a tight cohesive unit that develops a relationship to family that begins even while still in the womb.   

To take such a feeling of belonging from a child is cruel but I fear will continue by well intending people convinced they’re doing the right thing simply because many of our Native families have so little.  Until we as a nation recognize the unique culture and identity these children have a right to inherit, these tragedies will continue and we will be responsible for the failings of such programs.

If there is a happy ending to the story of Lost Bird it is that Renee herself discovered where the young woman’s bones had been laid and because of Renee’s work and the efforts of many others her body was exhumed in a manner that observed proper tradition and taken to her final resting place to be once more with her family buried at Wounded Knee on July 11^th 1991.

Editor's Note: Highly Recommend the purchase of Lost Bird of Wounded Knee by Renee Sansom Flood, available at Amazon.com etc. Compelling read...