Joseph Standing Bear, one of Illinois’ most visible activists on Native American issues, vividly remembers a TV documentary he watched as a teenager about the federal government’s Indian schools. The schools were set up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to teach academic subjects and the ways of white society to Native American children, many of whom had been removed involuntarily from their parents’ homes. “The students had all had their hair cut short and couldn’t speak their own language,” he says. “They wore uniforms and slept in barracks–it was the total opposite of what they had come from. And one of the schools they showed in this documentary was in Carlisle, Pennsylvania–the school my grandmother had been sent to. For the first time I realized what my grandmother had been through, what had happened to a lot of other people like her who were taken away from their community and told to act like somebody else.”
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Serious and soft-spoken, Standing Bear started trying to find his place in that culture while he was still in high school. He spent as much time as he could listening to Ojibwa elders in Minnesota, where his mother and grandmother were from. He also followed closely the efforts of Leonard Peltier and other activist Native Americans. He says exploring a heritage he’d barely known he had was exhilarating. “For me, it was a cultural awakening,” he says. “I like the German side, but the native part of it called out to things in my own spirit–like my love of the natural environment. I was really concentrating on what I could do to help make things better for my people. I was going to museums and talking to elders I met about how you can be a warrior and serve.”
After he graduated he followed his father into the machinist’s trade and started working at Continental X-Ray, on the city’s southwest side. He didn’t begin to speak out on Native American issues until the early 1990s, when he learned that the park district in the southwest suburb of New Lennox was planning to build a lavish golf course on 230 acres of undeveloped land. Archaeologists had found human remains and evidence of a Native American camp on a 19-acre section of the land, but park district officials decided to build there anyway. Standing Bear, other Native Americans, and their supporters protested the plan; one of their most dramatic actions was forming an “honor guard” of Native Americans who stood at the edge of the construction site to show respect for the ancestors whose resting place was being disturbed.
Another major goal of SOARRING is to find places to reestablish the plants and animals that are traditional in Native American rituals and daily life. The organization now owns a bison that’s being bred on a downstate farm near Le Roy. On a parcel deeded to the Westchester Historical Society at the edge of the Wolf Road prairie, just west of Chicago, members of the group have a garden where they grow sweet grass, Hopi blue corn, sage, and other plants; they’re also helping to reintroduce native plants to the preserve’s prairie and marsh. In September each year the group does a two-day canoe float on the Fox River, which Standing Bear says is intended to show their concern for Illinois’ waterways and to reflect how their ancestors lived along the river. “There’s a lot of symbolism in most of what we do,” he says. “It’s about restoring the balance of the earth, unifying people with each other and with their surroundings.”
