NORTH Dakota had them in 1890. South Dakota, it is widely believed, got them in 1953. And now, controversially, Montana wants them.
But are Sitting Bull's bones actually in Canada?
Chief Sitting Bull, in photo dated about 1885, was killed in North Dakota.
A century-old struggle over the remains of one of North America's most revered native leaders has flared again in the U.S. after descendants of the great Sioux chief -- backed by the U.S. National Park Service -- launched a bid this week to move Sitting Bull's grave from a "neglected" burial site on a South Dakota Indian reservation to the Little Bighorn Battlefield Memorial in the neighbouring state of Montana.
But, in a startling twist in the long-running dispute over Sitting Bull's skeleton, a new theory has emerged about the post-mortem fate of the legendary warrior, who spent his life crossing back and forth over a Canada-U.S. border that meant nothing to his people.
Jerome First, a 70-year-old Montana Sioux and the great-grandson of Sitting Bull's close friend, Chief Medicine Bear, claims the latest uproar over the bones is irrelevant because Sitting Bull was secretly buried in the Turtle Mountains of southern Manitoba.
The Turtle Mountains straddle the border between southwestern Manitoba and North Dakota.
"They faked his grave," First told CanWest News Service on Friday, "because Sitting Bull had visions that there would be a fight over his body."
If true, his visions were prescient.
Soon after Sitting Bull was shot to death near Fort Yates, N.D., on Dec. 15, 1890, battles began over what should be done with his body.
Born Tatanka Iyotank around 1834 in northern South Dakota, Sitting Bull had, by the 1870s, become the most famous and feared Indian in North America.
He was the leader of the 1876 victory over Gen. George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and a stoic symbol of Indian resistance to white settlement through the 1880s.
Sitting Bull spent five years in exile in southern Saskatchewan after the Montana massacre of Custer and his troops. The Sioux chief's presence north of the border -- and beyond reach of the U.S. army -- became a flashpoint in Canadian-American relations, and Sitting Bull eventually led his starving people back to Standing Rock reservation in southern North Dakota.
Suspected of endorsing the Ghost Dance revival of Indian militancy, Sitting Bull was shot to death at Standing Rock while attempting to evade arrest.
Most historians believe Sitting Bull was initially buried at Fort Yates before his remains were disinterred in 1953 and moved to a memorial site near the town of Mobridge on the South Dakota side of the Standing Rock reserve.
But North Dakota officials have, over the years, insisted the transferred bones were not Sitting Bull's and that at least some of his remains are still at Fort Yates.
First's claim about the "fake" grave -- first reported by the Billings Gazette on Thursday -- has stoked a new round of debate about what really happened to one of America's most storied set of bones.
-- CanWest News Service
PREVIOUS
