[think indian]
Josephine Gates Kelly: Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Leader By Susan Kelly Power (Josephine’s daughter)
Josephine Gates Kelly (Wanahca Tindah Wastewin, or Her Good Work Brings Flowers Woman) was born on Battle Creek in January of 1888—the year before North Dakota would become a state. She liked to remind people she was born the same year as the Great Blizzard. “I came into this world during a blizzard, and I’ll probably leave it the same way!” Her parents were Nellie Two Bear (Mahpiya Bogawin, or Gathering Clouds Woman) and Frank Gates (Sasway, or Blood Red). Sitting Bull was still alive during Josephine’s first three years, and his leadership made such an impression on her—memories of his gentle ways, love for his people, his prescient vision of the challenges to come—that in one sense he never died. Yet, she had seen firsthand evidence of the slaughter. The morning of December 15, 1890, when Josephine was a month shy of her third birthday, her father wrapped her in his great overcoat and held her in front of him as they rode into town. Someone had brought word that there was danger, guns fired, rumors that the old chief was injured. Frank Gates’ sons weren’t born yet, so Josephine would be his fellow witness that cold day. She saw the wagon that brought Sitting Bull’s body into town, and the mourners who gathered behind it, though at a distance, fearful of the soldiers and their guns. They were crying and singing, stunned with grief as if they had lost a part of their own body, an arm, a leg, a beating heart. She would later say she saw blood in the snow. When they lifted him from the cart? His wounds still new? One leader was lost, but another, held against her father’s warm body, her large eyes seeing everything, was being born.
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