Native American Indian Chiefs & Warriors Educational Posters

Sitting Bull Poster

• South Dakota posters

Sitting Bull Great Native American Leaders Art Print

Sitting Bull (c. 1831-1890)

Poster Text: “What treaty that the white man ever made with us have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them? ... What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux: because I was born where my father lived: because I would die for my people and my country?” Statement

Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux chief and holy man Sitting Bull lead a band of Sioux Indians who resisted all of the U.S. government's attempts to change the way the Sioux traditionally lived. The U.S. government eventually drove Sitting Bull's people out of their homelands around the Black Hills of present-day South Dakota, but not without a fight. In 1876, Sitting Bull's tribe defeated the U.S. government's forces in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in which Colonel George Armstrong Custer was killed. Sitting Bull's tribe later retreated to Canada. Starving and cold, tribe members surrendered to the U.S. government several years later. Sitting Bull was killed in 1890 when tribal police tried to arrest him at his home on the Standing Rock Reservation.

Geronimo Great Native American Leaders Art Print

Geronimo (1829-1909)
b. 6-16-1829; New Mexico
d. 2-17-1909; Ft. Sill, OK

Poster Text: “[Arizona] is my land, my home, my father’s land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct.”
From Geronimo’s autobiography (1906)

Geronimo Holding a Rifle, 1884, Giclee Print

Geronimo was an Apache warrior. His tribe lived in Mexico and the southwestern United States. In 1877, the U.S. government forced the Apaches to live on a reservation in the desolate area of Arizona, but Geronimo lead a small band of Apaches that refused to settle on the reservation. After years of fighting, captures, and escapes, Geronimo surrendered for the final time in 1886, after the U.S. government promised that he and his tribe could return to their homelands in Arizona. After a brief period of exile in Florida, part of the Apache tribe was allowed to return to Arizona. But Geronimo and the tribe members who resisted with him were never again allowed to return to their homelands.

Chief Joseph Poster

Chief Joseph Poster
“Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself...”
CHIEF JOSEPH, 1879

Chief Joseph Great Native American Leaders Art Print

Chief Joseph (c. 1840-1904)

Poster Text: “Our chiefs are killed. ... The old men are all dead. ... The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are, perhaps freezing to death, I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I can find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

Chief Joseph, 1903, Art Print Edward S. Curtis

Chief Joseph was the leader of the Nez Percé Indians. In 1877, the U.S. government tried to drive the Percé from their home in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon to a reservation in Idaho. Instead, Chief Joseph led his tribe on a retreat toward Canada. The tribe was eventually stopped 40 miles from the Canadian border and sent to a reservation in Oklahoma. Chief Joseph's tribe was later relocated to a reservation in Washington state.

• Chief Joseph Prayer poster

Chief Seattle Great Native American Leaders Art Print

Chief Seattle
(c. 1786-1866)

Poster Text: “Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as they swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.”
Chief Seattle’s Oration, Pugit Sound (1854)

Chief Seattle Prayer, Art Print

Red Cloud Poster

Red Cloud Poster
“Men came out and brought papers. We could not read them and they did not tell us what was in them.”
Red Cloud, 1870

• Nebraska posters
• South Dakota posters

Red Cloud Great Native American Leaders Art Print

Red Cloud (1822-1909)

Poster Text: “We were told that they [federal troops] wished merely to pass through our country ... to seek for gold in the Far West. ... Yet before the ashes of the council fire are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. You have heard the sound of the white soldier’s axe upon the Little Piney. His presence here is ... an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be plowed for corn? Dakotas, I am for war.”
Speech at council at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, 1866

Red Cloud was a war leader of the Oglala Sioux. Throughout the 1860s, Red Cloud defended Sioux hunting grounds in present day Montana and Wyoming. the white settlers, with the help of the U.S. government, could not defeat Red Cloud and his warriors. In 1868, the United States agreed to stop building roads through Red Cloud's Sioux territory. Red Cloud is famous for being the only Indian to win a war with the U.S. government.

Black Hawk Great Native American Leaders Art Print

Black Hawk (1767-1838)

Poster Text: “[Black Hawk] has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who came year after year, to cheat and take away their lands. You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it.”
Speech upon surrender, Prairie du Chein, Wisconsin (August 27, 1832)

Black Hawk was a Sauk Indian chief. His tribe lived in the northwestern part of present-day Illinois. White settlers tricked the Sauk into signing away their land, but Black Hawk refused to recognize the sale of his home. During the Black Hawk War in 1832, the Sauk fought for the right to live on their land west of the Mississippi River, but they lost. Black Hawk's tribe was the last to live in the Illinois region.

Osceola, Giclee Print George Catlin

Osceola was a war chief of the Seminoles during the Second Seminole War fought against the US in Florida during the 19th century.