Lost Bird of the Sioux Nation

By Edward Barlow, Section Historical Perspectives
Posted on Mon May 08, 2006 at 06:23:27 AM CST

In Los Angeles, on Valentine's Day 1920, a 29 year old poverty-stricken, partially blind, syphilitic Sioux woman, Zintka Lanuni (Lost Bird), died from flu complications. Her story is heartbreaking.

image from this_website

This history in Full Story, and more pictures at this website.

When Lost Bird was about one year old, she survived the Wounded Knee Massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The United States army had used large military machine guns to slaughter between 290 and 350 Lakota Sioux (mostly women, children, and babies).

As they were being machine gunned to death, her mother and other Sioux women managed to cover and hide Lost Bird with their bodies. After the massacre, the American soldiers departed to participate in yet another massacre at Drexel Mission several miles away.

Four days later, after a severe blizzard and 40 below temperatures, the Army returned to bury the dead in a mass grave and collect souvenirs. Incredibly, they found Lost Bird still alive and crying under her dead mother. Against the protests of the Sioux, General Leonard Colby claimed her as his personal war trophy.

He spent the next several years displaying Lost Bird to the public for profit and fame. In his law practice, she was always on display as a war trophy and a curio. For cheating several million dollars from Indian allotments and claims, he was appointed Assistant US Attorney General of the US.

Lost Bird's poverty stricken life did not go well. She ran away from her physically, emotionally, and possibly sexually abusive home and joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. She was cheated out of her land allotment. She worked as a prostitute on the infamous Barbary Coast of San Francisco. She was married twice to white men who routinely beat her. She had four children - 2 died in infancy and the third was given to an Indian friend before she died. At age 17 her first child was stillborn soon after she was placed in an Indian Boarding School by Colby.

Lost Bird died not knowing she was a survivor of the Wounded Knee Massacre.

In June 1991 the Lakotas were able to move her remains from the LA grave to a single grave next to the mass grave of her people slaughtered at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota where she now rests in peace.

Lost Bird has become a symbol of the many Indian children who were stolen, kidnapped, or deceitfully taken from their families and communities by the military, social workers, missionaries, and others and raised to be "White" children..

The "Lost Bird Society" was formed to bring back the roots of these Indian children.

Reference: LOST BIRD OF WOUNDED KNEE, by Renee Sansom Flood. Simon & Schuster

http://www.kstrom.net/isk/books/ya/ya336.html