The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas

Robert M. Utley’s The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas exposes a new angle to the history of Sitting Bull after Little Bighorn and before his death in 1890. Reading against the grain of traditional archival sources such as government correspondence and documents, Utley shows us how the Lakotas’ search for sovereignty and agency in the years after Little Bighorn contributes to the burgeoning history of this important Lakota leader. In regard to Utley’s previous work on Sitting Bull, The Last Sovereigns serves two purposes. First, it contributes to Utley’s Sitting Bull: The Life and Times of an American Patriot (2008), filling in a period that has been understudied. Second, the accessibility of the book allows for broad audiences to understand Sitting Bull’s life in Canada before his death, while making a crucial historiographical call to action for the exploration of deeper notions of Lakota resurgence against governmental authority—both from the United States and from Canada during the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, the book argues that the act of resistance that Sitting Bull and his Lakota followers deployed provides a new mode of understanding Lakota-white relations on both sides of the US-Canadian border.In seven digestible chapters, Utley positions a large cast of characters to tell Sitting Bull’s story in the Northwest Territory, a space across the “Medicine Line”—the Native terminology for what would be considered the US-Canadian border. Of these characters, Utley homes in on not only those who wanted to push Sitting Bull back into US custody but also those who built significant relationships with the Lakota leader. Major James M. Walsh of the North-West Mounted Police, as one example, exposes the contentious authority between those in control of the territories, who allowed Lakota to reside in their region, versus the broader Canadian government, an entity that wanted Lakotas removed from their lands. Utley shows readers that Lakota communities threatened Canadian authority over Indigenous communities, as their presence diminished the bison population and heightened conflict with other Indigenous communities needing bison for sustenance. The lack of food, as Utley points out, was the contributing force behind the Lakotas returning to US-occupied territories from Canada, a move that threatened Sitting Bull’s life. While his death came days before Wounded Knee in 1890, Utley provides details for why he and his followers moved back to the United States in the first place.The Last Sovereigns is accessible for both academic and public audiences. Undergraduate classes could easily read through this book to grasp Sitting Bull’s life, just as scholars of Native American history could find great use in Utley’s close examination of this understudied period. Moreover, Utley’s approach constructed a strong foundation for a more profound historical inquiry into Sitting Bull’s life and broader history of the US-Canadian border. Beyond Sitting Bull’s experiences, scholars should use Utley’s book in tandem with other studies, such as Sheila McManus’s The Line Which Separates, to examine the exclusionary citizenship that Native Americans faced during the late nineteenth century. Sitting Bull’s expulsion from Canada could also be supported through the lens of settler colonialism and how Canadian policies sought to remove Lakota communities from their nation’s landscape. One idea for those practicing ethnohistory could be to expand Utley’s work by implementing Lakota perspectives to understand the Indigenous experiences better on this trek to and from Canada. With that said, The Last Sovereigns is a significant contribution to the study of the period between Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee. It provides deeper insights into Sitting Bull’s life, which has regularly been excluded from this period’s history.

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