The Education of Clarence Three Stars: A Lakota American Life
From the Author:
Think of all the great American Indian names in our history: Geronimo. Sitting Bull. Crazy Horse. Chief Joseph. Most of them were great warriors and chiefs who led extraordinary lives. But they weren't exactly ikce wicasa, as the Lakota say, or of the common people. Sometimes those of more modest stature hold in the story of their lives an entire era, one in which they struggled with the challenges of the day as members of a family, a community, and a whole people. It's too bad that history has a way of forgetting all about them.
So it is with Clarence Three Stars (a.k.a. Packs the Dog), a Lakota boy who was told, at age 15, that everything he had learned in life up to that point was wrong. He set off from Pine Ridge agency for Carlisle Industrial School in 1879, a member of the first class of Native boys and girls sent to the most famous Indian boarding school in our history. Once I began to understand the obstacles Clarence faced at Carlisle, and what he went on to make of the rest of his life, I decided to write down his story. He would become, you might say, a modern warrior long after the last shots of the Indian Wars had been fired.
His story wasn't easy to dig up, though. History buries most lives so deep that sometimes only family are left to remember. Friends and colleagues would often ask, "Why do you want to tell the story of a man nobody's ever heard of?" "Well," I'd say, "novelists have been doing it for hundreds of years." David Copperfield. Emma Bovary. Jim Loney. The Kapshaws and Lamartines of Louise Erdrich. Who had ever heard of them until they burst forth from between the covers of a book? And if novelists can do it by force of imagination, why can't historians do the same with facts and documents and true stories to guide them?
The Education of Clarence Three Stars, then, is no novel. It recounts the life of a man, a family, and a tribe, culled from letters, reports, classroom lessons, and institutional records, all concerning a boy who started life in a Lakota camp and grew up to become a trailblazing teacher, activist lawyer, county judge, and the duly elected president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. But his was no simple success story, no Horatio Alger tale where hard work powers the hero to a life of wealth and high status. It's a Lakota version of the American story, one that reveals the hardships and compromises of assimilation and renders the many choices confronting Lakotas even today as they try to make the best of two cultures, two languages, two ways of seeing and understanding the world.
Reviews:
"As with his wonderful Song of Dewey Beard, Philip Burnham focuses on a single remarkable man, in this case Clarence Three Stars, boarding school graduate, educator, resolute advocate, and seat-of-the pants lawyer, to trace the experience of the Lakota people as they grappled with the challenges faced after their confinement to reservations. Three Stars's life is a vivid revelation of their story, one of determination and cultural courage, an underappreciated chapter in the American experience."
---Elliott West, author of Continental Reckoning: the American West in the Age of Expansion
"With engaging prose, Philip Burnham traces Three Stars's pioneering journey in his own homeland as he readjusted and traversed the shifting reservation terrain that neither his cultural past nor Carlisle education fully prepared him for. In his search for a place in a new world, Three Stars became a government teacher, a store owner, a fee patent rancher, a Bennett County state's attorney, a family man, and a leader for a new generation. Burnham tells his important story in this engaging tribal bioraphy that is truly an important American epic."
---Richmond Clow, author of Spotted Tail: Warrior and Statesman