This History is Ours

Robert Four Star

(speaks in language)

My name is Robert Four Star. When I was born they gave me the name of Good War Paint. When they made me Chief of the Red Bottom in 1981, they gave me the name of Buffalo Stops Four Times, which was a name of one of my great grandfathers.

I was fortunate as a young man to be raised by in a traditional closed society. My mother was sent away to boarding school when she was four years old until she was in the eleventh grade, but that did not deter her from teaching us children the Assiniboine language and she insisted that we learn. As we grew up we spent time, summers with our grandparents. We spent time with others of our relatives. That's all they spoke was Assiniboine so fortunately we spoke our language. And of course as you grow up you assume everybody else was raised like that, which is not true.

I'm of the Red Bottom Band. The Assiniboine are patrilineal. My father was a Red Bottom, the name Four Star. And my mother is of the Fort Belknap Little Rocky Mountain Assiniboines, The history that was shared with me is they always said, " You are not a Sioux " .

As I got older and I got educated and I started teaching at the college, I had to educate myself as to who are these Sioux's. They all stem from the Dakotas in Minnesota. We call ourselves Nakona. N-a-k-o-n-a. We're not Sioux's. You read your European history books, it says that these Assiniboines were Yanktonai at one time. There was a big fight over buffalo and the ones that went north was the start of the Assiniboine tribe. That story may have been true and those Yanktonai might have joined the Assiniboines, but there have always been Assiniboine.

We've been in this Montana area here. This last time I think we came out here I'm guessing in the thirteen hundreds.

European history says that this Yellowstone River and this Missouri River dried up in about 1200. When we were sent out here on the plains we brought the medicine lodge with us. The medicine lodge is, the official name of that is the House of Cloth, where where we plead with the Thunderbirds to bring water to the land. They say the water causes the plants to grow, and the plants growing the animals have something to eat, and so therefore we have something to eat. The medicine lodge which the Assiniboine, the Nakona people, do is an age-old ceremony. Very, very ancient ceremony.

We have stories amongst our people of dealings with the cave man. And we have older stories about the tipi. They call them tipi circles, the circles of rocks. Our old people say we're the only ones that ever used those. So wherever you find those, our people have been there.

Those circles of rocks they held on the skins on their tipi.

There are stories in the Cheyennes that when they came into the Black Hills in the 1600s they couldn't cross the river because the Assiniboines wouldn't let them. Why we would stop people from crossing that Missouri River just doesn't fit with the history that was taught me because we're not that kind of a people. We didn't sit here and fight people that came in here. Instead it was the other way around. We helped them when they came in here and we never did war on the Europeans when they came in here.

Our old people said that there's a race of people coming. There's no need fighting them. Instead you should try to help them and learn their ways because they're going to be in this country some day. These are the teachings that they had with us when we were young. The closed society I was raised in with my mother and my stepfather and with my own father when he was still alive, the traditional ways we were raised in, we never talked about other Indians. We never even talked about other bands of the Assiniboines. It was just the Red Bottom, which I am. When I turned fourteen I found out that there were Sioux's and I thought, " What is a Sioux? " I'm very naïve about it and I found out what they were, and I thought, I wonder why nobody ever talked about them? Well, that's the closed society I was raised in.

There's a lot of these things that have never been written about the Assiniboine. This history is ours. People of my age now and my brother Carl, we're preserving this. We're documenting it. We're finding out where all our archives are. We're building a database so that there's kids down the road, our children, our grandchildren want to know about our people, it will be there.