Dewey Beard or Wasú Máza | Minneconjou Lakota | Little Big Horn & Wounded Knee

Dewey Beard or Wasú Máza (“Iron Hail”, 1858–1955) was a Minneconjou Lakota who fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn as a teenager.[1] After Custer’s defeat, Wasu Maza followed Sitting Bull into exile in Canada and then back to South Dakota where he lived on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. [2]

Iron Hail joined the Ghost Dance movement and was in Spotted Elk’s band along with his parents, siblings, wife and child. He and his family left the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation on December 23, 1890 with Spotted Elk and approximately 300 other Miniconjou and 38 Hunkpapa Lakota on a winter trek to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to avoid the perceived trouble which was anticipated in the wake of Sitting Bull’s murder at Standing Rock Indian Reservation. He and his family at the Wounded Knee Massacre, where he was shot three times, and some of his family, including his mother, father, wife and infant child were killed. His experiences were recounted in an in depth interview with Eli S. Ricker (Union Civil War veteran well known for his progressive views on Native Americans) for a book Ricker planned to write.[11] Ricker conducted more than fifty interviews with various Native Americans, as well as scouts and settlers, recording various eyewitness accounts on events during the Indian Wars in the west, such as the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Will Rogers | Cherokee Nation Citizen

William Penn Adair Rogers (November 4, 1879 – August 15, 1935) was an American vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator. He was born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, in the Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma), and is known as “Oklahoma’s Favorite Son”.[1] As an entertainer and humorist, he traveled around the world three times, made 71 films (50 silent films and 21 “talkies”), and wrote more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns.[2] By the mid-1930s, Rogers was hugely popular in the United States for his leading political wit and was the highest paid of Hollywood film stars. He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed in northern Alaska.[3]

Rogers was born on his parents’ Dog Iron Ranch in the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory, near present-day Oologah, Oklahoma, now in Rogers County, named in honor of his father, Clem Vann Rogers. The house in which he was born had been built in 1875 and was known as the “White House on the Verdigris River”.[4] His parents, Clement Vann Rogers (1839–1911) and Mary America Schrimsher (1838–1890), were both of mixed race and Cherokee ancestry, and identified as Cherokee.[5] Rogers quipped that his ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower, but they “met the boat”.[6] His mother was one quarter-Cherokee and born into the Paint Clan.[7]

Wes Studi | Cherokee Nation | Actor

Wesley Studi (Cherokee: born December 17, 1947) is a Native American (Cherokee Nation) actor and film producer. He has garnered critical acclaim and awards throughout his career, particularly for his portrayal of Native Americans in film.[15][16] He has appeared in Academy Award-winning films, such as Dances with Wolves (1990) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and in the Academy Award-nominated films Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) and The New World (2005). He is also known for portraying Sagat in Street Fighter (1994). In 2019, he received an Academy Honorary Award,[17] becoming the first Native American and the second Indigenous person from North America to be honored by the Academy (the first was Buffy Sainte-Marie). In December 2020, The New York Times ranked him #19 in its list of the “25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century (So Far),” noting “Wes Studi has one of the screen’s most arresting faces — jutting and creased and anchored with the kind of penetrating eyes that insist you match their gaze.

Studi was born in a Cherokee family in Nofire Hollow, Oklahoma, a rural area in Cherokee County named after his mother’s family.[19] He is the son of Maggie Studie, a housekeeper, and Andy Studie, a ranch hand. Until he attended elementary school, he spoke only Cherokee at home.[20] He attended Chilocco Indian Agricultural School for high school and graduated in 1964; his vocational major was in dry cleaning.[8]