Mission Sitting Bull

Book excerpt: This book focuses on two personalities, on Tatanka Iyotake (1831-1890), known as Sitting Bull, a political and spiritual leader of the Sioux people of the Great Plains, and on the immigrant Martin Marty (1834-1896), a Swiss abbot of the Benedictine monastery of St. Meinrad, Ind. Their life goals were opposite: Martin Marty not only intended to convert the Sioux to Christianity, but also to eradicate their culture and replace it with Euro-American patterns. Tatanka Iyotake in contrast, imbued with the millennia old traditions of his people, strove to oppose the territorial, political, and spiritual Euro-American conquest. (458pp. illus. index. Swiss American Hist. Soc., 2017.)