To commemorate Native American History Month, the National Postal Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian share stamps and artifacts representing Native American leaders pivotal to the history of this continent. Facing unimaginable forces, some chose resistance and war; others chose a path of adaptation and accommodation to a new way of life. These leaders of nations were elder representatives of huge extended families, and their commitment to future generations was paramount.

Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan (Wahunsenacawh), powerful chief of 30 confederated tribes of Algonquian people of the Virginia Tidewater region. In the early 1600s she became a respected intermediary between her nation and the English colonists. Pocahontas was "the instrument to preserve this colonie from death, famine, and utter confusion," according to John Smith. She married tobacco grower and exporter John Rolfe and died at age 22 while returning from a diplomatic mission to England.

Sequoyah, a skilled silversmith without formal education, understood the importance of the written words of non-Native settlers and set out to devise a method of writing using 85 symbols to represent all the vowel and consonant sounds that formed the Cherokee language. Sequoyah’s syllabary was completed around 1821 and brought written literacy to the Cherokee people. The Cherokee Phoenix, made possible through the innovation of the syllabary, became the first American Indian newspaper in 1828.

A flood of American settlers was moving west over the Plains by 1866. Red Cloud fought a war to keep the wagon trains from trespassing on Oglala lands and destroying the buffalo herds, forcing the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which was to guarantee the Lakota possession of their lands forever. But that proved far from true, as we will see at our next stop.

The US broke the Fort Laramie Treaty and Red Cloud’s people were forced onto the Pine Ridge Reservation. Red Cloud now envisioned that the route to survival and prosperity for his people was education. He petitioned Washington, DC for a mission school where the Lakota youth would be equipped to walk equally in both the Lakota and white man’s worlds. A school continues in Pine Ridge as the Red Cloud Indian School, enhanced today by other educational institutions such as the Oglala Lakota College.

Tireless in his passion to thwart American military efforts intent on the confinement of the Lakota to reservations, the name Teshunke Witko remains a symbol of national pride and resistance among the Sioux people. A superb military tactician in his own right, Crazy Horse played a major role in the defeat of General George Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. “My lands,” he said, “are where my people lie buried,” and “One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.”

Tatanka Iyotaka, or a large bull buffalo at rest, remained resistant to takeover until his death, and was to be the last chief to surrender his rifle. Like Crazy Horse, he served as a combined military, spiritual and political leader, standing firm against land intrusion by those who would talk peace and not guarantee it. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn against General Custer, his spiritual vision of victory was powerful enough to inspire his warriors to succeed.

When famine forced Sitting Bull finally to deliver himself and his band into the hands of the United States Army, he still refused to sell his land. Today, once again inspired by the visionary hope of their leader, Sitting Bull College has as its motto that of the great Hunkpapa leader: “Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children.” Sitting Bull’s family and their teepee in 1891.

Hollow Horn Bear traveled to Washington, DC in 1905 to take part in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration as representative of his people, and walked in the Woodrow Wilson inaugural parade in 1913. His great appeal as a representative of an American Indian nations resulted in his likeness also appearing on a fourteen-cent stamp and a five-dollar bill.

Apache leader Geronimo resisted all government attempts to confine his people to reservations. “I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures.” A masterful warrior-chief, he fought Anglo-American and Mexican encroachment for thirty years, and suffered exile as a prisoner of war to a Florida jail, a guarded area in Alabama, and finally returned to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Chief Joseph stood for a natural connection to his peoples’ land. “The Earth and myself are of one mind,” expresses his spirituality. At treaty councils he often recalled his people’s assistance to the Lewis and Clark expedition and simply requested justice: “We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men.” The Nez Perce or Nimíipuu are still working to regain lands reserved in their 1855 Treaty.

By 1900, Euro-American settlers claimed nearly all of Iowa's 36 million acres as farmland. The original Iowa people signed treaties to accommodate the expansion and were relocated to a small reservation in southeast Nebraska where they became increasingly impoverished. However their leader, White Cloud (Mew-hu-she-haw), inheriting the leadership skills of his father, had a plan. Antler-handled horse quirt, collected from Jefferson White Cloud, first to sign the US 1891 land treaty with the Iowa.

Chief White Cloud decided to raise funds for his people by touring with other Ioway in Europe in 1844-45, meeting with many dignitaries. The entourage dressed in formal regalia and were engaged by George Catlin to perform in his studio and elsewhere for donations. White Cloud was awarded a gold medal by the king of France. "The Americans have been long trying to civilize us, and we now begin to see the advantages of it, and hope the Government of the United States will do us some good,” he said.

Two American Indian brigadier generals fought in the Civil War. Stand Watie commanded the Confederate First Indian Brigade. He was the last Confederate general to surrender. For the Union, Seneca luminary Ely S. Parker penned Ulysses S. Grant’s terms of surrender for General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. General Lee remarked to Parker, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker, who would rise to the rank of general, later stated, "I shook his hand and said, 'We are all Americans.'"

James Francis Thorpe was declared by the Associated Press in 1950, “the greatest athlete of the first half of the century.” Thorpe was born in 1888 and grew up in Oklahoma. At the Haskell Institute and Carlisle Indian School, he excelled in football and track, becoming a football superstar, professional baseball player, and one of the greatest track and field stars of all time. But his story doesn’t end there.

At the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, Jim Thorpe became the first athlete to win both the pentathlon and the decathlon. Today, in the wake of his leadership, the North American Indigenous Games (“the Indian Olympics”) bi-annually convenes outstanding Native athletes from states and provinces of the US and Canada.

Will Rogers exposed the lie of the stereotypical view of the “stoic” or humorless Indian. He reached millions of Americans with his wry social and political commentaries. Born in 1879, at Oologah, Oklahoma and raised on the family ranch, he was skillful at contest roping, becoming popular in Wild West shows and vaudeville as a trick roper. The multi-talented Rogers wrote books and newspaper columns and appeared in movies and on the radio. He famously said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”