Draft:John Okute Sica

John Okute Sica, also known as John LeCaine (1890-1964), was a Lakota Sioux homesteader, historian and writer.

Life

John Okute Sica, a great-grandson of Chief Black Moon, a veteran of the Little Bighorn, was born at Willow Bunch, Saskatchewan, in 1890, the eldest son of Okute Sica and Tasunke Nupawin, a granddaughter of Chief Black Moon. His parents were members of the band of Chief Sitting Bull who found refuge in Canada after the massacre at Little Bighorn.

His mother, Tasunke Nupawin, was nine years old when the Lakota came to Wood Mountain in 1877. Food was plentiful at first, but became scarce as the buffalo herds were hunted almost to extinction, and when Tasunke Nupawin was thirteen, her father, Zuya Tehedin, persuaded her to live with a member of the Northwest Mounted Police, Archibald LeCaine, who, in return supported her family. When he was transferred to Regina, Tasunke Nupawin went with him, but when he was transferred to Winnipeg, her father refused to let her go, and she and their daughter, Alice, stayed behind with the Lakota band. In 1888 Tasunke Nupawin took a second husband, a Lakota man named Okute Sica, by whom she had five children - John, Charles, Elizabeth, George and Walter. Because of his mother's earlier relationship to Archibald LeCaine, John, the eldest, was known as John LeCaine, although later in life he used the name of his biological father, Okute Sica.

From 1899 to 1906 John Okute Sica attended the Regina Industrial School, where he learned English and the practical skills of agriculture and carpentry. In 1907 the family moved to Wood Mountain, and John went with them. In 1910, he filed for a homestead, and by 1913 had broken 32 acres of farmland and built a house, a log stable, and a granary. He did all his farmwork himself, ploughing, seeding, harvesting, and hauling his grain to market in a horse-drawn wagon. To feed his horses during the winter he mowed, raked and stacked prairie hay. He had proved up his homestead on private land before the Lakota Wood Mountain reserve was set up in 1930, but in 1952 he turned his land over to the reserve and claimed status under the Indian Act. In 1954 he was appointed Chief.

His first two wives, Florence Cote and Helen Tawiyaka, died while they were still young women, and in 1925 he married Christina LaSuisse of the Standing Buffalo Reserve. He had six children, Adeline, Stella, John, Grace, Augustus and Margaret.

Until the age of nine, John Okute Sica lived the traditional life of the Lakota, and developed a keen interest in the history of his people. In 1910, his father took him on a long journey on horseback to the Frenchman River in the course of which they visited more than 30 places of significance to the five years that Sitting Bull and his band had spent in Saskatchewan, including winter camps, sun dance sites, and places where vision quests were conducted. In later years he mapped the places he and his father had visited in 1910, and wrote a collection of stories told to him by Sioux Elders, Reflections of the Sioux World, and numerous articles, including articles published in the Indian Record.