The Education of Clarence Three Stars: A Lakota American Life

In The Education of Clarence Three Stars Philip Burnham tells the life story of the remarkable Packs the Dog, a member of the Minneconjou Lakotas who was born in 1864 east of the Black Hills. His father, Yellow Knife, died when the boy was five, and the family eventually enrolled at Pine Ridge Agency with the Oglalas under an uncle’s name, Three Stars. In 1879 Packs the Dog joined the first class of Indian students to be admitted to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. An enthusiastic student, Clarence Three Stars, as he would come to be known, was one of five Lakota children who volunteered to stay at Carlisle after the three-year plan of instruction was finished--though he eventually left the school in frustration. Three Stars returned to Pine Ridge and married Jennie Dubray, another Carlisle veteran, and they had seven children.

The life of Lakota advocate Three Stars spanned a time of dramatic change for Native Americans, from the pre-reservation period through the Dawes Act of 1887 until just before the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Three Stars was a teacher, interpreter, catechist, lawyer, and politician who lived through the federal policy of American Indian assimilation in its many guises, including boarding school education, religious conversion, land allotment, and political reorganization. He used the fundamentals of his own boarding school education to advance the welfare of the Oglala Lakota people, even when his efforts were deemed threatening or subversive. His dedication to justice, learning, and self-governance informed a distinguished career of classroom excellence and political advocacy on his home reservation of Pine Ridge.

Philip Burnham is a retired associate professor of composition at George Mason University, a former reporter for Indian Country Today, and a freelance writer. He is the author of Indian Country, God’s Country: Native Americans and the National Parks and Song of Dewey Beard: Last Survivor of the Little Bighorn (Bison Books, 2014), winner of the 2015 Spur Award for Best Western Biography, among other books.