Chauncey Yellow Robe

Chauncey Yellow Robe
Canowicakte ("Kills in the Woods")
Chauncey Yellow Robe
Sicangu Lakota leader
Personal details
Born	1867
Died	1930 (age 63)
Spouse(s)	Lillian Belle Springer
Children	3, including Rosebud
Parents	Chief Yellow Robe (Tasinagi) (father) Tachcawin (Deer Woman) (mother)
Known for	Educator, lecturer and activist
Nickname(s)	Timber and Chano

Chauncey Yellow Robe ("Kills in the Woods") (Canowicakte) (1867–1930) was an educator, lecturer and Native American activist. Yellow Robe was a widely known intellectual and one of the best-educated American Indians in the United States. Yellow Robe was raised in the Sicangu Lakota tradition, an honors graduate of the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and a founding member of the Society of American Indians. He crossed cultural bridges to improve the status of American Indians, believed that the majority of Anglos were ignorant of what Indians were capable of achieving, and urged Indians to fully participate in all aspects of American life. Yellow Robe was at the forefront in the fight for American Indian citizenship during the Progressive Era, and collaborated with American Museum of Natural History to produce The Silent Enemy, the first movie and documentary with an all-Indian cast.

Chauncey Yellow Robe ("Kills in the Woods") (Canowicakte) was born in what is now southern Montana around 1867, in the Sičháŋǧu Oyáte in Lakota or "Burnt Thighs Nation." Chauncey's father Chief Yellow Robe (Tasinagi), first known as White Thunder, assumed the name Yellow Robe name for his heroic war deeds against a Yellow Robe family of Crow Indians. Tasinagi was a descendant of two famous leaders of the Sioux nation, Sitting Bull and Iron Plume. Tasinagi signed the Treaty of 1868, fought in the Battle of the Little Big Horn and died in 1904 at the age of eighty-seven, Chauncey's mother Tachcawin (Deer Woman), was a niece of Sitting Bull and had seven children with Chief Yellow Robe. As a boy, Chauncey lived on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. "Kills in the Woods" was trained in Lakota skills of making bows and arrows, riding ponies bareback, foot racing, wrestling and swimming. "Sometimes during a morning of a winter blizzard my father used to wake me up out of my warm bed of buffalo robes and dare me to go out and lay down in the deep snow and roll in it 'as I had come into the world'. This was not as a punishment, but a test of endurance." Chauncey did not see a white man until he was ten or eleven years old. When he did, he could not decide if it was a man or an animal, and as the creature approached, he decided it was an evil spirit and ran to the tipi of his father.