The Feathered Headdress

They select their leaders based on popularity. We chose our chiefs according to how many feathers they earned in service to the oyate (people.) #SettlerSaturday https://t.co/GILxLMxTkZ

— Lakota Man (@LakotaMan1) January 16, 2021

That tweet has an image in it and I encourage you to go look at it. I am not on Twitter and I want nothing to do with it. This is from an old post from a previous incarnation of this site and I preserved it because to my mind this is a big deal and I have no idea how to find another source for this information.

There's a second tweet by him in reply that says: 

Feathers were awarded for gallantry in battle. Or some other act of altruism that benefited the collective good of the oyate (people.)

I always thought -- and probably a lot of people think -- that it ran the other way. I thought if you were chief, they gave you a big headdress to indicate your position of power.

That's basically how White heirarchies seem to work. You become king, they give you a crown as a mark of your office.

I think that's a pretty profound difference and likely explains some of the significant fundamental misunderstandings between colonizers and Native Americans.

He's kind of wrong about leaders being selected based on popularity. In Europe, once you became King, you passed the title on to an heir.

So a crown for a king doesn't remotely mean what a feathered headdress means. A crown means you are the big boss in charge and says nothing about how you got there.

Frankly, I'm not sure we know how people originally became nobility and royalty, but European nobles intermarried so much they are all interrelated as cousins or something and it's genetically speaking very similar to incest and I'm not thrilled that this is a thing.

I know in something like the Hawaiian Islands or similar cultures, you became the big kahuna by producing enough food for a big feast. But I don't know what happened hundreds or more years ago in Europe to establish "this dude is a big boss and we hold him in such high esteem we shall say his kids are also in charge after he dies."

Even in modern America with nominal democracy, there's a political machine -- and people will likely take offense at that because that phrase is typically used to mean a corrupt system -- and you have to go through that machine to even run for office.

We technically allow for write in candidates and independent candidates, but in practice the person who becomes President of the United States is almost ALWAYS someone run as either a Republican candidate or a Democratic candidate and that means you went through a gatekeeping process to get their backing.

By the time we put it to a vote of the people, there's already been substantial gatekeeping processes involved that defacto make it nigh impossible for "just anyone" to decide "I want to be President! And THIS is my set of political promises!" 

Furthermore, you win based on voting in specific districts and there's currently an ongoing battle between our corrupt President Donald "My daddy made money and made me rich" Trump and the Democratic party where both sides are trying to redistrict key places to skew the odds of getting the people they want elected because all those bits and pieces of the process influence how the vote gets counted and what it adds up to.

It sounds to me like a feathered headdress is a highly visible record of public service and that sounds like a vastly superior means to decide who is qualified to serve the people as their leader and trust that he has their best interests at heart.