Chief Standing Bear Forever Postage Stamps

Chief Standing Bear, who lived from about 1829 to 1908, was a Ponca leader who sued the U.S. government and won. The 1879 ruling in his case established that a Native American was a person under the law, with the same inherent rights to life and liberty as anyone else - a sentence that had to be written down because until then it had not been. The stamp carries a portrait by Thomas Blackshear II, worked up from a black-and-white photograph taken in 1877, with the colors of his clothing reconstructed from written accounts of the period. Derry Noyes was the art director.

It is a stamp with a specific weight to it, and it gets used accordingly: tribal government and cultural center correspondence, law school and history department mail, museum membership letters, civil rights organizations. It also stands on its own as a portrait for everyday use. Sheets of 20, and the portrait carries at stamp size, which matters for a design that is mostly a face.