| n |
| The Arapaho (in French: Gens de Vache) are a tribe of Native Americans historically living on the eastern plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Sioux. Arapaho is an Algonquian language closely related to Gros Ventre, who are seen as an early offshoot of the Arapaho. Blackfoot and Cheyenne are the other Algonquian languages on the Plains, but are quite different from Arapaho. By the 1850s, Arapaho bands separated into two tribes: the Northern Arapaho and Southern Arapaho. The Northern Arapaho Nation has lived since 1878, with the Eastern Shoshone on the Wind River Reservation, the seventh largest reservation in the United States. The Southern Arapaho Tribe lives with the Southern Cheyenne in Oklahoma. There is no direct historical or archaeological evidence to suggest how and when Arapaho bands entered the Plains culture area. The Arapaho Indian tribe most likely lived in Minnesota and North Dakota before entering the Plains. Before European expansion into the area, the Arapahos were living in South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, and Kansas. They lived in teepees which the women made from bison hide. Before they were sent to reservations, they migrated often chasing herds, so they had to design their teepees so that they could be transported easily. It is said that a whole village could pack up their homes and belongings and be ready to leave in only an hour. In winter the tribe split up into small camps sheltered in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in present-day Colorado. In late spring they moved out onto the Plains into large camps to hunt buffalo gathering for the birthing season. In mid-summer Arapahos traveled into the Parks region of Colorado to hunt mountain herds, returning onto the Plains in late summer to autumn for ceremonies and for collective hunts of herds gathering for the rutting season. They originally used dogs to pull travois with their belongings on them. When the Europeans came to North America, the Arapaho saw the Europeans' horses and realized that they could travel quicker and further with horses instead of dogs. They raided other Indian tribes, primarily the Pawnee and Comanche, to get the horses they needed. Later on, they became great traders and often sold furs to other tribes and non-Indians. The name 'Arapaho' might have come from the Pawnee word for 'traders.' It is uncertain where the word 'Arapaho' came from--they called themselves Inuna-Ina (Hinonoeino), 'our people'--but this tribe self-identifies as Arapaho now. There are two major Arapaho tribes: the Northern Arapaho, who number about 6000 and are concentrated in Wyoming, and the Southern Arapaho, who are united with their longtime allies the Cheyenne into the Cheyenne-Arapaho Nation in Oklahoma, with a combined 11,000 members. The Gros Ventre tribe of Montana was originally an emigrant group of Arapaho Indians, and their languages and cultures are closely related. Though the Sioux, Shoshone, and Pawnee knew them as formidable warriors, history tends to label the Arapaho Indians a "peaceful people" because they did not fight the Americans. Unfortunately, their strategy of making treaties with the invaders rather than fighting them did not bring them to any better end. The increasing influx of settlers into areas promised to the Arapaho by treaty forced them away from their traditional lands, disrupted the buffalo routes, and ultimately split the Arapaho tribe in half, a split that still exists today. The Southern Arapaho joined the Cheyenne, where they together became victims of the most egregious massacre in American history, the Sand Creek massacre of 1864 (in which one Colonel Chivington deliberately attacked a reservation of peaceable Cheyenne and Arapaho people under US protection and killed more than 150 men, women, and children despite their repeated attempts to surrender. "Nits," he famously proclaimed, "breed lice.") Meanwhile, the Northern Arapaho fled to what is now Wyoming and petitioned their old foes the Shoshone for a home there. Finally, the Arapaho had made a treaty which would be honored: the land granted to them by the Shoshone remains theirs to this day. |
| The Arapaho |
 |
 |
 |