Arapaho

Hunters, traders and warriors of the high plains below the Rocky Mountains, the Arapaho once ranged across what are now Colorado and Wyoming and speak an Algonquian language. They call themselves Hinono'eino, "our people", and were long the closest allies of the Cheyenne. Today they form two nations: the Northern Arapaho, who share the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming with the Eastern Shoshone, and the Southern Arapaho, who make up the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma together with the Southern Cheyenne.

Where the name Arapaho comes from is uncertain. It may derive from a Pawnee word for "trader", fitting a people famous for trade on the plains, or from a Crow word referring to tattoos, since Arapaho custom included small tattooed circles. Neighbouring peoples called them "sky" or "blue cloud" people. Arapaho tradition recognises five divisions, each with its own dialect. By the late eighteenth century four of them had merged into the Arapaho proper, while the northernmost, the A'aninin or Gros Ventre, became a separate nation.

Some 3,000 years ago, it is thought, ancestral Arapaho speakers lived as maize farmers in the Red River valley of today's Manitoba and Minnesota. Pushed west by the Ojibwe, who had French guns, they entered the plains some time before 1700, at first using dogs to pull their travois. Horses arrived in the early 1700s and turned them into mounted bison hunters. They traded meat and hides for maize, squash and beans with the farming villages of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara on the Missouri, and exchanged bison robes and beaver pelts with European traders at posts and fairs.

Around 1811 the Arapaho allied with the Cheyenne, a partnership that lasted into modern times. With the Lakota they pushed the Kiowa and Comanche southwards, and in 1840 they made a lasting peace with them. Chief Little Raven of the Southern Arapaho became known as a peacemaker. Warriors belonged to eight military societies arranged by age, unlike those of their allies, and moved up as they grew older. Their enemies included the Pawnee, Crow, Shoshone and Ute.

The 1859 gold rush brought miners and settlers into Arapaho country around Denver and Boulder. In November 1864 Colorado militia under John Chivington attacked a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, killing mostly elders, women and children; Arapaho under Chief Left Hand were among the victims. Years of war followed. Northern Arapaho fought alongside Lakota and Cheyenne in Red Cloud's War of 1866–1868, including the Fetterman Fight, but during the Great Sioux War of 1876–1877 many Arapaho leaders, such as Black Coal and Sharp Nose, chose to serve as scouts for the United States in the hope of securing land in Wyoming. Only five Arapaho were present, by chance, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

In the Arapaho creation story, Flat Pipe floats alone on the water and, guided by the Great Spirit, thinks creatures into being; a turtle finally brings up the earth from below. Men hunted, while women, and two-spirit people known as haxu'xan, prepared food and dressed hides for clothing, bedding and lodges. Dresses were decorated with porcupine quills, elk teeth and beads, and such clothing is still worn as regalia.

The Arapaho numbered 12,192 in 2020, after falling to about 1,750 in 1910. Since 1878 the Northern Arapaho have lived at Wind River, where around 250 people speak the language fluently; an immersion preschool opened in 1995, and language classes run through school. Southern Arapaho has only a few elderly speakers. Both nations run casinos, the Northern Arapaho having won a court case in 2005 that allowed the first casinos in Wyoming.

Our maps for 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Arapaho territory on the high plains east of the Rockies. On the 1650 map it touches the Cheyenne, the Teton (Lakota) of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Crow, the Shoshone, the Ute, the Kiowa and the Comanche.