Opinion: From Colorado lands smeared with my ancestors blood to a Wyoming sacred hot springs stolen from us, the dispossession continues

If only the cottonwood trees throughout our sacred homelands — stretching from the Sand Creek Massacre Site to the sacred waters of Hot Springs State Park to the Little Bighorn National Monument, could tell the stories of our peoples.

There is a reason the National Parks Service refers to them as witness trees. This spring when I traveled to the Massacre Site, in what is today called Colorado, to commemorate my Arapaho and Cheyenne ancestors killed there and those who barely escaped with their lives, the cottonwood trees had a ghostly appearance. It sounded like they sang with me as the wind picked up when I prayed there.

From there I traveled north, along the Sand Creek Massacre Trail that my ancestors followed to escape to one of their safe heavens: the sacred source of the hot water at what is now referred to as Hot Springs State Park, in Cheyenne. We call it tsexhoeomotometo mahpe, where the breath of life comes out of the water.

From there, I traveled all the way back to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in what is today called Montana, past the Little Bighorn Battlefield, to the place where our ancestors sundanced to pray for guidance before the battle in 1876.

My journey through the Arapaho and Cheyenne homelands — from Sand Creek, to Hot Springs, to Little Big Horn — marked a trail of dispossession of our peoples.

We were effectively driven from the state of Colorado by genocide. A recent study found that the state of Colorado alone benefitted over $1.7 trillion from the dispossession of land of Indigenous Peoples.

The dispossession continues to this day.

The state of Wyoming tried to unilaterally proceed with major changes at what they designated in as Hot Springs State Park. These hot springs have always been sacred to our people, our ancestors went there for healing, including after the Sand Creek Massacre.

But the springs and 100 acres of land surrounding it was taken from the Wind River Reservation
and the compensation was not just nor fair. The federal government turned around and gave the
land to the state since settlers had been pushing into the area.

In a recent letter to me, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon recognized this, he stated: “I fully acknowledge that the trauma of these events strongly impacts Tribal members even now, and that the wounds are still deep and fresh. While it may seem to some that the days of forced relocation and violent conflict are far behind us, that brutal history is all too recent for many, sometimes only removed by one or two generations as noted in your letter.”

He then proceeded to describe what I consider a continuation of the same: the unilateral state decision-making process that started with a Master Plan almost 10 years ago for the development of the springs and continues with the current decisions handing facilities over to out-of-state operators aiming at the further commercialization of our sacred waters.

This does not meet the standards of consultation with Indigenous Peoples necessary under U.S. law, let alone the requirement of prior informed consent of the Arapaho and Cheyenne Peoples under international law, including under the United Nations (U.N.) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that the United States government has committed to implementing.

This single largest source of sacred hot springs in the world is a sacred site to our people. My grandparents and parents taught me to always make offerings there and they took me to the privately owned Star Plunge pool to swim as a child. I have since taken my children and most recently my 3-week-old grandson there to swim at this place that continues to facilitate intergenerational Indigenous and local access, which stands to be forever changed, without our peoples’ necessary input and consent.

The state points to the publicly owned bathhouse, which it considers as a fulfillment of the promise to give the Indigenous Peoples free access, in the past elders and people with disabilities could easily access individual pools there, which is no longer the case, and access is limited to 20 minutes. The waters there are also too hot for little children, so the Star Plunge is the main place where our people have been coming together in 3+ generations for collective healing.

Most recently the local family that has been operating the Star Plunge for three generations and stands to be expropriated organized a free swim for the Northern Arapaho and Cheyenne and more than 700 of our people came and around the beginning of August the Eastern Shoshone will also be joining in. This is an example of benefit-sharing with the main obligations falling to the state. What the state has to understand is that when we as Indigenous Peoples talk about access and benefit-sharing it connects to the requirement of FPIC, which requires dealing with us as decision-makers regarding access to our lands and waters, and the site of Hot Springs State Park.

In order to truly address the intergenerational effects of genocide, access and benefit-sharing regarding the Hot Springs State Park have to be implemented with the Arapaho and Cheyenne people right now.

But the dispossession doesn’t stop at the Wyoming border.

It is important to acknowledge that our people were deliberately targeted by genocidal strategies, first by the U.S. Army and militias like the Colorado volunteers; followed by an even more devious strategy to go after our children, through the so-called boarding school system. It really had nothing to do with education; it exploited our children as forced labor, while assimilating them by literally beating our indigenous languages and ways of thinking out of them.

Many died and were buried on the grounds of these institutions, too often in unmarked graves. The forceful removal of Indigenous children meets the international definition of genocide under Article 2(e) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

In 2020, Colorado lawmakers passed a bill titled “Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Public Schools” (House Bill 1336), which requires completion of such a course as a condition of high school graduation.

Yet the Colorado Boarding School system was not included in this recent statute, not even after the Colorado Legislature commissioned House Bill 1327 and was presented with a study into how these boarding schools were genocidal. What is almost more shocking is that the Sand Creek Massacre is not explicitly listed for study in the bill, although the then-governor of Colorado Hickenlooper presented an official apology on the 150th anniversary which makes it come up on its 10-year mark this year.

Actually, the only two genocides explicitly mentioned are the “holocaust meaning the systemic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews and five million individuals targeted for their religion, disability, or identity by the Nazi Regime” and the Armenian Genocide. As William Zessar, who lost many of his relatives to the Holocaust, and has been advocating to amend the statute said: “To fail to recognize the genocides that happened in the very land where we sought refuge, means to diminish all other genocides.”

As a fellow intergenerational survivor of genocide, I wholeheartedly agree, there can be no competition or for that matter comparison between genocides: We have to condemn them all; they are cumulative on the soul of humanity. What signal does the Colorado legislature send by not explicitly listing the Sand Creek Massacre and the Colorado Boarding School system, when they constitute incidents of genocide in the state?

Some might point to the discretion passed on to the Colorado State Board of Education to set the standards for the teaching of the course and that they can add and for that matter also remove genocides by way of a simple majority vote. They have to date added eight more genocides, among them the Sand Creek Massacre, although it remains the only one among them that does not have educational materials attached to it, that facilitate the teaching of the respective content.

And they have not added the Colorado Indian Boarding School system, contributing to the lack of education on this incident of genocide in the state. There is no doubt that a simple vote at the State Board of Education, does not equal the standard and protection of having incidents of genocide directly listed in the statute, and that is why as a direct descendant of families impacted by the Sand Creek Massacre and the Indian Boarding School system, I urge the amendment of the Colorado Holocaust and Genocide Studies Statute to explicitly list “genocides of Native American Peoples, including the Sand Creek Massacre and the Colorado Indian Boarding School system,” to ensure that they are taught to all students in public high schools.

There is no better way to commemorate the upcoming 160th anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre on November 29, than for legislators to make a commitment to do this. Public education about this topic is key in the lead-up to the 150th anniversary of Colorado becoming a state in two years. I call on the Colorado 150/America 250 Commission to champion this.

In Montana, we will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn at the same time, when our ancestors took a stand for our way of life, which includes our Indigenous languages, way of thinking, our identities and our spiritual connection to the land, all things that the Indian Boarding school system tried to sever.

And 2026 will also mark the 250th anniversary of the creation of the United States, with the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, in Pennsylvania.

Too many U.S. citizens do not know that Pennsylvania hosted a crucial institution in the Indian boarding school system in the United States: The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was set up by the U.S. Army in 1879, within 3 years of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, targeting especially children of leaders of Plains Indian Tribes. While a number of my great-grandparents had been at the Sand Creek Massacre and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, they saw their children, my grandparents, targeted to attend first the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the next generations Indian Boarding Schools in other states.

The systemic genocidal intent is clear, and as their descendants, we carry the intergenerational effects. Thankfully our Indigenous teachings passed on from generation to generation also carry many counter-remedies that the world needs now more than ever, and we would be ready to share these as part of learning about genocide.

Northern Cheyenne traditional Chief Phillip Whiteman Jr, Heoveve’keso (Yellowbird), comes from long lines of chiefs and works with Indigenous Peoples across North America. He has developed his own teaching model based on ancestral wisdom and his life experience to counter the intergenerational effects of genocide with indigenous teachings. More information can be found at: phillipwhitemanjr.org

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