Grinnel lived among the Cheyenne in the latter part of the 19th century. He was a deeply sympathetic observer of Indian life & culture. In this volume Grinnell gathered both Cheyenne & White accounts of the many battles between the two. He carefully explored Cheyenne culture & the way the Cheyenne to the threats on an alien society.
Rarely does a primary source become available that provides new and significant information about the history and culture of a famous American Indian tribe. With A Cheyenne Voice, readers now have access to a vast ethnographic and historical trove about the Cheyenne people—much of it previously unavailable. A Cheyenne Voice contains the complete transcribed interviews conducted by anthropologist Margot Liberty with Northern Cheyenne elder John Stands In Timber (1882–1967). Recorded by Liberty in 1956–1959 when she was a schoolteacher on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana, the interviews were the basis of the well-known 1967 book Cheyenne Memories. While that volume is a noteworthy edited version of the interviews, this volume presents them word for word, in their entirety, for the first time. Along with memorable candid photographs, it also features a unique set of maps depicting movements by soldiers and warriors at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Drawn by Stands In Timber himself, they are reproduced here in full color. The diverse topics that Stands In Timber addresses range from traditional stories to historical events, including the battles of Sand Creek, Rosebud, and Wounded Knee. Replete with absorbing, and sometimes even humorous, details about Cheyenne tradition, warfare, ceremony, interpersonal relations, and everyday life, the interviews enliven and enrich our understanding of the Cheyenne people and their distinct history.
"The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Their Ways of Life" is a classic ethnography, originally published in 1928, that grew out of George Bird Grinnell's long acquaintance with the Cheyennes. In Volume I he wrote about the tribe's early history and migrations, customs, domestic life, social organization, hunting, amusements, and government. Volume II looks at its warmaking and warrior societies, healing practices and responses to European diseases, religious beliefs and rituals, and legends and prophecies surrounding the culture hero Sweet Medicine. Included are appendixes on early Cheyenne village sites, the formation of the Quilling Society, and notes on Cheyenne songs.
What should a man do when the army sends him to help kill his wife's family? His grandson and Northern Cheyenne tribe member, Gerry Robinson, reaches back through time to unravel the emotional and complex story. Bill Rowland married into the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in 1850, eventually becoming the primary interpreter in their negotiations with the U.S. government. On November 25, 1876--five months to the day after Custer died at the Little Bighorn--Bill found himself obligated to ride into the tribe's main winter camp with over a thousand U.S. troops bent on destroying it. The Cheyenne Sweet Medicine Chief, Little Wolf, had been to the white man's cities. He knew how many waited there to follow the path cleared by soldiers who were out seeking revenge for their great loss. He also knew that the hot-blooded Kit Fox leader, Last Bull, emboldened by their recent victory and convinced he could defeat them all, posed a dangerous threat from within. Tradition and the protestations of the boisterous young leader prevented Little Wolf's warnings from being taken seriously. This is the balanced and compelling story of the ensuing battle"€"its origins and the devastating results"€"told beautifully from the perspective of both Little Wolf and his brother-in-law, the government interpreter, Bill Rowland. Pulled from the dark historical shadow of Custer, Crazy Horse, and the Lakota, The Cheyenne Story vividly brings to life the little known events that led to the end of the Plains Indian War and the beginning of the Cheyenne's exile from the only home and lifestyle they had ever known. In a commendable effort to preserve the Cheyenne language in written word, Gerry Robinson worked closely with tribal elders and Cheyenne cultural leaders to accurately and seamlessly incorporate the language into his text. Robinson's characters use the Cheyenne language in their dialogue, and the reader comes to know and understand its meanings contextually and by employing the accompanying glossary of Cheyenne words and phrases found at the back of the book.
For almost fifty years George Bird Grinnell's great work The Fighting Cheyennes has stood unrevised and virtually unchallenged as the definitive account of the struggles of the Cheyenne Indians to preserve their way of life. Now Donald J. Berthrong has re-examined Grinnell's findings and searched historical records unavailable to or not used by Grinnell to verify or correct his conclusions. The result is this accurate, highly interesting account of the Cheyennes' life on the Great Plains, their system of government and religion, and their relation to the fur and hide trade during their last years of freedom. After nearly two centuries of fighting other Indians and whites for their lands, in the eighteenth century the Cheyenne's were forced to shift their range from the Minnesota River Valley to the Central and Southern Plains. From 1861 through 1875, they fought to maintain their free, nomadic existence. There were bloody wars with territorial forces and federal troops, and a few years of intermittent peace and retaliation (including the massacre at Sand Creek in 1864). Finally, after the intensive winter campaign of 1874-75, the fierce Southern Cheyenne's were brought to bay by the U.S. Army and herded onto a reservation in western Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Their turbulent, colorful history related by Berthrong will interest the general reader as well as the historian and anthropologist
“If Chaucer were a Texan writing today . . . this is how he would have written and this is how he would have felt.”— New York Times In Leaving Cheyenne (1963), which anticipates Lonesome Dove more than any other early novel, the stark realities of the American West play out in a mesmerizing love triangle. Stubborn rancher Gideon Fry, resilient Molly Taylor, and awkward ranch hand Johnny McCloud struggle with love and jealousy as the years pass.
A Plains tribe that subsisted on the buffalo, the Cheyennes depended for survival on the valor and skill of their braves in the hunt and in battle. The fiery spirit of the young warriors was balanced by the calm wisdom of the tribal headmen, the peace chiefs, who met yearly as the Council of the Forty-four. "A Cheyenne chief was required to be a man of peace, to be brave, and to be of generous heart," writes Stan Hoig. "Of these qualities the first was unconditionally the most important, for upon it rested the moral restraint required for the warlike Cheyenne Nation." As the Cheyennes began to feel the westward crush of white civilization in the nineteenth century, a great burden fell to the peace chiefs. Reconciliation with the whites was the tribe's only hope for survival, and the chiefs were the buffers between their own warriors and the United States military, who were out to "win the West." The chiefs found themselves struggling to maintain the integrity of their people-struggling against overwhelming military forces, against disease, against the debauchery brought by "firewater," and against the irreversible decline of their source of livelihood, the buffalo. They were trapped by history in a nearly impossible position. Their story is a heroic epic and, oftentimes, a tragedy. No single book has dealt as intensively as this one with the institution of the peace chiefs. The author has gleaned significant material from all available published sources and from contemporary newspapers. A generous selection of photographs and extensive quotations from ninteteenth-century observers add to the authenticity of the text. Following a brief analysis of the Sweet Medicine legend and its relation to the Council of the Forty-four, the more prominent nineteenth-century chiefs are treated individually in a lucid, felicitous style that will appeal to both students and lay readers of Indian history. As adopted Cheyenne chief Boyce D. Timmons says in his preface to this volume, "Great wisdom, intellect, and love are expressed by the remarkable Cheyenne chiefs, and if you enter their tipi with an open heart and mind, you might have some understanding of the great 'Circle of Life.'"
Many stories that non-Natives tell about Native people emphasize human suffering, the inevitability of loss, and eventual extinction, whether physical or cultural. But the stories Northern Cheyennes tell about themselves emphasize survival, connectedness, and commitment to land and community. In writing Webs of Kinship, anthropologist Christina Gish Hill has worked with government records and other historical documents, as well as the oral testimonies of today’s Northern Cheyennes, to emphasize the ties of family, rather than the ambitions of individual leaders, as the central impetus behind the nation’s efforts to establish a reservation in its Tongue River homeland. Hill focuses on the people who lived alongside notable Cheyennes such as Dull Knife, Little Wolf, Little Chief, and Two Moons to reveal the central role of kinship in the Cheyennes’ navigation of U.S. colonial policy during removal and the early reservation period. As one of Hill’s Cheyenne correspondents reminded her, Dull Knife had a family, just as all of us do. He and other Cheyenne leaders made decisions with their entire extended families in mind—not just those living, but those who came before and those yet to be born. Webs of Kinship demonstrates that the Cheyennes used kinship ties strategically to secure resources, escape the U.S. military, and establish alliances that in turn aided their efforts to remain a nation in their northern homeland. By reexamining the most tumultuous moments of Northern Cheyenne removal, this book illustrates how the power of kinship has safeguarded the nation’s political autonomy even in the face of U.S. encroachment, allowing the Cheyennes to shape their own story.
(Volume 1 of 2) Killsback, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, reconstructs and rekindles an ancient Cheyenne world--ways of living and thinking that became casualties of colonization and forced assimilation. Spanning more than a millennium of antiquity and recovering stories and ideas interpreted from a Cheyenne worldview, the works' joint purpose is rooted as much in a decolonization roadmap as it is in preservation of culture and identity for the next generations of Cheyenne people. Dividing the story of the Cheyenne Nation into pre- and post-contact, A Sacred People and A Sovereign People lay out indigenously conceived possibilities for employing traditional worldviews to replace unhealthy and dysfunctional ones bred of territorial, cultural, and psychological colonization.