Cheyenne Tribe Quotes

in which all children born belong to their mother’s tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man’s world—a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native Americans clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyennes’ request was not well received by the white authorities—the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do.

In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them. For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.

The Pawnees did most of the killing at Summit Springs, and they killed without mercy. The Cheyennes expected as much. “I do not belittle the Pawnees for their killing of women or children because as far back as any of us could remember the Cheyenne and Sioux slaughtered every male, female, and child they could run across of the Pawnee tribe,” said a Dog Soldier survivor. “Each tribe hated the other with a deadly passion and savage hearts [that] know only total war.” Sherman and Sheridan’s notion of total war paled beside that of the Plains Indians.

Our People were imprisoned within the most difficult of the Indian languages, so difficult indeed that no other tribe except one related branch, the Gros Ventres, ever learned to speak it. It stood by itself, a language spoken by only 3300 people in the world: that was the total number of Our People. The enemy tribes were not much larger: the Ute had 3600; the Comanche, 3500; the Pawnee, about 6000. The great Cheyenne, who would be famous in history, had only 3500. The Dakota, known also as the Sioux, had many branches, and they totaled perhaps 11,000.

The Sioux position, conveyed by White Face, is that the land needs to be returned; it needs to become tribal land again. White Face showed me what used to be several ancient sacred sites “where the Great Spirits dwell” and she wants those sites restored, so Sioux people can once again commune with the spirits. I reminded White Face that before the Sioux, there were Cheyenne Indians and other tribes on that land. So if America stole the land from the Sioux, didn’t the Sioux steal the land from the Cheyenne and other tribes? If the land is returned to the Sioux, shouldn’t the Sioux turn around and give it back to those who had it before? White Face looked flustered.

Somehow, when his duties had consisted of killing hostile Sioux and Cheyenne, Zane had been able to justify the situation. Those groups were warring against the wagon trains and refusing to follow government instructions. Many tribes saw the whites as an impossible threat, refusing to even try to get along. But the Blackfoot had been friendly. For the most part. Mountain

Practically all of the Indian tribes wore some form of shirt. This garment is usually mistakenly called a “war shirt.” In reality it was a ceremonial shirt usually worn by the older men or chiefs of authority on solemn occasions. The Dakotas and Cheyennes trimmed their shirts with small hanks of horsehair. Sometimes human hair was used. These shirts were called “scalp shirts” by the white man who believed that all of the hair decorations were from scalp locks. The Blackfoot and some of the other tribes decorated their shirts with strips of white weasel skin. Indians on the warpath did not wear shirts. They wore only a breechclout, leggings, and moccasins. War shirts were not worn for active dancing, either, because they were too hot. Indians made their shirts out of soft buckskin. It usually took two hides for one shirt. Sometimes an additional hide was required for the sleeves.

Deal.” I reached down and put my empty cup on the porch railing. “Speaking of deals, do you know about the one your father had with the Cheyenne Conservancy?” “Yeah, I know about it. I think he was just feeling guilty about making it off the Rez and being a success. He carried big medicine for the tribe and, as I said, was getting more and more traditional as he got older. He was getting so stiff, he probably would’ve ended up standing in front of a cigar store.” He glanced around, his eyes lingering on the clouds building up on the mountains as if trying to push them east.

[Neo-evolutionists] were arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organization - successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states - and held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gathers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilization. It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course fo the year, between economic categories. The Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine or Lakota would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to the other. They were a kind of band/state amalgam. In other words, they threw everything askew.

Since in this new, evolutionist narrative ‘states’ were defined above all by their monopoly on the ‘legitimate use of coercive force’, the nineteenth-century Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen as evolving from the ‘band’ level to the ‘state’ level roughly every November, and then devolving back again come spring. Obviously, this is silly. No one would seriously suggest such a thing. Still, it’s worth pointing out because it exposes the much deeper silliness of the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with. You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.

for sixty-one days.” I began questioning the makeup of the negotiation team I’d brought with me to convince the chief of the Northern Cheyenne tribe that he should allow my daughter to be married at Crazy Head Springs. “Don’t call the White Buffalo a joint; it’s the nerve center of the reservation.” My undersheriff, Victoria Moretti,