Oral tradition tells of a time when the people who called themselves Tsetschestahase, and are now called by others "Cheyenne" (probably from a Sioux word meaning "crazy talkers"), were fishermen, living in a marshy area by a large body of water, living probably very much like their more easterly Algonquian relatives. Next, they were villagers who lived in earth lodges, planted corn, and hunted without horses. Later, after migrating westward onto the Great Plains, they received from the Sacred Mountain (modern Bear Butte, South Dakota) the buffalo and developed the lifeway for which they are best known today: the classic horse-buffalo-tipi complex of the high plains. Archaeology confirms the transition from semisedentary earth-lodge villages to high-plains life, and the reinvention of Cheyenne culture in the new environment. This transformation, which probably took place in the mid-seventeenth century, included an encounter with and the incorporation of the Suhtai people. Tsetschestahase and Suhtai, according to oral history, were able to understand each other's (Algonquian) language, and so recognized their kinship and joined together. The Suhtai brought with them their culture hero, Erect Horns, and his teachings, as well as the Sun Dance and the Sacred Hat medicine bundle that figures prominently in it. Like other tribal ceremonies, the Sun Dance was banned in the early part of this century, but was never completely lost and has undergone a modern revival. The Sacred Hat is kept today by Northern Cheyennes of Suhtai descent; it remains the preeminent spiritual icon of the Northern Cheyenne people. From the Sacred Mountain came the teachings of the culture hero Sweet Medicine and the four Sacred Arrows, now kept in Oklahoma by the Southern Cheyenne people. The famous Cheyenne Council of Forty-four also developed during the classic high-plains period. Its fame derives from the fact that, unlike many other Native American governments, the council was a vaguely representative body with conventional rules of procedure that non-Indian people could comprehend.
Today, most of the more than six thousand Northern Cheyenne people live on the reservation in southeastern Montana; others live off-reservation in urban or rural areas around the country. Though federal officials have long sought to subdue the Northern Cheyennes and settle them on a joint reservation with some other group (the Sioux, the Crows, the Southern Cheyennes), the ancestors of present-day Northern Cheyennes have always insisted on official recognition of their separate identity. The Reservation, on the Tongue River, represents their victory. The people there have held on to their native lands more tightly than most other tribes. Ninety-seven percent of the land within the reservation remains in tribal hands, most of it held in common by the tribe and in trust with the federal government.
The Northern Cheyennes were among the last Indians to accept allotment, doing so only in 1926, just eight years before the Indian Reorganization Act ended this practice for all tribes. The reservation consists of some 460,000 acres of prairie grassland and rolling timbered hills, unsuited for farming but ideal for cattle grazing. The land is rich in high-quality, low-sulfur coal. The tribe is known for its strong opposition to large-scale coal development, its communal holding of mineral rights, and its steadfast defense of the quality of its land, air, and water—as well as its quality of life—in the face of coal development in surrounding areas. The tribe is also careful to manage its timber resources by selectively harvesting trees and by repairing any forest-fire damage.
The Northern Cheyenne Reservation is divided into five districts, each of which sends representatives to a tribal council. Northern Cheyenne tribal offices and Bureau of Indian Affairs offices are located in Lame Deer, the largest town on the reservation. Dull Knife College, one of the more than two dozen tribally controlled colleges, is located in Lame Deer, as is the Northern Cheyenne public elementary school and the new Morning Star High School. Other programs such as Head Start, the tribal ambulance service, and the tribal police are also headquartered in Lame Deer. Annual events hosted by the tribe are the spring rodeo and the Memorial Day and July 4th powwows.
Though other tribes signing the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 gained recognition for their reservations thereby, the Northern Cheyennes did not. Their tiny original reservation on the Tongue River was created by executive order on November 26, 1884, by which time Congress had unilaterally declared an end to treaty making with Indians. The reservation's boundaries expanded to their present size as a result of another executive order, signed on March 19, 1900. Although the reservation lies within their plains homelands, the Northern Cheyenne people have not escaped dislocation and removal. Indian success in the Battle of the Little Bighorn made federal officials anxious about the continued presence of Northern Cheyenne people in the area. Pressure was brought to remove them to Oklahoma, where Southern Cheyenne relatives were already situated on a reservation they shared with the Southern Arapahos. For a time the Northern Cheyennes resisted removal and amalgamation, but, with the threat of military encounter if they refused, 937 of them began a trip southward from the Red Cloud Agency on May 28, 1877, with the understanding that they would be able to return north if they were unhappy in Indian Territory. They traveled under cavalry "escort" to join the Southern Cheyennes.
Northern and Southern Cheyennes had separated earlier in the nineteenth century, mostly for reasons of trade. The Cheyenne people, however, had sustained (and continue to sustain) linguistic, cultural, and spiritual bonds through continual visits and joint ceremonial activities, and think of themselves as kin who share a common cultural tradition.
From the outset, things did not go well in Oklahoma. Provisions were inadequate to support the increased number of people on the reservation, and the Northern Cheyennes suffered from disease (within two months of their arrival, nearly two-thirds of them became sick with malaria) as well as from the heat. Northern Cheyenne chiefs asked that the people be allowed to return north, but government officials refused their persistent demands. The situation continued to deteriorate, and the people determined that they would rather die trying to return home than languish in Indian Territory. Little Wolf and Morning Star led most of the Northern Cheyenne people as they fled the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency in 1878. As they traveled they divided into ever smaller groups to increase the likelihood that some would reach their northern homeland. They suffered great losses against huge odds—the worst coming when a captured group under Dull Knife were massacred in an attempt to escape from Fort Robinson, Nebraska—but some two hundred succeeded in returning home and winning their own reservation.
The transformation in Northern Cheyenne community and culture in the late nineteenth century is only one of many transformations that have taken place throughout Northern Cheyenne history. The people continue to change, but also to maintain both roots in and spiritual connections with their own history. Their resilience and their ability to sustain community through the incorporation of new ideas and new peoples continue to serve them well. Today, as in the past, there are many different ways of being Cheyenne, but the shared language and shared history, the Old Man Chiefs, the military societies, the Sun Dance, the Sacred Hat, and the Sacred Arrows continue to symbolize and sustain Northern Cheyenne culture.
John Stands-in-Timber and Margot Liberty, Cheyenne Memories (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967); Orlan J. Svingen and Rubie Sootkis, The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, 1877-1900 (Niwot, Colo.: University Press of Colorado, 1993).
Terry Straus
University of Chicago
