From 16735835f6f6d27d4e795fac7e793cb5be7ff433 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Nathan Schneider <nathan.schneider@colorado.edu>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:16:53 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] Added Williams interview

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+---
+narrator: Rick Williams
+subject: Restorative justice
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-11-17
+approved: 2026-01-20
+summary: "An American Indian elder studies and uses the history of colonization to win justice for his people."
+location: "Broomfield, Colorado"
+#headshot: "first_last.png"
+topics: [ancestors, conflict, diplomacy, ecology, economics, family, food, government, indigeneity, language, ritual]
+links:
+  - text: "People of the Sacred Land"
+    url: "https://peopleofthesacredland.org"
+---
+
+My name is Rick Williams. I'm Oglala Lakota and Cheyenne.
+
+*Thank you. Can you tell me a bit about where you are now and what
+brought you here? Take it wherever you like. We'll unravel from there.*
+
+I began this journey in life in a very difficult situation. I was
+rescued by my grandmother because my mother was going to put me up for
+adoption. I was in Watertown, New York, of all places. My dad had been
+in the Korean War, came home, and said he'd never go back again. Two
+weeks later, he received orders to return. He went AWOL, got arrested,
+and was in prison. My mom had two other little children and couldn't
+take care of another baby. My grandmother took me. She was born in 1899
+and was a very well-educated woman for the time. I lived with her and
+her mother, my great-grandmother Ida White Eyes, who was born in 1869.
+She could speak Lakota and Cheyenne but wasn't very good at English. My
+grandmother could speak Lakota and Cheyenne and was excellent at
+speaking English. I attribute a lot of my ability to speak well to her.
+She was a gifted storyteller and a real asset to our community. She
+served as the banker and wrote letters for people on behalf of other
+Indians in the community to help them with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
+
+*Were they also in New York?*
+
+No, she went to New York by train and brought me back to Crawford,
+Nebraska, not too far from the Pine Ridge Reservation. That's where we
+were enrolled. I grew up in a community that was like a border town.
+About forty to fifty Indians lived there in a small town. When I started
+kindergarten, there were fifteen of us, fifteen Indians in kindergarten.
+I had a class of forty-five, so about a third of the kids were American
+Indians. By the time I got to eighth grade, I was the only one left.
+
+My grandmother would save buffalo nickels, put them in a can, and say,
+"This is your college money." From the time I was a little boy, as
+soon as I could remember, I was going to go to college. Nobody in our
+family had ever gone to college, so this was going to be remarkable. It
+was an interesting way to plant a seed that you want to grow. She was
+smart about those things. I never knew that I wasn't going to college.
+I just assumed that that's part of what I was growing up to do.
+
+Unfortunately, she passed away when I was in my senior year. But I was a
+good student, so I had enough credits to graduate. I ended up in Denver,
+living with an aunt and uncle. My folks lived in North Carolina, and
+I'd only seen my mom and dad once during my seventeen years. It was
+just better that I went with relatives that I knew. I did go to college.
+I had a really good time that first year.
+
+*Where was that?*
+
+At the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. First time in a big city.
+First time on my own. First time I ever had enough to eat. I'd get up
+at six o'clock in the morning and be the first one in line at the
+cafeteria. First time I ever had a salad, a green salad. That was an
+interesting experience. Back then, they served fish every Friday. I
+loved fish. I would always get a bunch of fish sticks. I saw these other
+guys putting this yellow stuff on their side. I tried it, and it was
+good. I put a whole bunch on my fish. This kid sat down next to me and
+said, "Boy, you sure do like tartar sauce, don't you?" I had no clue
+what he was talking about. I was thinking about tar, that stuff they put
+on the road. I said, "Of course not." He got up and moved away.
+
+You go through life and learn things. Experiential learning is very
+important, particularly for people who aren't part of the culture where
+you'd ordinarily have those things. Things that we take for granted
+after we know about them.
+
+Like quiche. I ran a summer program here at CU. The Indian kids---we
+stayed in the sorority and had a really good cook. She served quiche one
+morning, and all those kids walked by, looked at it, and kept going. She
+was getting frustrated. She said, "How come they won't eat the
+quiche?" I said, "Ask them." She did, and they said, "Well, we
+don't eat pie for breakfast."
+
+I was a hard worker. I'd come back to Colorado in the summertime, work
+on construction crews in Denver, and then go back to school.
+
+My aunt and uncle lived in Denver. I'd come back, and he'd get me jobs
+on highway construction. I was a big, healthy guy. They really liked me
+and worked the hell out of me. But I made a pretty good wage---five
+and a quarter an hour was big money back then to keep me in school.
+
+I didn't follow the typical course of instruction that you would get as
+an undergraduate student. I majored in university studies. By
+happenstance, I interned at the Nebraska Indian Commission. My job, my
+assignment, was to work with the Indian inmates. At that time, the state
+penitentiary had about a quarter of the population that was American
+Indians---about two hundred of them. I would meet with them regularly.
+When they would get out, I'd help them get jobs. I was a liaison. I was
+coming to Boulder, so they said, "Can you go visit our attorneys at the
+Native American Rights Fund?" I came here and met my wife on the second
+floor of the NARF building. We eventually hooked up later.
+
+I met with these guys, and they started talking about a case they had.
+It was a religious freedom case, the right to have a medicine man, a
+sweat lodge, and grow their hair long in prison. They asked me to help
+them on the ground with some legwork. I said, "Sure." The next thing I
+knew, we were engaged in significant litigation. It just so happened we
+got a new head of the Department of Corrections who came out from New
+Hampshire. He didn't know anything about Indians. He had no prejudices.
+The warden had convincingly told me it wasn't an issue, but he was
+going to testify that it was---probably committing perjury. We did a
+sidebar and settled the case, resulting in a consent decree. The
+Commissioner of Corrections was all for that. I got to know him well. I
+helped build the first sweat lodge in a prison.
+
+I ended up not really going back to school, but my professors and
+lawyers got together and set up a university studies program for me. My
+last three semesters were spent working at the Native American Rights
+Fund here in Boulder and getting college credit for it, which was a
+marvelous experience. Probably the best experience of my life. I learned
+a lot in that process. We were very successful. We won a number of
+cases. Then we sued the Federal Bureau of Prisons and got a consent
+decree that they had to provide religious practices for American Indians
+inside the institution.
+
+We were running out of money. They said, "Well, why don't we just
+start our own correctional facility?" We set out to figure that out. Lo
+and behold, back then, there was a federal agency called the Law
+Enforcement Assistance Administration. They had an Indian desk, of all
+things. The guy---I remember his name, Dale Redwing---he was from
+the Sisseton tribe. He had money but not many places to spend it. We put
+that proposal on his desk, and he was elated. He wanted to do this. We
+found an abandoned Jobs Corps Center on the Cheyenne River Reservation
+and began preparing to convert it into a minimum-security correctional
+facility.
+
+We were all ready to do the final stuff, but we needed a director. We
+couldn't find anybody. I had planned on going to law school. I
+graduated that spring---first Indian to ever graduate from the
+University of Nebraska with a bachelor's degree, in 1975. I was going
+to go to law school and was admitted, and took the LSAT. But we
+couldn't find anybody to run the place, so they talked me into not
+going to law school, getting a deferment for a year, and getting the
+place opened up.
+
+*So were you the warden?*
+
+Yes, I was the warden. Not only that, but I was also overseeing the
+renovations. I had a really good experience in construction from all
+those summers. I had exceptional opportunities and learned a lot. We did
+some renovations on the facility. I went out and, with the help of the
+attorneys, negotiated contracts with six western states and the Federal
+Bureau of Prisons to transfer prisoners into their custody. We opened
+up, and I was a warden at twenty-six.
+
+Because of tribal politics, I didn't last very long. I was up there for
+about three years, and I came back to Boulder. Started another facility
+up in Alaska and then came back. We were out of money, so I had to look
+for a job. I got a job at CU running an Upward Bound program---very
+similar to a prison---just kidding. It was a delightful job.
+
+I'd bring Indian kids from across the United States to a six-week
+summer program for college prep. I was very tough on them. We had a set
+of core values: respect, relationships, and responsibility were our
+three Rs. That was the basis of the program, and it was extremely
+successful. We did a lot of work behind the scenes to understand the
+cognitive processing for American Indians. It was substantially
+different than the typical Western methodological approaches that
+weren't working in the schools.
+
+*Say more about that, both in that context and in the prison context.
+What did you have to do differently?*
+
+I didn't try to do it much in prison. But with those kids, one of the
+things we would do---we had a lot of testing. We had pre-tests to show
+where the kids were at the beginning of the summer and post-tests. We
+saw kids grow three grade levels in six weeks. But we were very
+deliberate about how we did our instruction. I did a lot of studying to
+understand how our kids learned. It was a combination. Our kids had a
+natural propensity to see something, particularly in a setting like
+geography or plants or in a forest and have total recall of that
+picture. If you think about it, they probably developed survival
+techniques over thousands of years. You learn how to see what's
+happening. You see things, and the minute you see it, you take a picture
+of it in your mind. Then the next time you see it, if there's something
+out of place, it gets your attention.
+
+Understanding that was one thing, but then we had to figure out how to
+combine that natural ability with these kids, who were heavy
+experiential learners. Their modality was that if they had hands-on
+experience, they would grasp it much quicker. We started doing some
+unapproved experiments. Kids learn better in a dark room than in a
+bright one. Historically, our people learned at night in a teepee in the
+dark. You get a 20 percent increase in scores just by changing the
+lighting in the room. Little things like that, but also peer teaching.
+One of them might get it, and we may not be able to reach the others,
+but their ability to interact with their peers was extremely important.
+
+The other thing is when you think about math---algebra---you've got
+this formula, A plus B equals three, so you have to figure out what A
+and B are. If these kids could see the problem and solve it correctly,
+they would never forget it. But the minute you changed it from B plus A
+equals C, it didn't work because it wasn't the same thing. What you do
+is you teach them not to look at how to solve the problem as you see it,
+but to learn the steps that you have to go through to solve the problem.
+When you hit something, you look for another alternative to the step and
+memorize the steps. You might see a problem, and in your mind, you might
+have eleven different steps on how to solve that problem. One of them
+will be the right way. But you have to go through all these
+configurations. It's amazing how quickly they could do it. One of the
+challenges when you have someone processing stuff that way is that it's
+difficult for them to show their work. That was always the big thing.
+"Show your work." Some of these kids didn't need to show their work.
+They just got the right answer.
+
+We would build those ideas into the coursework and the instructions. The
+other thing we always used to say was that Indian kids were not
+competitive. That's nonsense. You put them in the right environment;
+they become extremely competitive. Basketball, man, they'd kill in
+basketball. What did we do? We had 30 students and 6 teams of 5, and the
+quiz scores for everyone on each team were averaged. That was their
+team's score, and they would play against another team. At first, it
+wasn't working out too well because some kids would do their homework
+and share it without teaching the others. Everybody would get the same
+score on the team, but they wouldn't learn anything. The first quiz
+ranged from one hundred to twenty, so they quickly learned that you
+can't just give somebody something. You've got to teach them. They
+became our best teachers---and competitive, man. They stayed up two
+nights in a row the last two days of the program to get the best scores
+they could and win the tournament.
+
+When you think about an academic setting---the University of Colorado,
+for instance---you have to be competitive and able to think on your
+feet. What we saw was that once these kids mastered those kinds of
+skills, you had to interface it with Western methodology. They're not
+going to always get their instruction experientially. They're going to
+have to fit it into the Western methodology. It's basically like having
+two different kinds of computers, and then you build an interface, a
+software interface. That's what we would do---build a software
+interface within their brains that is well-suited to their cognitive
+processing. These kids were mastering this over here, but then they were
+also learning how to use these skills to master something in another
+part of their brains. You end up with a really good student who can do
+both, can go back and forth between the two types of learning. We have
+doctors, lawyers, and everything else all over the country because of
+it. It was solving that problem. Our biggest challenge was that they'd
+go back to the schools, come back, and lose ability over the school
+year. Over nine months, they would lose ground.
+
+*Because of being away from your program?*
+
+They'd come back the next summer, because they would come for three
+consecutive summers. You'd have to rebuild. We would try to influence
+learning back in the home school. We had everybody get a subscription to
+*Discover Magazine*. We had monthly assignments that they had to turn in
+to us based on material we sent them that was above and beyond their
+school curriculum, just to keep their brains stimulated. *Discover
+Magazine* is good for that kind of stuff. Little things like that
+enhance the learning experience. Having them trust you and have
+confidence in you is critical.
+
+*How important do you think it is for American Indians to protect their
+culture through distinctive institutions, as opposed to being in state
+institutions like CU Boulder? What do you think is the right approach in
+terms of how much you need distinctive, separate spaces where you can
+organize life differently?*
+
+It's absolutely critical. In prison, those guys got to meet once a week
+for about 2 hours. You had nations that were enemies, but they worked
+through these kinds of things inside the institution, and they would
+take care of each other. A young person would come in, and right away,
+they would take them under their wing. Rather than being exposed to the
+bad stuff, they're often taken care of by their relatives. There was
+this culture inside the institution that helped maintain the stability
+of the experience.
+
+The unfortunate thing was that almost every one of these guys had been
+institutionalized at a very early age---taken away from their parents,
+gone to boarding schools. They did well inside institutions and didn't
+do well on the street. I don't know how many times in that year we'd
+help somebody get out, and they'd be out for a while, and the next
+thing you know, they're back in. "What'd you do?" "Well, I broke
+into a liquor store." I said, "Okay, then what'd you do?" "Well, I
+just sat in there and drank until they came and arrested me." I said,
+"Why? Why would you do something like that?" "It's too rough out
+there. Here, I got three meals a day and a place to sleep. I do better
+in here. I don't like it out there."
+
+That comes from being institutionalized at a very early age. The
+recidivism rate was high. Functionality for people who get out was
+really difficult. With the institution we created, we reintegrated them
+into the community before they left prison. Ranchers and people in the
+area who wanted to have somebody come work with them would check them
+out for the day, and they would go to work. They would interact, learn
+skills, and the ranchers loved it because they had a hand in branding or
+whatever. From the standpoint of bringing them back, bridging them back
+into the community, doing it on a reservation was absolutely critical.
+
+Our facility was surrounded by a herd of buffalo. Our security was a
+buffalo fence. That makes a big difference in rehabilitation. We built a
+health care facility on the property. For the most part, during the
+years I ran the place, we had only one incident that caused me any
+consternation. We had a guy who had been trained as a baker, so he was
+baking for us. We had cooks and wonderful meals. Freshly baked cinnamon
+rolls every day. People from the community were coming in and having
+coffee. It wasn't like you were in prison. It was like you were
+adjusting back to your homeland. We had vocational trades, so guys could
+learn to do things like body and fender, plumbing, and electrical. Stuff
+that they could utilize when they got home. We had a sweat lodge on the
+facility. We had a medicine man on staff. That just made the problems
+almost disappear. I mean, the alternative---you want to be here, or
+you want to be back in prison?
+
+*How did you develop a historical consciousness of these experiences?*
+
+It goes back to the very beginning---storytelling. My
+great-grandmother was at the Little Bighorn. I'd hear that story, and
+anytime we went anywhere, my grandmother would be telling stories.
+"Well, you see that butte over there. That butte's named this." "You
+see, over here, we planted those trees when we were in the CCC." "They
+worked on---we built this bridge when we were doing the WPA." I was
+learning stuff all the time about our history. Every night was stories.
+We didn't have a TV or radio, or anything like that. Stories about our
+people, stories about relationships, stories about animals, stories
+about the sun, stories about the plants. My grandmother---we would go
+for walks in some places, and she would pick a plant for me. I learned
+about what plants were used for medicinal purposes. But the history
+part, as a little boy, was always really exciting to me, to hear those
+stories about the Battle of the Little Bighorn and those kinds of
+things, and how the Cheyennes came from Oklahoma when they broke loose
+and came up. That was my great-grandmother. She was one of them. It was
+personal. Living in that town where it happened, Fort
+Robinson---living there, right next to it, being able to walk around
+there as a little kid, walk up in there and walk up into the buttes
+where my grandfather was missing.
+
+When I got to the University of Nebraska, one of the first places I went
+to was the historical society. I hung out at the historical society,
+whenever I got a chance, to learn more about the stories I'd heard. I
+have always had, from the very beginning, this propensity to understand
+history. While working at the university, I taught an Indian studies
+class focused on federal law and policy. All my life, I've been doing
+it. Even when I was running the American Indian College Fund, I took a
+little sabbatical and taught at the University of Denver---the first
+introductory course in its graduate program in American Indian studies.
+I was always doing stuff like that. When I'd visit places, I would go
+to the used bookstores. I'd look for history books because I wanted to
+know it all. I would buy the oldest books I could find, and anything to
+do with political history, law, or anything like that. Today, I have
+about four thousand books.
+
+When I was running the American Indian College Fund, I focused on
+securing scholarships for American Indian kids. I knew education was
+critical for us at that early time in the 1980s. It was really important
+to us because we didn't have many graduates. We didn't have many
+people working in institutions. It was rare for somebody to have a PhD,
+rare even to have a bachelor's degree. It was natural for me- I was
+passionate about raising money for scholarships. I was good at it.
+
+I had planned to retire and continue working after retirement. But I had
+gotten in a car accident, had a brain injury, and was dysfunctional for
+about a year. I finally got better. My first six years of retirement
+were horrible. I had Lyme disease, and I broke my leg. Then I got
+diabetes. I went from 260 pounds to 200 pounds. Then I started healing.
+When I started healing, I wanted to learn more about Colorado and its
+history because my great-great-grandfather was Southern Cheyenne. He was
+a Dog Soldier, and he was one of the Council of Forty-Four. I knew all
+of this other stuff, but I never knew anything about him.
+
+*Can you explain what "Dog Soldier" and the Council mean?*
+
+The Dog Soldiers were a military society. They were like the army of the
+Indians. They're soldiers that---Lakota call them *akicita*; they're
+in the military. The Council of Forty-Four was the governing body. The
+Cheyennes had a very sophisticated governing body. They had ten bands.
+Four representatives from each band would be a part of the Council of
+Forty-Four. Then they would bring in the keeper of the sacred hats and
+the keeper of the sacred arrows. They would pick somebody as the head
+chief. But they'd always bring somebody in from another tribe to be a
+party to this. They governed primarily as a peace council. They tried to
+keep the peace---not only within the community, but also outside it.
+It was heavily focused on conflict resolution. You practice harmony with
+each other.
+
+That was the first level, but when there was strife, when something was
+going on---somebody attacks you, do we attack them back?---then they
+would talk about it and put it down to the societies. There were seven
+societies, each with a different set of functions. There were the
+warriors, and there were those who took care of the camp. Another group
+was the hunters. There were different functions, and they would always
+defer to the right level before a decision was final. Beyond that, even
+though the society's members were all male, they would never make a
+decision without going back home and talking to their spouses about what
+to do. The women were the ones who could say, "You don't be doing
+that. No, you can't do that." The men would take the message back up.
+
+When you see the myth of the interactions in history, you see the white
+man coming in, and the first person he's interacting with is an Indian
+male. It looks like all the decisions are being made there. That's what
+it looks like---that the decisions are being made there. But Indian
+people always had this thing about, "We got to sleep on it." That
+comes from the Indians. What they meant was they had to go home and deal
+with it, and then a decision would be made. That frustrated the hell out
+of the Europeans. They couldn't make a decision right away. It was
+because they needed more input. It's a good thing to think about---
+what is really good for the people? What is good for the next year? What
+is good for the children? There was a lot going on behind the scenes.
+
+That was pretty much in place until the wars became so brutal and things
+became dysfunctional. The peace council disbanded, and the warriors took
+over. It was all about retaliation. Somebody would do something to you,
+and you retaliated. It wasn't necessarily an aggressive act to
+attack---we didn't do much attacking other people. But we sure were
+quick to retaliate when somebody did something to us. The Cheyennes were
+the most ferocious fighters there were. When they went after it, they
+went after it. The other tribes feared them. You hear a lot of stories
+about it. They were one of the smaller groups, but among the most
+vengeful. When they weren't in that mode, they were the kindest,
+gentlest people in the world. They would give anything. They would treat
+you decently. But if you did something to them, it's unbelievable how
+they could turn.
+
+*I wonder if you could say a bit about the meaning of a treaty or
+diplomacy between American Indians and the colonizer. I think of, for
+instance, the difference between a written treaty that has articles and
+so forth and the Two-Row Wampum of the Haudenosaunee---the idea that
+you would write a constitution in symbolic language. When you say
+"treaty," which is such an important word in the history of the
+colonization of this land, does it mean something different on either
+side of the line?*
+
+Two completely different kinds of dealings.
+
+The tribes would come together. They might be enemies, like the Kiowas
+and the Comanches, and the Cheyennes and the Arapahoes, who were deadly
+enemies. However, in 1838, they came together. They went to a bunch of
+ceremonies. They made peace. Today, there's still a song that the
+Cheyenne gave to the Kiowa that the Kiowa will still sing whenever they
+see the Cheyenne. It created a bond, but it was a bond like taking care
+--- building your base of relatives, building your relationships. Then,
+with relationships come responsibilities to respect. Those are the kinds
+of things that those agreements were based on.
+
+Then you have this other form, a unilateral one that dictated exactly
+what the government wanted, with little or no consultation. Consultation
+looked like this: "We're going to have you sign this. You're going to
+sign this document, right? The first thing is, you're going to give up
+all this portion of land. Is that okay with you?" They would say, "No,
+no, we don't." "Oh, okay. We're going to take your children and put
+them in boarding schools. Is that okay with you?" "No, no way." That
+was the consultation. No matter what Indian people said, these documents
+were rarely changed from the time they came out, and negotiations---
+supposed negotiations---began.
+
+Here in the West, the last treaties were the worst. They should have
+been called removal documents, because that's why there are no
+reservations here. The whole intent was to remove everybody from the
+northern Oklahoma border to the southern South Dakota border, with the
+exception of a few Indians in Kansas. Everybody had to be gone. You did
+whatever you could to get them out of there. If you lied to them, that
+was fine. If you told them you weren't going to feed them, that's
+fine. If that didn't work, you threatened to kill them. If that didn't
+work, you killed them.
+
+Those last policies were all under military control. Five of the nine
+commissioners were military officers, most of them fresh from the
+scorched-earth policies in the Civil War. They didn't give a damn about
+people. They had been killing their own people. When it came to Indians,
+why would they do anything different? The whole idea was that they
+needed to exterminate these people. There were no plans for integrating
+Indian people into society. You don't see a single word about freedom
+of religion in any treaty. "You're going to become civilized. You're
+going to become a farmer. You're going to send your kids to boarding
+schools." That's what these were all about. "You're going to be
+relocated to the Missouri River."
+
+Everybody in the north got put on the Missouri. You see it on the maps
+today, with the exception of Pine Ridge and Rosebud---because their
+leaders went to Washington, DC, and got support. They fought to stay.
+But you start at the top: Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Standing Rock,
+Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Yankton, Santee, Winnebago's,
+Omaha's---all on the river. They were removing them so that people
+could come in and settle the land.
+
+That's why we don't have any reservations here in Colorado. The ones
+in the south were moved to Oklahoma. They're all in Oklahoma today.
+That's why this work we're doing today is critical, because this is
+the homeland of many of those people. They were removed from their
+homeland by 1870. They never had a chance to come back. Just think if
+you were Scottish and you said, "I'm going to go back to Scotland to
+see my homeland and see my relatives," you'd have a place to go,
+right? Indians never had that opportunity. We don't have that
+opportunity. We're trying to change that.
+
+That goes to the question of how you could do that without causing too
+much disruption. I stay completely away from "land back" because so
+many people get offended very easily by the idea that somebody's going
+to come in and take their land. I'm careful. I talk about restorative
+justice. I talk about restoring the land, not taking somebody's land,
+but restoring the land back to the people it belongs to. In many cases,
+in too many cases, there was fraud involved in the taking of this land.
+Between 1860 and 1870, the greatest amount of fraud in Indian country
+occurred, and it occurred out here. Colorado was an integral part of
+that.
+
+When Indians wouldn't cooperate, when they wouldn't come in, you get
+things like the Evans proclamations, where they illegally declared war.
+A territorial governor---and he was also Superintendent of Indian
+Affairs, so he knew it---didn't have authority to declare war on
+these people. But he did. When that wasn't successful, then he said,
+"All you citizens in Colorado, you can go out, and you can kill Indians
+and take their property as a reward."
+
+I'm studying this stuff, and I see those two proclamations. I wonder if
+they're still the law. They were. It took me a while to figure it out.
+I had to get help. What did the law say? The law said that if you
+didn't remove yourself, if you were an American Indian and you didn't
+go to Sand Creek, you were deemed to be hostile, and they declared war
+against you. That didn't work so well. The proclamation said, "We are
+authorizing all Colorado citizens, either individually or collectively,
+to kill Indians and take their property."
+
+*What did it feel like to read those?*
+
+Horrifying, horrifying. I kept thinking, "How could this possibly be
+acceptable?" They had an opportunity to settle this thing peacefully.
+The people came in and said, "We're tired of fighting. We don't want
+to fight anymore. We want to make peace." Evans turns them away. He
+said, "No. We're not going to do peace with you now." The
+undercurrent is, "Tell all the military officers, kill as many of them
+as you can. Nits make lice." Remember, that's one of their sayings,
+"Nits make lice." You have Sheridan doing stuff the same way, saying,
+"The only good Indian is a dead Indian." The mentality is that you're
+going to kill as many Indians as you can, kill them to exterminate them,
+and then you don't have to worry about them.
+
+That's the basis of what Sand Creek was. They got as many of them down
+there, and they tried to exterminate them. What happened there is the
+worst case of inhumanity, probably in the history of the world, what
+they did there. It's all in the records. If you read the books, these
+people testifying about what they were doing---the brutality, the
+inhumanity is unbelievable.
+
+In this process, I found out that five people at Sand Creek were my
+relatives. I think, "Oh my God, we never even knew." It becomes
+personal. It becomes really personal. I really don't know how the
+people in America and the people in Colorado will ever be able to make
+amends for what happened---what they did, the brutality. It's
+unbelievable. How could these people be so aggressive and so inhumane
+and not care? I mean, it would be different if they were killing males.
+But killing women and children? There's an account of a little boy, two
+years old, standing out in the field crying. These soldiers are taking
+shots at him to see who can kill him. That's not right. Can you imagine
+the psychological effect that would have on anybody?
+
+That's why these things don't go away. The spirits of those people are
+still here. When I see people talking about how we're going to
+celebrate 250 years of the United States, and we're going to say all
+the wonderful things---oh my God. How cruel is that? How cruel is
+that? Without giving it a moment's thought about whose land it is, who
+was here, and what they did.
+
+I never knew a lot of this. The last few years of my life, I've learned
+it all. It's been---sometimes it's overwhelming.
+
+*What did it take to change it?*
+
+I tried to do the research myself to figure out whether a law passed in
+the territory---the proclamation is a law---carried over when
+Colorado became a state. I had this friend who was a state senator and
+asked her for help. She went to the attorney general's office. They did
+the research. They said, "These proclamations are still the law.
+They've never been rescinded."
+
+I tried to get Polis's attention about rescinding them. I sent letters
+and emails---nothing. At the same time, there was a bill that had been
+passed, the mascot bill here in Colorado. He was going to the Indian
+Center to sign that bill. I took it as my opportunity to confront him. I
+went up to him, and I said, "When are you going to do something about
+those proclamations?" He looked at me, puzzled. He said, "What
+proclamations?" I said, "I've been writing to you for almost a year
+now. I've been sending emails regularly about these proclamations,
+proclamations that allow citizens to kill Indians. They are still the
+law today." He looks at his chief of staff and says, "Do you know
+anything about these proclamations?" That guy was shrinking. He was so
+embarrassed. In two weeks, they were rescinded.
+
+Because I'm a nobody, I don't have a say-so. I don't have any
+standing to get attention. That's the way it is with most people.
+Unless you have money or you're a political entity, you don't have any
+power to do anything like that. They just ignore you. It's easy to
+ignore you by just saying, "Yeah, that isn't true. No story here."
+
+*Now that's the case where you're working against something that's on
+the books. But some of your work has also involved trying to take
+advantage of the terms of those treaties and laws that have been
+forgotten, right?*
+
+We created a Truth, Restoration, and Education Commission---made up of
+seven commissioners, most of whom were representatives of tribes
+affected. We had three attorneys on the commission---educators, very
+competent people. When we finished the project, for each tribe we
+compiled a list of recommendations to address the issues we identified,
+such as the destruction of the buffalo. What about water rights? We
+raised all those issues in the recommendations and moved them forward.
+Lo and behold, somebody in Denver, after getting a copy of it, read the
+report and was shocked. "This couldn't have happened, this can't be
+real\--" They called me in, and I showed them the evidence. I spent
+months working with the city council.
+
+*What couldn't have happened?*
+
+Any of it. Any of it.
+
+It comes down to one person---one person on the Denver City Council,
+Stacy Gilmore. She says, "What do you want us to do?" Can you imagine?
+Unbelievable. Somebody's listening, and they're asking us, "What do
+you want us to do?" We said, "Well, we'd like to have a cultural
+center. We'd like to bring the people home." She said, "I read
+that." She said, "Let's do it." She led the charge inside to garner
+the votes. We helped educate the other council members and created a
+force so impressive that they approved putting that in the bond, and the
+voters voted. We're going to have that.
+
+Is that how the democratic system works? Not typically. I didn't have
+any money. I didn't have any power other than my voice and my words. I
+keep remembering how I got to where I am, and my grandmother. How
+powerful her way was, her way of teaching me about being responsible.
+
+Once I went to the store---stole a car at the nickel and dime store. I
+came back with this little ten-cent car.
+
+*Oh, a toy car.*
+
+A toy car. She says, "Where'd you get that at?" I said, "Well, the
+guy at the store gave it to me." She said, "I don't believe you."
+She grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, marched me back uptown---I
+had that car in my hand---and went into that store, and she said,
+"Did you give this to him?" He said, "No." I caught hell. I caught
+hell all the way home. For the next month, all I heard was, "You don't
+steal. You steal a nickel, you lose a dime. You steal a nickel, you lose
+a dime. You steal a nickel, you lose a dime. You don't steal."
+
+"Wait a minute, Grandma, these people stole this land. What are we
+going to do about it?"
+
+As American Indians, we're such a small population. We don't have any
+power. We don't have anybody in the state legislature. We don't have
+anybody in any of the county commissioners' offices. We don't have
+anybody anywhere. How are we supposed to get justice when we didn't
+even do anything wrong? That's where I turn to the American people.
+It's time. It's time. They're the ones that did it. They need to fix
+it.
+
+*What does restorative justice mean to you?*
+
+Restorative justice means creating opportunities for the people whose
+homeland this is to have something here, something they can go back to.
+Maybe they create a new reservation here, maybe it's small. Maybe they
+can build a community somewhere in Denver where relatives can all live
+together and appreciate the beautiful mountains. Can we bring buffalo
+back? Yes, we can. We're doing it at the Arsenal. Why can't we do it
+in other places? How about Pawnee National Grasslands? Why can't we
+have buffalo there and have the tribes co-manage it? What about the
+Eagle Repository at the Arsenal? Could we maybe have Indian people
+overseeing that and taking care of those sacred feathers and sacred
+animals in a good way? Maybe some insight from our part might be useful.
+I think there are lots of things that can happen.
+
+Shouldn't there be a way to get resources back to the Indian people
+without causing too much harm? What if, going forward, every real estate
+transaction in the state of Colorado were assessed a 1.5 percent fee,
+not a tax. We're not taxing somebody; we have a fee. It's a fee, not a
+tax. What if we did that and generated $80 million a year? What if we
+did it for a hundred years? That would give these people something to
+come back to. It would help them build it, and the money had to be spent
+in Colorado. It would create economic gain for our people and also for
+everybody in Colorado. It's not going to hurt anybody, because the
+money's coming back one way or another. What an easy way to not do harm
+and yet figure out restitution---to restore people to their homeland
+in some way, in just a little way. Isn't that something that is an
+American ideal, a moral obligation that people here today should
+support?
+
+People are listening. We have a couple of church groups that are moving
+forward to figure out something along those lines because they know they
+were a party to what happened. When you tell them, "Did you know that
+the United States government took some of our land and gave it to
+churches?" The Church Act? They didn't have a clue. What about
+education?
+
+*Well, who was running the boarding schools?*
+
+Not only that. Here in Colorado, 3.8 million acres of land were given to
+the school fund. They invested it and are getting the leases off the
+land. They've sold some of it. They have a permanent endowment that
+generates $150 million a year, which goes to the schools here in
+Colorado, off the backs of Indian people's lands. In history, 1876
+forward, not a dime has ever been used to help Indian education. Why
+not? Why can't that happen? Why can't we move forward and create an
+American Indian Education Department to start teaching our kids the way
+they need to be taught in schools and help them succeed? Right now,
+it's not working. We have a poor graduation rate. We have a poor
+attendance rate. We're at the bottom of all the good stuff and the top
+of all the worst stuff. We could do something about it, but we need
+resources.
+
+What about water rights? Water rights in Boulder County have never been
+adjudicated by the people who owned them. They were just taken. Nothing.
+Every time somebody gets a drink of water, they're drinking my water.
+What's going to happen? What can happen? It doesn't need to be a
+hostile, vindictive kind of thing that ends up in litigation and clouds
+people's titles. It doesn't have to be that way. In fact, in my mind,
+we don't want it that way. We don't want an individual's private
+property. I think we understand what that kind of loss is and its
+impact. We don't want to hurt people. That's the real Indian way.
+
+*I think it's a really interesting question---what restitution looks
+like where you have different understandings of property, of
+relationship to land. One of the tremendous imports of colonization was
+the imposition of fences, an understanding of property. The idea, for
+instance, of having a fee says, okay, you're buying a piece of
+property, but it's not just a transaction between you and the seller.
+It's a relationship that has other parties. Land can't be owned just
+by one person.*
+
+Ownership was defined from an Indian perspective through occupancy and
+use. Use includes economic, spiritual, cultural, and interactive
+associations with others who come into the area. Sometimes it's
+transitional. Sometimes it's circular migration, where you come and you
+go into an area. That gets converted into a concept called aboriginal
+title, which is an oxymoron.
+
+*Why is it an oxymoron?*
+
+You're taking a derogatory term to describe native nations as
+aboriginals, when they're not- they're people who are existing in the
+same space as you are. The title is a completely foreign concept to
+people who are living by occupancy and relationship standards. You put
+them together, and it's an oxymoron. Yet because of the laws, we
+actually had congressional title to all this land after 1834. That was
+never properly extinguished. In that law, people who came to Colorado,
+especially during the Gold Rush---one hundred thousand of them---were
+supposed to be arrested, fined $1,000, and removed by the federal
+government. That was the law. It never happened.
+
+If you look at it from a legal standpoint, you have an illegal
+occupation and use of a property that didn't belong to you. There was
+no justice. There was no justice for the Indian people. They knew what
+they were doing. I got a copy of a letter from a senator back east in
+1860. He says, "You guys out in Colorado are all out there illegally,
+and you're doing things that you're not supposed to be there for. If
+you don't straighten up, we're going to arrest you all and remove all
+of you." The Indian commissioner knew it. Evans knew it. There was a
+district attorney who knew it and said, "I can't do anything with this
+land," because he was here specifically to survey the land. He said,
+"I can't do anything because you don't have the title to this land."
+
+Right here where we're sitting, I did the title search on the
+University of Colorado. Not legal. There was never any treaty or consent
+by the two nations that lived here, and this land was never guaranteed
+to them by congressional or treaty title. Nothing. No transfer of
+property. They just did it. By 1858, the city of Boulder was already
+plotted. The lots were already sold. They had no authority to do that.
+
+People don't like what I'm saying, and they don't like to hear this,
+because the truth is coming out. But wouldn't it be wonderful if people
+would coalesce around fixing it? It'd be an honorable thing to do. You
+could start to heal. We have historical trauma, and we have to heal from
+that. But the other side has got a lot of unresolved traumas that they
+don't even understand. They need to do it because God's watching. God
+knows it. You can't just keep covering it up and doing nothing about
+it.
+
+*For people who are coming into this struggle and work that you've been
+part of for so many years---how do you guide them? What do you point
+them toward? Where do you see this going in future generations?*
+
+I point them to processing the information and learning more about it.
+Don't just believe me. Find out for yourself. Own it. Own it because
+it's yours. They do. They start that process. I don't want too much
+sympathy or empathy. I want action. Tell me what you're going to do and
+how you're going to do it. How are you going to help us? That manifests
+itself in people saying, "Well, I don't have any children or
+grandchildren, and I own a house in Boulder, and it's going to go back
+to the state. I don't think I want it going back to the city, the
+county, or the state. Can we give it to Indians?" "Yeah, you can.
+We'll figure out a way to do it." Can you imagine?
+
+*That could be the default.*
+
+Yeah, yeah. That should be the default---when somebody dies, instead
+of the state getting it, the Indian nation should get it. Wouldn't that
+be a wonderful way to do it? Boulder County is always doing something
+with land and doing this and that. There's never any consideration for
+Native people---very little, if any. I'm hoping and praying that they
+acquired Haystack Mountain with good intentions. If there's going to be
+a cultural, spiritual center out there, our people can go back out to
+that sacred site and do *hanblechas*, to do their vision quests, and to
+pray. There'll be places for people to stay, to come here, to do that
+again, like they did 150, 160 years ago. There would be buffalo out
+there, and opportunities for them to have those interactions. Wouldn't
+that be beautiful? Wouldn't that be beautiful for the people of
+Colorado and the people of Boulder to be a part of, party to that? It
+can happen. All it takes is the right people saying the right things.
+It'll happen. That's what we pray for. That's what we look for.
+
+I don't know that all this is going to happen in my lifetime. I'm 74
+years old. I paid some dues. But as long as I can get around, speak,
+tell the story, encourage people, teach the young ones about their
+history and their ways, and remind them that our first law is
+respect---treat each other well. There's a place for all of us in this world.
+If you look at our medicine wheels, red, white, black, and
+yellow---what's that mean? It means that all races of people are part
+of our medicine wheel. We know it. We understand it. That's what the
+Creator taught us. White people were never the enemy until they started
+killing us. That's the simple fact. You go back and read the early
+history in Colorado. There was no conflict between the Indians and white
+people. They were living together peacefully in Denver. Indian people
+would come in and trade, gladly come in and trade, and people there
+would gladly buy those buffalo robes because they needed them, and dried
+meat, and choke cherries, and stuff like that. It was a mutually
+rewarding relationship for both sides. Then gold---and all of a sudden
+greed became the dominator of the minds of a hundred thousand people.
+
+What I tell our children and what I tell our people is we never give up,
+we can never give up. Those people who gave their lives and everything
+else, they're counting on us. They're counting on us. The other thing
+is that it's becoming easier for people to become our allies because of
+their genetic makeup. Your genetic code now has all the blood, bones,
+and remains of our people from thousands of years, feeding the plants
+you're eating and the water you're drinking. You're absorbing all of
+that stuff. Your genetic code is changing to be more understanding and
+see Mother Earth is sacred, and Mother Earth is something that we need
+to take care of while treating each other in a good way. Every once in a
+while, there's a jolt of lightning that causes us to go astray, but we
+need to get back to that. Otherwise, we won't exist. We understand what
+we need to do to save this earth. We know it. That's what the Creator
+said: "You're going to have this place to live, but you have to take
+care of it." We're the guardians of this land, but we have to have all
+of us taking care of it if we're going to survive.
+
+If you want my honest opinion, we got twenty years at most, or we're
+done. Mother Earth's done. She's had it. You see what's going on, and
+it doesn't look good. But we can do something. We're intelligent human
+beings---we can do little things along the way. Why not bring the
+buffalo back in large numbers instead of cattle?
+
+I'll tell you one more story. I used to have buffalo up on the
+reservation in South Dakota. Because of leases and everything, I had to
+let them go. But there was a big blizzard, and it killed hundreds of
+thousands of cattle in 2011, I think it was, in South Dakota. Went right
+through our buffalo herd. Six hundred head. We lost one. It was because
+the snow was over the fence, and this bull wandered out of the pasture
+and got on the highway, and got hit by a semi. It wasn't because of the
+weather.
+
+What happens to Denver if we have that kind of thing? Our food supply
+runs out in seven days. What are you going to do? You going to look for
+that cow that froze to death out there and eat that? Wouldn't it be
+better if we had, for our own security, our food security---if we had
+buffalo roaming around in the pastures and the hills and open spaces
+where we could. We'd have a natural food supply in the event of a
+disaster. Now, that's thinking ahead.