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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.