Protocol-oral-history-project/content/interviews/williams-restorative_justice.md

narrator, subject, facilitator, date, approved, summary, location, topics, links

narrator	subject	facilitator	date	approved	summary	location	topics	links
Rick Williams	Restorative justice	Nathan Schneider	2025-11-17	2026-01-20	An American Indian elder studies and uses the history of colonization to win justice for his people.	Broomfield CO 80020, Broomfield County	ancestors conflict diplomacy ecology economics family food government indigeneity language ritual	text url People of the Sacred Land 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.