hello today we would like to present to you dr henrietta mann she is the american indian resource center's 2018 circle of honor recipient she is cheyenne indian and today she's going to give us a history of her tribe welcome thank you very much teresa i am very honored to be making this presentation my cheyenne name is oyster on and it translates closely into english as prayer cloth woman or the woman who comes to pray as is the traditional way of giving cheyenne names you are named for someone in your family and so consequently i am named for my paternal grandmother and she carried that name first and for us as cheyenne people our names is really the foundation upon which we stand and so i am duty bound to honor my grandmother in that way and to never dishonor the name of prayer cloth woman and you've got a whole group of names that are usually kept within the family for the babies to be named for your name for someone in the family it used to be on the mother's side of the family but now we switch to it being on the father's side of the family but it still works both ways and i came to walk on this earth in 1934 and my great-grandmother whose name is white buffalo woman had brought her family following our cheek black kettle into indian territory after the sand creek massacre of the cheyenne and the arapaho in 1864. black kettle is hailed as the most peaceable of all cheyenne peace chiefs and he wanted to keep his band out of the way of conflict so he brought themselves into indian territory and unfortunately four years later almost to the day of sand creek black kettle's camp was once more attacked this time by troops under the command of lieutenant george armstrong custer and so as they were in their winter encampment along the ouachita river in western oklahoma unfortunately black kettle and his wife did not survive that day we look upon life as a people as the most cherished possession that we as a person can ever have life life is sacred to us it is important and when we were or are born we are given a life purpose we our life to us is a cyclical journey that we make with the people on this earth and so we walk this road of life with the people and all other of the indigenous peoples of this country whom we call the hama what's da nil and so our history goes back in time to when we lived far to the north and east from where we currently live in oklahoma and our kins people the northern cheyenne live in montana we are recognized as two separate nations and yet we are one people culturally we speak the same language we live by the same value systems we we we share a culture even though we are separated geographically by more than a thousand miles and so we have journeyed through life since our creation and that has been quite a journey we call that first period of our history the ancient time and our elders described this ancient time as a very happy time when we lived far to the north and east and some people say that it's in that area between the great lakes and hudson's bay in canada but we were uh hit by a pandemic much like we are experiencing today that left many of our our people as orphans our children orphaned and so we left that first period of our history the ancient time and journeyed south toward the great lakes with our huge uh servant animals we didn't have horses at that time but we had these huge part wolf dogs and those dogs carried the possessions of the people with them and thus the second period of our history is named for those animals the time of the dogs and they carried our possessions into a new time into a different place where we lived in earth launch villages where we were agriculturists and and and planted and the three sisters as they are known corns beans and squash by that time some of our warriors had discovered and found the buffalo as as we call them today they're the north american buffalo but more properly called the bison and so the men would go out and follow that animal and bring food back to our earth large villages and that particular animal this bison this buffalo was what we might call a walking department store it provided us with absolutely everything that we needed from food to the buffalo skull being an altar in our ceremonies to the tail even being used as a fly swatter the horns being used as to carry the fire or to be used as drinking cups it was the bones even could be could be held together and the children could use them as sleds during the winter time as they slid down steep embankments of snow and so of course the hides provided us with clothing which were tanned into buckskin and were ornamented with porcupine quills and later when we acquired them beads and so that the cheyenne band of black kettle were sometimes referred to as the people of beauty for their elegant possessions they're white beautifully decorated teepees with exquisite teepee liners the buckskin clothing beaded intricately and white and soft with the beautiful moccasins and leggings with even the women had their bags that we called possible sacks and and they were called that because they said you could find anything possible in that sack which is sort of like maybe a a bag that we carry today that holds everything that we might need from car keys to driver's license and just anything possible that you need to keep with your you on your person and so when we would follow the buffalo and one time we got back to the village and we no longer had any of our seeds to plant that year our corn our beans our squash seeds were gone someone had come and stolen them from us and so we had to leave our agricultural existence and venture out into the interior of this country as we know it following the buffalo thus entering our third period of history when it's being named for this beautiful and huge animal which supplied our every need and so we followed this this buffalo out deeper into the interior of this country and it is said around maybe the mid 1700s that we came to a different kind of animal by some lake we think in the state of wyoming today and we had been told that we would come to this animal by one of our great prophets sweet medicine he said you will come to that animal and said its hoofs are different than than the bisons he said it has a long tail a lawn mane on its neck he said and it will be a very rest restive animal he said but you will get on that animal instead from that time on you'll you'll go and journey into the blue vision meaning the blue shadow distances he said and you will move very quickly and so we still live in that time we entered the into the time of the horse and we may not have horses per se these beautiful animals that carried us into the blue vision but we still have that horsepower under the hoods of our cars that help us to fly in those planes above our animals i mean our appliances that are gauged or operated by horsepower so we are today in that fourth period of history that we call the time of the horse maybe there will be a different a fifth time added when we come to another point of time in our history as a people and when that happens then our knowledge keepers will decide whether or not we have entered into a new period of our history but there was a time that we lived far to the north on the northern plains and uh we we followed the the bison on those beautiful animals and we at one point reached our sacred mountain which is on the periphery of the black hills in south dakota bear butte we look at beer butte as the center of the cheyenne universe and it is from that sacred mountain that our contemporary are our ways the cheyennes uh were given to us they came from within that mountain where our or some people call them cultural heroes we call them a prophet sweet medicine was taught for four years by all of the spirit powers of the world that assembled in the mountain to teach him about our ways as a cheyenne people all of those spirits were there can you imagine being taught by the spirit of grandmother moon the spirit of the sun mother earth the spirit of the rose the spirit's a of sweetgrass cedar sage juniper the spirits of even the the bison or the buffalo the spirit of the horse the spirit of of everything that exists in this world all gathered there to teach sweet medicine and how we were to live as a people and he gave and those spirit powers gave us our form of government which is the council of 44 chiefs there were peace chiefs it gave us our four warrior societies who protect and provide for the people and those two entities yet remain today although we are governed by a constitutional form of government uh at this current time but sweet medicine brought us everything that makes us unique as a people he told us how we must live he gave us our value systems about how we are to interact with each other he told us that we were to love all life and to have kindness and compassion so that we know how important love is today and embedded in that is you need to be kind you need to be compassionate you need to have sympathy for a person another of the cultural values that he brought us is respect we need to have respect for each other as the upright two-legged walkers with five fingers which is the way uh that we as human beings are are generally described the upright two-legged people with five fingers as different from the four-legged animals there are four-legged relatives those that fly those that swim those that stand rooted in the ground all of them are relatives and we were taught and know that we must have respect for all of them to respect this earth that we call grandmother in our prayers she's ishkimon to respect the water of life to be very thankful and to respect this air that we breathe that helps us to talk making our languages as indigenous peoples we say very sacred because it comes from the winds from the four directions but there is some held in our lungs that when it comes up vibrates against our vocal cords and we have sound and we have speech and we have songs well it's sacred the sacred area we i mean we if if we don't have any air we can only live for a few minutes we can live without water maybe for a week some say even a month but uh but we have to have that we also have to i mean water is life that's what we look at and so we have to have respect for those those four basic elements of life and of course there's fire there's a sacred fire many many of our relatives from different nations carry their sacred fire with them the sacred fire of the fire light that uh burns and and makes uh makes them the people of light so we we must respect those four elements that make up who we are as individuals and these are the kinds of teachings that we have as cheyenne people that we have to have respect for those elements but we must particularly respect this earth and we have lived in that way for a long time but when the strangers came here now we are in a place where we really need to think about living more interdependently with this earth all things of earth because of uh impin the kind of uh changes that are occurring in in the climate and with our weather so we need to respect our grandmother the earth we were taught also that we needed to be honest honest as our honesty is our cardinal value and we were told very specifically by sweet medicine do not lie do not cheat and these are things that we we learned as we walked this road of life we were also taught to be very generous to to be as generous as as our mother or grandmother the earth who continues to support us here on earth this is earth is the only home we have we don't have wings we d to fly in the air we don't have fence to live in the water and so we have to be very very appreciative of grandmother earth who continues to support our feet she represents our first home our home and sometimes uh we we nee we we can sometimes forget that but we need to be very conscious about the environment in which we live because these are the teachings that we as a peoples learned as we walk to our road of life in addition to honesty we have to be very generous just like grandmother earth who supports us and we are also taught to walk with a great deal of humility to be very humble people because we are all equal and we all live in a relationship with all of creation so we need to walk naturally in spirit and with quiet modesty we must never be boastful or proud and i can remember when i went camo went off to college my father and my grandfather sitting there and telling me that i had to remember to to be an humble person they said you might get a good education but that does not make you any better than anyone else because we are all equal so remember regardless of where you go and what you do that you are just one of the people that walks with quiet modesty and humility and another of our cardinal values is patience each one of us has to have the ability to calmly your life and being slow to react just sitting back and let things happen the way they are supposed to at their own time patience to walk very slowly on this sacred earth of fires as if we were walking on fragile seashells and finally most important as my great-grandmother told my my grandfather and son to pass down to me that we each have to have understanding that we need to comprehend what the other person is thinking or what the situation in life because she always told my her son and her grandson that understanding is a wonderful thing and i think it holds true with this particular project and the kind of work that that miss reynolds does in promoting understanding between those of us as indigenous peoples and the world in which well we live uh today it has changed well i mentioned that in our history we came through four periods and and that we had unfortunately some very conflicting situations in what was in colorado territory and and we had made retained that area of of land for ourselves as our hunting territories in fact we as cheyennes and we became allied with the arapaho as we journeyed on the northern high plains and came to the black hills of south dakota and it was when the in the shelter of that place that we as cheyenne people and the arapaho people the blue cloud people joined as allies and we are still living in that alliance today because we are the cheyenne and arapahoe tribes of oklahoma are made up of those two nations arapaho the blue sky people and the cheyenne people just sisters which means the people with like hearts our hearts are the same all cyans are light-hearted they are people of of heartline connections that we say and so we essentially signed as the allied tribes of cheyenne and arapaho for treaties with the united states government beginning in 1851 with the treaty of fort laramie that particular treaty was held and negotiated in the territory of wyoming along horse creek we as cheyenne's remember that treaty as the great horse creek treaty and in that treaty we reserved our hunting territories that straddle portions of the current four states of wyoming nebraska colorado and kansas and we maintain for our use the entire eastern rocky mountain front around uh that that came down through wyoming colorado and and and so that we were a huge slam barons however because immigrants had started on their track across the country uh to go west and what we now know to be california we were forced to sign just a handful of people black kettle among them our greatest uh and most peaceful cheyenne chief signed the treaty of fort wise and we gave up 12 13. of the territory that we had received for our use we exchanged that huge huge track of land for a small reservation in southeastern colorado which is what's about 1 13 the size of our original land holdings after the unfortunate unfortunate massacre at sand creek uh the united states government again negotiated with us another treaty called the treaty of the little arkansas and moved us out toward um kansas closer to kansas and uh said that they would would compensate us for for the life and the property lost at sand creek although it is uh one of the articles in our treaty that money never did came come to us and so finally in 1867 the cheyenne and arapahoe signed their last treaty uh called the medicine the treaty at medicine lodge because it was held along the uh the creek of medicine lodge medicine lodge creek and we were assigned to a different reservation then that straddled um kansas and oklahoma but we didn't we our ancestors didn't like that area that that we had reserved for our use in the treaty of medicine lodge and so we came down further sent out some of our leaders to find a place for us to live where the water was more drinkable because they said the water was so bad in the medicine lodge creek area that not even the horses would drink it and so our leaders found the area here along the canadian river in indian territory and we put down our roots here and our headquarters are now at north of el reno oklahoma at a place that we call concho though where our tribal headquarters are located so we moved down here and finally in 1869 president ulysses s grant created and that that executive order reservation for us and that is where we currently live today so you can see that we've had a long journey from the ancient time to the time of the dogs to the time of the buffalo to the time of the horse we walked through treaty after treaty after treaty after treaty and finally reached our current homelands of the area around el reno oklahoma are and could today we as cheyenne and arapahoe can be found and scattered in nine counties of western oklahoma where some of our relatives took their allotments our our territory our reservation was open for the oklahoma run and around 500 000 acres was allotted to us and the rest was opened in the run of 1892 so we lost the bulk of our reservation and now live on isolated allotments or in the cities in that seven county area in western oklahoma today we have a new constitution through which we govern ourselves as the cheyenne and the arapaho tribes it was adopted in 2006 so for um for we have been operating under that form of constitutional government since then for about what 15 years and our two highest officers our leaders according to that constitution are a governor and a lieutenant governor the current governor is currently reggie wassonne a cheyenne and the lieutenant governor is gilbert miles is arapahoe we have six casinos two in concho one in watonga one in canton one in clinton and one in hammond which helps with our economics situation in terms of uh our the generation of funding for operating our casino and and helping uh keep our programs going i i like to say that the cheyenne and arapahoe people have an elderly program as they call it and our elders of the age of 55 receive 150 dollars a month for food or for their use and so that comes from some of the casino uh revenue we have a tribal languages program operated through the tribes a master apprentice program and so we are trying to maintain our language language revitalization is certainly an important priority not just for us as cheyenne arapahos but for all nations who were first to love this beautiful land that we continue to live on and uh we also participate in an annual spiritual healing run from from sand creek in colorado where the massacre occurred in 1864 to the colorado state capitol that is a holdover when we owned that particular area of land we continue to observe our ceremonies primarily among them the sun dance we continue to utilize or still have the body of the council of 44 peace chiefs we have our warrior societies our traditional systems of government but the new constitution has responsibility over all of us as the allied nations of cheyenne and arapaho we are a good-hearted people and we continue to respect this land that gives us life and we continue to carry our values our life ways that were given to us by our great prophet sweet medicine who was taught at the center of our universe as cheyenne people bear beaut in south dakota so that is a very quick overview of who we are as cheyenne people but we share our land and territories with the arapaho people the blue cloud people and have for a long period of time they are our relatives as are all of the 39 nations located within the state of oklahoma we are all related all our relatives so i am very pleased to call miss reynolds my little sister she's my relative so thank you very much for letting me speak to you for a little while today walk safely on this earth walk happily be happy and remember that you're loved thank you dr man i think we could sit listen to you all day long that was so awesome thank you for giving us your time and thank you for your continued support for the american indian resource center at the tulsa city county library okay thank you thank you