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Native American Indian Information
THE CHEYENNE TRIBE
The Beginnings
Many Native American tribes were victims of their small
size, as smallpox and other European diseases left too few survivors to
withstand colonization. The Cheyenne were victims of their own large size, for
factions within their nation were poorly understood by the American settlers
encroaching on their territories. For years relations between Cheyenne Indians
and white Americans followed an ugly pattern of some settler killing a Cheyenne
woman from one clan, that clan killing some settlers in revenge, and then angry
soldiers killing some bewildered Cheyennes from a different clan--prompting
their own kin to take revenge, and starting the cycle anew. This bloody cycle
reached its worst point in the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, where one Colonel
Chivington deliberately attacked a reservation of peaceable Cheyennes and
Arapahoes under American protection and killed more than 150 Native American
men, women, and children despite their repeated attempts to surrender.
"Nits," he famously proclaimed, "breed lice." The most
egregious massacre in American history--none of the participants even attempted
to claim that the victims were armed or dangerous--Sand Creek was condemned as
an atrocity even by the media of the time. Eventually the Cheyenne people were
forced to move to Oklahoma. The Cheyennes from the south grudgingly accepted
this arrangement, but the Cheyennes from the north could not adapt to the hot
weather and "broke out" to flee back to the north, led by Chiefs Dull
Knife and Little Wolf. Though many of the escapees were killed by the US Army en
route, the rest reached safety and their descendents still live in Montana
today.....
Please learn more about the Cheyenne history at: http://www.native-languages.org/cheyenne_culture.htm
The People
Cheyenne Indians call themselves Tsitsistas;
'Cheyenne' is a mistake, a Sioux word for Cree. The Cheyenne were Great Plains
people, who today have two tribes: the Northern Cheyenne in Montana,
numbering 6500, and the Southern Cheyenne, who are united with their longtime
allies the Arapaho into a single Nation in Oklahoma with a combined 11,000
members.......
Please learn more about the Cheyenne people at: http://www.native-languages.org/cheyenne_culture.htm
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