Wind River Indian Reservation Research Articles

Wind River Elementary Computer Science Collaborative: Connecting Computer Science and Indigenous Identities and Knowledges on the Wind River Reservation

Three Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone–serving districts formed a researcher–practitioner partnership with the Wyoming Department of Education, the American Institutes for Research®, and BootUp Professional Development to advance the computer science (CS) education of their elementary students in ways that strengthen their Indigenous identities and knowledges. In this paper, we share experiences from 2019 to 2022 with our curriculum development, professional development (PD), and classroom implementation. The researcher–practitioner partnership developed student and teacher materials to support elementary CS lessons aligned to Wyoming’s CS standards and “Indian Education for All” social studies standards. Indigenous community members served as experts to codesign culturally relevant resources. Teachers explored the curriculum resources during three 4-hour virtual and in-person PD sessions. The sessions were designed to position the teachers as designers of CS projects they eventually implemented in their classrooms. Projects completed by students included simulated interviews with Indigenous heroes and animations of students introducing themselves in their Native languages. Teachers described several positive effects of the Scratch lessons on students, including high engagement, increased confidence, and successful application of several CS concepts. The teachers also provided enthusiastic positive reviews of the ways the CS lessons allowed students to explore their Indigenous identities while preparing to productively use technology in their futures. The Wind River Elementary CS Collaborative is one model for how a researcher–practitioner partnership can utilize diverse forms of expertise, ways of knowing, and Indigenous language to engage in curriculum design, PD, and classroom implementation that supports culturally sustaining CS pedagogies in Indigenous communities.

The Moby Bookmobile: Providing Health Education Materials in Wyoming Indian Country.

The COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for Native American populations to access health information. Through funding from the Network of The National Library of Medicine Region 4, a community library was able to enhance their native and nonnative health collections for distribution on the Wind River Reservation in Central Wyoming. The book mobile was originally funded by the Wyoming State Library through American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 funding to increase literacy efforts during the pandemic. Materials were distributed at multiple locations throughout the reservation and individuals indicated they appreciated the materials being provided. This program was successful in distributing health information to an underserved priority population within the United States. Hopefully, similar programs would be successful in enhancing health education programs with other priority populations in both the United States and the world.

The Wind River Scribe: Grace Darling Wetherbee Coolidge and Her Teepee Neighbors

Grace Darling Wetherbee Coolidge’s 1917 book Teepee Neighbors is a little-known collection of twenty-nine sketches of Indian life on the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, where she worked as a missionary from 1902 to 1910. Only recently have Coolidge’s personal papers been made publicly available by the Pioneers Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado, allowing scholars to investigate the true contours of her life for the first time. These primary source materials shed new light on a woman who—though born to great privilege in New York City—rejected a life of leisure and wealth in favor of a subsistence existence on a remote Indian reservation, devoted to charitable acts. This paper offers the first accurate essay-length biographical treatment of Grace Coolidge. It as well analyzes selections of her Teepee Neighbors as an attempt to generate sympathy among white readers for a colonized people, the Arapaho, and to offer a critique of Euro-American society from the standpoint of the communal Indian values she encountered at Wind River. Coolidge’s project, however, is ultimately hampered by her own ethnocentrism and admitted inability to understand Indian cultures.

Assessing tribal roads with improperly designated speed limits: A case study of Wyoming

ABSTRACT Establishing appropriate speed limits is a critical issue in transportation engineering. This study entailed the examination of speed limits of rural tribal roads in Wyoming<apos;>s Wind River Indian Reservation that were set below reasonable levels. In particular, the roads’ 85th percentile speeds were modeled using quantile regression and their average speeds were modeled using random parameters, or mixed, Tobit regression. The risks of encountering drivers exceeding the speed limits were modeled using mixed logistic regression while the speed variances were modeled using mixed Tobit regression. The aforementioned outcomes were modeled as functions of traffic and roadway parameters. According to the results, it was concluded that the outcomes were influenced by the shoulder width, posted speed limit, and difference between the posted speed limit and the appropriate speed limit recommended by the USLIMITS2 expert system of the Federal Highway Administration. As such, recommendations were made concerning the roads under study.

A Bryological Survey in Dickinson Park, Wind River Range, Wyoming

Dickinson Park is a difficult-to-access remote subalpine parkland in the Shoshone National Forest of Wyoming; it is located on the east slope of the Wind River Range (Central Rocky Mountains), immediately south of the Wind River Indian Reservation. The area has never been previously visited by bryologists. As a result of a bryological inventory conducted in the Park in 2012 (and subsequent laboratory research through 2019), 121 species, three subspecies, and five varieties were documented by voucher specimens. Of this total, 17 species, three subspecies, and two varieties are hepatics and 104 species and three varieties are mosses. The bryophyte checklist is presented, based on 990 specimens from 35 sites, collected by the author. Fourteen species of mosses have not previously been reported for Wyoming in the Flora of North America North of Mexico. There are 89 taxa (10 species, two subspecies, and one variety of hepatics and 74 species and two varieties of mosses) that are reported new for Fremont County. Three regionally rare species are documented on intact habitat sites of eutrophic fens located within the Park, Meesia triquetra, Paludella squarrosa, and Sphagnum angustifolium; their distribution in Wyoming is updated, based on recent publications and new herbarium materials.

The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation by Sara Wiles

Reviewed by: The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation by Sara Wiles Angelica Lawson (bio) The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation by Sara Wiles University of Oklahoma, 2019 SARA WILES'S PHOTO-ETHNOGRAPHIC BOOK The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation highlights the lives and significant events surrounding twenty-two featured individuals, their extended families, and friends. Following a forward by Jordan Dresser (Arapaho) and a brief introduction, the book is divided into three sections, organized chronologically beginning in the early 1900s and concluding in 2017. After publishing Arapaho Journeys in 2011, Wiles sought to add more personal and historic depth to this second volume of Arapaho ethnography by including more family and historic photographs alongside her own and by placing biographical stories within larger historical contexts such as the boarding school era, the occupation of Alcatraz, and the early days of the American Indian Movement. The layering of family stories, as in the opening section "Connecting Families through Photographs and Oral Histories," adds depth to her photo-ethnography. "Discovering Matilda Spoonhunter" comprises the entire first section; this is an intriguing story accompanied by thirteen black-and-white photos. The narrative examines interactions between two families—Matilda's (Arapaho) and Minnie's (non-Arapaho) during a tenuous time, when homesteading was taking place near the newly created Arapaho reservation. Wiles does not problematize the negative impacts of homesteading in Arapaho territory; instead, she focuses on the friendship between Matilda and Minnie, who became fast friends after saving a child's life together. While the story lacks exegesis, it is lovely in how it highlights "the founding mother of two prominent Arapaho families," Matilda Spoonhunter, who until now had been hidden in the shadows of her more famous brother, Sherman Sage. Matilda's story shines among the photos of generations of her descendants and is one of many examples of fascinating women's stories in this collection. The many biographies of Arapaho women are especially compelling and cover a wide range of topics and time periods beginning with Matilda's story and ending with Nora Oldman's, who along with her husband William C'Hair, participated in the protests at Standing Rock. These stories are a positive [End Page 192] aspect of the collection and cover a wide range of topics. A favorite is Rubena Hernandez's story. With thirty years of flagging experience, Rubena began working on the Seventeen Mile Road project when she was seventy years old. Wiles contextualizes Rubena's biography by telling a story of personal significance to the Arapaho people of the Wind River Reservation—about a project that sought to improve the safety of an extremely dangerous road on the reservation. Wiles adds depth to her photo-ethnographic project by strategically pairing stories. Chapters pair themes of attending high school and college off the reservation, as well as themes of performance and rodeo. The most powerful pairing comes near the end of the collection with chapters about a recently committed hate crime and Arapaho tribal member Ron Howard's efforts to organize a peace march in the aftermath. The chapter explores racist attitudes toward Arapahos and hatred toward homeless Native Americans, in particular. It is followed by a chapter about one of the victims of the crime, James Goggles Jr., who was shot in the head by a non-Indian intent on murdering homeless Native Americans. Goggles was one of two men who were shot and the only survivor. Pairing—essentially layering these stories together—helps to humanize the stereotyped homeless Arapahos derogatorily referred to as "park rangers" (182). Although Wiles shines a light on the deeply entrenched racism surrounding Arapaho communities, she only slightly contextualizes that racism within the larger history of resource extraction, water wars, and other policies and practices that led to the disenfranchisement of Arapahos by neighboring towns. Readers looking for a highly academic or nuanced critique of settler colonialism's impact on this reservation community will not find it here; yet there is value in these very intimate and distinctly Arapaho stories and photos. Wiles states in the introduction that these are photos of friends and people...

Tradition, Sovereignty, and Conservation: The Controversy Surrounding the Wind River Indian Reservation Game Code

Abstract In December 1983, a highly publicized slaughter of over fifty elk at Wind River Indian Reservation reignited a dispute between the reservation’s resident tribes—the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho nations—over wildlife management. In response to diminished big game populations, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe had passed hunting regulations in 1980, but the people of the Northern Arapaho Tribe refused to do so, effectively derailing any attempt to manage wildlife at Wind River. After the Bureau of Indian Affairs imposed a game code on the reservation in 1984, the Northern Arapaho Tribe initiated a legal battle that culminated in the 1987 case of Northern Arapahoe Tribe v. Hodel. The court ruled that because the treaty rights of the two tribes overlapped in the area of wildlife management and because research conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the request of both tribes had revealed a need for hunting regulations, the U.S. government had the power to impose the Wind River Reservation Game Code. Although the tribes jointly manage wildlife today and big game populations now thrive at Wind River, it is important to examine the controversy that involved conflicting visions of and concerns about cultural traditions, tribal sovereignty, and wildlife conservation principles and practices. Exploring how Eastern Shoshones and Northern Arapahos viewed those subjects differently and how their longstanding rivalry at Wind River shaped this conflict highlights some problems with the simplistic and romanticized concept of the “Ecological Indian.”

Enacting Treaty Rights through Restoring Shoshone Ancestral Foods on the Wind River Indian Reservation

ABSTRACT Despite great loss in gathering and consumption of traditional foods among Indigenous communities, there is great hope for reclaiming and preserving knowledge. The Restoring Shoshone Ancestral Food Gathering (RSAFG) is a community group leading grassroots efforts on the Wind River reservation to reclaim Shoshone ancestral foods and promote food sovereignty. The story of the RSAFG promotes equitable, decolonized, and community empowered methods of reclaiming Indigenous foods by sharing three of RSAFG’s acts of decolonization: 1) enacting treaty rights through gathering traditional plants, 2) demanding equitable partnerships in community-based research, and 3) sharing the story through radical authorship via layered narratives. A pesar de la gran pérdida en la recolección y el consumo de alimentos tradicionales entre las comunidades indígenas, existe una gran esperanza para recuperar y preservar el conocimiento. El Restoring Shoshone Ancestral Food Gathering (RSAFG) es un grupo comunitario que lidera los esfuerzos de base en la reserva wind river para recuperar los alimentos ancestrales shoshone y promover la soberanía alimentaria. La historia de la RSAFG promueve métodos equitativos, descolonizados y empoderados por la comunidad para recuperar los alimentos indígenas al compartir tres de los actos de descolonización de RSAFG: 1) promulgar los derechos de los tratados mediante la recolección de plantas tradicionales, 2) exigir asociaciones equitativas en la investigación basada en la comunidad, y 3) compartir la historia a través de la autoría radical a través de narrativas en capas.

Ecology and Ethnogenesis: An Environmental History of the Wind River Shoshones, 1000–1868

In Ecology and Ethnogenesis, Adam R. Hodge presents a deep history of an Indigenous community too often overlooked by historians. This is a book of remarkable depth that tracks a group of people as they morphed culturally and politically during nearly a millennium. The book focuses on this group’s transformation from the Numu, the Eastern Shoshones, to the Wind River Shoshones over the course of that thousand-year span. Hodge argues that movement between vastly different ecologies prior to arrival of European colonists, as well as the changes to those environments wrought by European colonialism, played key roles in the development of modern Wind River Shoshone society. It is fundamentally an environmental history, showing how one Indigenous society’s environmental context, and their adaptation to ecological changes, shaped their social and cultural structure. “If we hope to grasp [the Wind River Shoshones’] past,” Hodge writes, “it is especially important to explore the interplay between their ancestors and the physical environments that they historically utilized” (3).The focus on the intersection of culture and ecology is well maintained throughout the book but is particularly strong in Hodge’s analysis of changing gender norms and roles within Eastern and Wind River Shoshone society. Hodge provides sensitive and nuanced discussions of polygyny and plural marriage among the Shoshones, arguing that such practices served important economic roles. “Gender complementarity and the practice of polygyny distributed critical labor practices and helped ensure productive Shoshone households and communities” during the high era of the mountain western fur trade in the early nineteenth century, Hodge argues (216–17). Gender is a major theme in this work as, in the author’s words, “ecological interrelationships that contributed to Eastern Shoshone distinctiveness often manifested in the form of gender dynamics. . . . I strive for a ‘genuine incorporation’ of Indian women’s history” (9). In this, Hodge succeeds wonderfully.Ecology and Ethnogenesis could have used another round of editing. This is not merely a matter of aesthetics—though, to be sure, word and phrase repetition can be distracting in the text. Some sentences and paragraphs run on long enough to obscure the central point the author is making, and unnecessarily wordy phrases similarly cloud meaning throughout the book. To cite one example of unnecessarily bulky sentences, in an early chapter Hodge writes: “The far northwestern portion of the Great Plains, a vast area that encompasses the grasslands of present-day Montana and Alberta, situated between the Yellowstone River on the south and the North Saskatchewan to the north, pulled Numic-speaking peoples northward along the eastern foot of the Northern Rockies because it afforded tremendous hunting opportunities” (86). Sentences of this size abound and do not clarify the story Hodge tells. This is a relatively minor drawback, but a noticeable one nonetheless.Adam Hodge’s Ecology and Ethnogenesis is a strong work of history, and the author’s emphasis on precontact Numu society and on the relationship between ecological change and gender history are welcome emphases in a field that too often ignores both. While some dense and occasionally unclear writing may mean this work appeals to a strictly academic audience, it will be of considerable use to any scholar working on the history of the North American West and those who have called that place home.

Crossing boundaries in conservation: land ownership and habitat influence the occupancy of an at‐risk small mammal

AbstractEcological research is critical for informing management of at‐risk species, for example, by identifying what drives occupancy of species across landscapes. However, restricting research to public land and omitting private land, as commonly occurs in ecological research, can bias inferences because important drivers of population and community patterns may vary with land ownership. We conducted a landscape‐scale study of a species of conservation concern, white‐tailed prairie dog (WTPD; Cynomys leucurus), across multiple land ownerships in Wyoming. We quantified how WTPD occupancy varied with both land ownership and biotic and abiotic factors. We established a baseline occupancy rate for WTPD in Wyoming, and quantified how this baseline would have been biased if we had restricted our study to public land. We surveyed 440 sites throughout the Wyoming range of WTPD, which included sites on public (275), private (80), checkerboard (55), and Wind River Indian Reservation (30) land. We found that WTPD occupancy varied significantly with land ownership and elevation, with WTPD being four times as likely to occupy private as public land at the median study area elevation. This difference in occupancy may have been driven by variation in habitat quality between ownership types, but we could not definitively determine the underlying cause. Regardless of land ownership, WTPD occupancy increased with bare ground, but also when recent plant biomass (as estimated by NDVI) was higher than a site’s long‐term average biomass. In other words, WTPD tended to occupy sparsely vegetated sites, but occupancy increased with short‐term increases in biomass. The strong land ownership effect illustrates how study area delineation in relation to land ownership can influence research inferences and management actions, and why it is counterproductive to presuppose that certain land ownerships contain low‐quality habitat. Ecologically, the variation in occupancy resulting from long‐term site conditions, such as overall density of vegetation, relative to short‐term site conditions, such as changes in plant biomass, can be used to improve long‐term population monitoring for WTPD.

Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation by Martha Louise Hipp

Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation by Martha Louise Hipp

Checklist of vascular plants for Wind River Indian Reservation (USA) high-elevation basins: ecological drivers of community assemblages

Background and aims – Native American reservations in the United States provide biodiversity critical for conservation and ecosystem functions. Unfortunately, botanical inventories are less common for reservations than other land jurisdictions. Such ecological importance and needs are apparent for the Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR), the 7th largest reservation in the US (&gt;890,000 ha) that is shared by the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho.Material and methods – A botanical study for two WRIR high-elevation basins (Saint Lawrence Basin (SLB) and Paradise Basin (PB)) to (1) reconcile a 1960 plant list, and (2) quantify plant communities ecologically was conducted. In 2017, 106 monitoring sites were established to quantify species presence. Across basins, 231 total vascular plant taxa (221 to species and 10 to genus) were identified, or &gt; 3× more plant species than noted in the 1960 list. In SLB, 222 plant taxa (213 to species and 9 to genus) were identified and in PB 98 plant taxa (90 to species and 8 to genus) were identified. In 2018, sites were re-sampled to quantify species abundance, soil pH, organic matter, soil nutrients, CEC, salts, and texture. Key results – Slope and elevation explained species distributions in the topography ordination and soil organic matter, pH, texture, P, and K explained species distributions in the soil ordination. Eleven exotic species, and one rare endemic species were documented with implications for empowering tribal management. Using a classification approach followed by an indicator species analysis and fidelity (Phi) assessment, we identified 14 unique plant communities and related these to 6 alliances and 7 associations across 6 macrogroups from the US National Vegetation Classification database. These indicator species of communities included sedges (Carex aquatilus), grasses (Pseudoroegneria spicata, Elymus elymoides, Achnatherum lettermanii, Elymus trachycaulus subsp. trachycaulus, Poa glauca subsp. rupicola), forbs (Polygonum bistortoides, Balsamorhiza incana, Castilleja flava), shrubs (Artemisia tridentata, Betula glandulosa, Dasiphora fruticosa subsp. floribunda) and trees (Pinus contorta).Conclusion – The plant taxa, plant communities, and ecological drivers documented in this study will enhance tribal and federal monitoring of these high-elevation WRIR basins.

Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation

Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation

Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Ethnobotany for Wind River Reservation Rangelands

The need to affirm and revitalize cultural knowledge of native plant communities is impera-tive for Indigenous people. This ethnobotanical study documents Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) structured from an Indigenous paradigm by exploring the connection be-tween plants collected in two high-elevation basins and tribal members on the Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR). We sought to qualitatively understand the plant resources by looking through the lens of Indigenous language and perspectives. Existing names of the ba-sin plants in both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho languages were compiled through an ethnobotanical literature review, seven in-person interviews with Eastern Sho-shone and Northern Arapaho tribal members, and attendance at language workshops. We documented 53 Eastern Shoshone and 44 Northern Arapaho plant names, respectively. His-torical impacts of past Federal Indian policy eras have shaped TEK as it currently exists within tribal communities. Both tribes used and had Indigenous names for Northern sweetgrass (Hierochloe hirta ssp. hirta), bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva), junipers (Juniperus ssp.), and bear-berry or Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi). The resiliency of TEK is attributed to the perse-verance of Indigenous people continuing to practice and teach traditions. The historical con-text specific to both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes and their languages are important for enhancing our current understanding of the ethnobotanical TEK of plants on the WRIR. Recognizing the value of ethnobotanical TEK and incorporating it into natural resource management plans and decisions can bridge diverse perspectives on land use for meaningful collaboration with tribal communities.

Reviving and Reclaiming Our Native Food System: Leadership Experiences of a Research Project's Community Advisory Board

As proud Native community leaders who call the Wind River Reservation home, our battles for sov­ereignty and respect are not just part of a long-ago history. Claiming our self-empowerment and put­ting it to good use on behalf of our entire commu­nity are challenged more often than we care to recount. In the matter of sustainable food security, those of us who agreed to serve as members of the Growing Resilience Community Advisory Board (CAB) were reminded of such events. Our CAB was established in 2016 as an oversight group for community wellbeing for a University of Wyoming (UW)–initiated and National Institutes of Health (NIH)–funded research project on gardening and health. See the press release for this article.

Adult Health Status Among Native American Families Participating in the Growing Resilience Home Garden Study.

Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes sharing the Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR) in Wyoming reportedly die 30 years earlier than whites in the state. We analyzed data on the health status of 176 adults from 96 families who participated in a randomized controlled trial to assess health effects of home gardens. Measures of body mass index, waist circumference, blood pressure, hemoglobin A1c, vitamin D, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and household food security were collected from participating adults before the intervention. Results indicated that this group has considerably worse health status than average US adults and also fares worse than average American Indians/Alaska Natives. To help improve these disparities, Native Americans need access to appropriate and effective means of health promotion.

Assessing health impacts of home food gardens with Wind River Indian Reservation families: protocol for a randomised controlled trial

IntroductionThis community-based participatory research, Growing Resilience, will be the first full-scale randomised controlled trial we have identified that is designed to evaluate impacts of home gardening on family health. It...

Reflections on an ethnographic project with elementary educators on the Wind River Reservation: A cautionary tale

AbstractIn this article, I analyze the successes and challenges of the first year of a four‐year applied anthropology project conducted on Wyoming's Wind River Reservation intended to help mostly white educators of Arapaho children who develop culturally relevant classroom pedagogy. Educators of Arapaho children have expressed concerns that student achievement is low, but also that the curriculum is largely disconnected from student backgrounds and experiences. Following deficit models, non‐Indian educators have historically cast American Indian schooling to reflect the norms and expectations constructed by the white dominant group. In contrast, in this study teachers were taught anthropological methods to conduct fieldwork in the households of children they taught. Teachers successfully documented historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well‐being. Teacher's ethnographic research fostered trust between school and families, and bridged communities to classrooms. On the other hand, pedagogical paradigms remained largely aligned with preexisting schooled programs, culturally relevant pedagogy existing as an add‐on but not inextricably embedded within the curriculum.

Agriculture Resource Management Planning on the Wind River Indian Reservation: An Integrative Approach

The Wind River Indian Reservation undertook the development of an agricultural resource management plan in 2015. The reservation is 8903 sq.km of which 63% is in crop and grazing lands. This project’s aim was to create a community-based integrated plan. A series of community meetings identified 83 issues and topics relating to agricultural development on the reservation. Using information from community meetings, the final agricultural resource management plan consists of 9 major elements, with 12 goals, 46 objectives and 88 policies. Three key issues are addressed in the plan: provide the reservation with a plan that leads to self-management of their agricultural resources; integrate the major agricultural elements as defined by the community into policies; and, create a governance structure that fosters agricultural development into the future.

Growing intergenerational resilience for Indigenous food sovereignty through home gardening.

As a community-based participatory research project designed to promote health and wellbeing, Growing Resilience supports home gardens for 96 primarily Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho families in the Wind River Reservation, located in Wyoming. Through analysis of data from two years of qualitative fieldwork, including stories told by 53 gardeners and members of the project’s community advisory board in talking circles and through our novel sovereign storytelling method, we investigated if and how these participants employ relationships, knowledge, and practices across generations through home gardening. We find that participants describe home gardening within present, past, future, and cross-generational frames, rooted in family relationships and knowledge shared across generations. Our analysis of these themes suggests that gardening provides families a means to transmit resilience across generations or, as we call it here, intergenerational resilience. We conclude by discussing intergenerational resilience as a culturally specific mechanism of social-ecological community resilience that may be particularly relevant in Indigenous movements for food sovereignty.