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Native & Indigenous People in Fort Collins#

portrait of Warshinun, picture of Arapaho & Cheyenne reservation, and Arapaho Bend Natural Area

Left - Portrait of Warshinun (Friday), c.1875, Fort Collins Museum of Discovery (FCMoD); Center – Map of northern Colorado, showing the Cheyenne & Arapahoe Reservation from the Fort Laramie Treaty (1851) in light grey, and the subsequent Fort Wise Treaty reservation established in 1861 in black (Colorado Encyclopedia); Right – Arapaho Bend Natural Area in Fort Collins, the location of the historic “Council Tree” and a regular location where Native people gathered prior to U.S. colonization (City of Fort Collins, Grant Smith).

City of Fort Collins Land Acknowledgement#

We acknowledge and honor the lands situated within the City of Fort Collins as the original homelands of the Hinono’eiteen (Arapaho), Tsétsėhéstȧhese (Cheyenne), Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Comanche), Caiugu (Kiowa), Čariks i Čariks (Pawnee), Sosonih (Shoshone), Oc'eti S'akowin (Lakota) and Núuchiu (Ute) Peoples. This area is an important site of trade, gathering, and healing for these Native Nations. These lands are home to a diverse urban Native community representing multiple Native Nations and Indigenous Peoples. Despite forced removal and land dispossession, they continue to thrive as resilient members of our community. We are grateful for Native community members and honor the rich cultural heritage they bring to our collective community. We further recognize and value their social, intellectual, economic, and cultural contributions. The City of Fort Collins is committed to supporting, partnering, and working with the Native and Indigenous community.

Native & Indigenous People in Fort Collins: Histories#

While the story of the town of Fort Collins begins in the 1860s, the land that is now the city has been home to people for much longer. Over the last 400 years, the dynamic movement and displacement of Native People of the Colorado Plains has been noted by a variety of groups at different and even overlapping times in history.  Today, History Colorado, the State of Colorado’s historic preservation agency, acknowledges 48 sovereign Native Nations who have a connection to the state. At various times before European colonization, the Hinono’eiteen [prouninced Hin-na-na-ay-teen] (Arapaho) and Tsétsėhéstȧhese [pronounced tsi-tsi-tsas] (Cheyenne), lived here and called this place home. The Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Comanche), Caiugu (Kiowa), Čariks i Čariks (Pawnee), Sosonih (Shoshone), Oc'eti S'akowin (Lakota) and Núuchiu (Ute) Peoples also have a connection to this space. For many of these people, their lifeways and culture centered around close connections with the grasslands, rivers, and mountains that make up what is now Larimer County. The place that is now Arapaho Bend Natural Area was known as a common gathering place for the Hinono’eiteen at various times of the year. 

These people’s lives were forever disrupted by the colonization of the continent by European nations such as Spain, France, and Great Britain, then finally the United States. The Poudre River itself takes its current name from French fur trappers from Quebec and Louisiana that traveled, trapped, and traded extensively within the Missouri River watershed that includes the Platte and Poudre Rivers, at that time claimed by France as Louisiana Territory. The U.S. purchased the land from France in 1803 and began slowly exploring and colonizing the territory, with generally little consideration for the rights of the people and nations who already lived there.

mid-20th century image of Council Tree

A photo of the Council Tree near present-day Arapahoe Bend Natural Area. The exact location of the tree is not known, or whether this was one specific tree, but this area served as a common location for larger gatherings of Hinono’eiteen bands prior to White colonization. FCMoD, H14778.

By the 1850s when European colonization in northern Colorado began in earnest, the area that is now Fort Collins was the homeland of both the Hinono’eiteen (Arapaho) and Tsétsėhéstȧhese (Cheyenne) people. These people began facing pressure by European Americans in the 1840’s from wagon trains headed to Oregon and California, which depleted grasses the Tsétsėhéstȧhese and the Hinono’eiteen relied on for both game and horse forage. Native nations from farther east, including the Oc'eti S'akowin (Lakota), began moving into the upper Platte River from the east due to their own homelands being invaded by White settlers, which put more pressure on the space and resources of the Tsétsėhéstȧhese and Hinono’eiteen.

The first European American settlers who colonized along the Cache la Poudre River were trappers led by Antoine Janis, who settled what is now Laporte in 1858. Although the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 delineated lands between the North Platte and Arkansas Rivers as territory of the Tsétsėhéstȧhese and Hinono’eiteen, including the area now known as Fort Collins, European American settlers ignored the treaties and claimed land anyway. Undercutting the agreements made ten years prior, in 1861 with the Treaty of Fort Wise, the U.S. government significantly shrank the area they recognized as Tsétsėhéstȧhese and Hinono’eiteen land to a small area near Big Sandy Creek. The U.S. Government brokered this treaty with a minority cohort of Arapaho and Cheyenne chiefs and ignored the social and political structure of the affected people. A homeland that once spanned the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains, was now restricted to an area less than 4 million acres between the Big Sandy Creek and the Arkansas River.

portrait of Warshinun

Portrait of Warshinun (Friday), 1869, FCMoD, H05383.

In 1864, the United States government established Camp Collins, later renamed Fort Collins, to protect trade, travel, and fledgling farm interests in the area. In June of that year, the Colorado Territorial Governor John Evans, issued a proclamation for all “friendly” Cheyenne and Arapaho to go to Fort Lyon to receive supplies and find safety from government actions against hostile groups. Local Hinono’eiteen led by Hinono’ei nieces ("Arapaho Chief") Warshinun (Friday) had no interest in leaving for the southern Hinono’eiteen reservation on Sand Creek, but they generally avoided conflict with the illegal White colonists. The federal government instructed the Hinono’eiteen to stay near Fort Collins for protection and food supplies.

During this time, local sources noted that by 1865, Warshinun’s Hinono’eiteen band was seen camping at various locations throughout the valley including near the mouth of Dry Creek, on the Coy farm near present-day Lemay & Mulberry Streets, and at the Frederick William (F.W) Sherwood ranch 4.5 miles southeast of downtown Fort Collins, near the current Arapaho Bend Natural Area. Hinono’eiteen women and their children were often seen at Joseph Mason’s sutler store in Fort Collins, which later became Stover’s Drug at Linden and Jefferson streets in Fort Collins. Other bands of the Hinono’eiteen and Oc'eti S'akowin (Lakota) also came to the area and frequently camped with Warshinun’s people.

Map of Indian Territory (Oklahoma), 1889

Map of Indian Territory, 1889 (now Oklahoma), showing the location where the federal government expelled the southern Arapahoe and Cheyenne bands after 1867, Oklahoma Historical Society.

The 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek forced the Hinono’eiteen and Tsétsėhéstȧhese to give up all claims to land within what is today Colorado. Local settlers and stage route operators opposed Warshinun’s proposal to retain a reservation for his people along the Poudre River, and despite negotiations, neither the territorial nor the federal government established any such reservation. General William T. Sherman decommissioned Fort Collins in 1868, and the Hinono’eiteen in the area were left homeless. Some went to the Southern Hinono’eiteen and Tsétsėhéstȧhese reservation in Oklahoma. Some Hinono’eiteen and Tsétsėhéstȧhese later moved to the Wind River reservation in Wyoming in 1878 after dêgwahini (Shoshone Chief) Washakie of the Sosonih (Shoshone) allowed them to settle there. These reservations were part of a larger strategy by the U.S. government to limit the land available to Native people, and attempt to assimilate them into American society by becoming small communal farmers – this latter effort ignored the fact that most federally-established reservations were largely on marginal land.

Native Life in Fort Collins after Colonization#

After 1878, some Native people still chose to live in or near Fort Collins. However, the social landscape they faced was difficult. Cut off from traditional lands and cultural practices, Native people in some cases tried to make a living working on local farms and ranches. They faced rampant discrimination in local towns. Fort Collins shops were known to include racist signs in their front windows advertising for “white trade only” or saying “No Mexicans” or “No Indians” well into the 1950s. Furthermore, when Native culture was studied, promoted, or discussed, particularly at the region’s land grant university, Colorado Agricultural College (now Colorado State University), images of Native culture, or Native speakers themselves, were often framed as part of a “lost” or “vanishing” culture, or as a necessary sacrifice for [White] progress.

The national culture in which Native people existed after the U.S. conquest of the west made prosperous life particularly difficult. White American cultural norms either demonized or mythologized indigenous people with little regard for culture or geography. The policy of the U.S. Government for most of this time was forced assimilation, which would not be ended until the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. Even then, the U.S. Congress moved toward closing, or “terminating,” reservations as late as 1960, seeking to end what was, at that time, a government-to-government interaction between tribal leaders and the federal government. Policies such as the Urban Indian Relocation Program encouraged Native people to leave reservations and take jobs in larger urban areas in fields like construction and other trades. For example, in 1952 1,200 Oc'eti S'akowin (Lakota) from Pine Ridge and Rosebud in South Dakota were recruited to northern Colorado farms, including 75 slated to work on farms in the Fort Collins area.

Beginning in the 1950s, Native people organized various national movements for Native/Indigenous people’s rights that made their mark on Fort Collins. While the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted all Native Americans citizenship, actual benefits varied. For example, the 1924 act left the administration of most citizenship rights, including the right to vote, to the states. Some states did not grant Native people the right to vote until 1957, and many states and counties continued to discriminate against Native people at the ballot box through restricting polling place locations on or near reservations, restricted mail-in voting, and implemented strict voter ID laws.

Changes to these practices typically came in response to actions by Indigenous civil rights organizations like the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and its more aggressive counterpoint, the American Indian Movement (AIM). The NCAI organized for the first time in Denver in 1944, hosting a delegation of eighty representatives from fifty tribes. They became the key organization lobbying Congress and the federal government to shift federal policy away from termination towards self-determination for tribes. AIM took a more activist approach through, their occupations of the Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco in 1969, the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. in 1972, and the Wounded Knee massacre site in 1973. In Fort Collins, AIM’s work was focused on other civil rights, mostly discriminatory policies at Colorado State University or related issues in local businesses and housing. AIM’s local chapter joined the Black Student Alliance and the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) to put pressure on the University to end discriminatory practices. Of particular concern for AIM was the Anthropology Department’s excavations and treatment of Native remains.

Nationally, the activism of these and other organizations resulted in several changes to Native American policy in the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century, Congress passed several laws, including the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act, 1972 Indian Education Act, and 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, all with the goal of at least halting two centuries of destructive policies toward Native people. The Native American Religious Freedom Act, passed in 1978, established federal policy that “American Indians” have an “inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rights.” This act both affirmed that Native people had a right to practice their religion protected under the First Amendment (a right denied to them under federal law until that point), but also established that Native people had a right to access important religious sites that might be owned and managed by the federal government, such as national parks, military bases, etc.

In 1990, recognizing the cultural and familial damage of archaeological research on human remains that didn’t engage and consult descendant communities, and responding to the work done by activists on the topic over the prior three decades, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) that, among other actions, obligated museums and other research institutions to make human remains and related funerary and cultural objects in their collections available for repatriation to their descendants. President Clinton’s Executive Order 13175 reaffirmed and strengthened the government-to-government relationship with Native nations, making it clear that tribal governments were independent from the federal government and must be consulted with as self-governing peers, not wards of the state.

Today, Native American people remain an important part of the Fort Collins’ community. While the Hinono’eiteen (Arapaho), Tsétsėhéstȧhese (Cheyenne), and Núuchiu (Ute) continue to live here, or visit here from Wind River Reservation in Wyoming the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Tribes reservation in Oklahoma, or the Southern and Ute Mountain Ute reservations in southern Colorado. Native Nations across the continent call the Poudre River Valley home. In July of 2023, the City of Fort Collins’ Department of Equity and Inclusion responded to the local Native community’s request for an advisory panel. The Native Nations Community Advisory Panelist team (NNCAP) was hired to serve the local Native community.

References and Resources#

 Special thanks from the Historic Preservation Services division for the research and writing support of Jae Anderson, HPS intern, and Dr. Valerie Small in the City’s Equity and Inclusion Office.