By Tom Rodgers
It happened after dark on April 14, 1860. An Arapaho village was stood near Blake Street, where the South Platte looped to feed Cherry Creek. The Arapaho had returned to what had so recently been a part of their homeland to trade with the illegal immigrants who had streamed into what was then Denver and Auraria, drawn by the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush. Most of the Arapaho men were absent in a hunting party, so when a mob suddenly descended on the camp there were none but a handful of old men and boys to defend the women and girls. It did not take long for them to be overwhelmed.
“Age was not respected,” wrote frontiersman Jim Beckwourth in a letter to the Rocky Mountain News. It was an episode in the tragedy that culminated at Sand Creek.
The rape of the Arapaho women and children, on April 14, 1860, communicated to the Arapaho men in the most brutally explicit manner that what the Pike’s Peakers were doing to Arapaho land, they could and would do to Arapaho women. It was an act designed to emphasize the superiority and dominance of the colonizers. They would defile our Mother, the Earth, at will — and us with her. They would degrade all we held sacred. And they would kill to remake our world in their image.
The Arapaho and Cheyenne are ancient relatives of my people, the Blackfeet. At the dawn of time we emerged as the matter out of which an ancestral tribe and then nations would arise. My people suffered and survived heinous acts like that inflicted upon the Arapaho in Denver on what to some may now seem like a distant April day. Indeed, Mount Doane in Yellowstone National Park is named after a war criminal, Lieutenant Gustavus Cheney Doane, who led the slaughter of Blackfeet women and children on the Marias (Grizzly Bear) River on January 23, 1870. We have been asking for that name to be changed for almost as long as the wolf has again roamed there.
My people were visitors — but not strangers — to what most now call Rocky Mountain National Park, that the Arapaho and Cheyenne called home. The Arapaho named those mountains as we do relatives, and there they were sustained and nourished physically and spiritually. Day-trippers and vacationers no longer see us there. Our songs were silenced… as were those of one of our teachers, the wolf. The wolf, the grizzly, the buffalo, and us, we were a quaternity to be exterminated in the cause of Manifest Destiny.
In Blackfeet culture, we revere the wolf as the one who gave us life by teaching our first people how to sustain themselves. When the wolves leave us in the spring we stand in awe of their eternal pathway, the Milky Way, which we call the Wolf Trail. The wolf taught our women, the life-givers, and now we have the opportunity to offer the wolf new life, making our voices theirs at the ballot box this November, so that with our friends and allies we may call the wolves back to where they belong, to this sacred landscape in Colorado.
Chairman Harold Frazier (Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe) and Chairman Gerald Gray (Little Shell) are among some of the most prominent tribal leaders in North America who support returning the wolf to Colorado. Tribal organizations, including the Global Indigenous Council, the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council, and the Great Plains Tribal Chairman’s Association, have also backed the initiative. The latter two represent every tribe in Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Colorado’s neighbors, Nebraska and Wyoming. Each identifies Colorado is a vital linkage zone for wolf recovery.
The Global Indigenous Council initiated The Wolf Treaty, which not only honors our ancient relationship with the wolf but is also a blueprint for recovering the wolf and future management and stewardship practices. Tribal leaders from California to Connecticut, and from Alberta to Arizona, have signed the treaty.
My grandfather was a cattle rancher near Babb, Montana, and so I understand some of those concerns about wolf reintroduction, but there are mitigation strategies that can be adopted, so this does not have to be a binary choice, nor one that needs to pit tribe against tribe, or neighbor against neighbor, to satisfy the political or financial motivations of invested interest groups. Peer reviewed studies have demonstrated that non-lethal techniques are highly effective in reducing wolf-livestock conflicts, and they extend beyond guard dogs, fladry, radio-activated guard boxes, and spotlights. But for these techniques to work it requires cooperation, not intransigence, from all parties.
Research in the field has found that most wolf-livestock conflicts in the Rocky Mountain states occur in open-range grazing environments that cover large tracts of leased public lands. It is a fact that some 60% of sheep lost in livestock conflicts are taken by coyotes, compared to approximately 4% by wolves. The coyote, however, does not carry the medieval stigma attached to wolf, nor the European folktale mythology that was transposed to religious dogma and eventually carried to the frontier where wolves in the New World were still seen as evil incarnate from the Old.
Pre-contact, the Biomass in what is now called North America was at its apex. In the wake of Manifest Destiny, take a moment to pause and see what is happening to the Earth. Take that moment now, before it is too late. If you don’t think the Earth is in peril, that climate change and environmental catastrophe isn’t going to impact what you consider to be your part of the world, then you should take more than a moment to think as California, Oregon, and Washington burn.
When you look at cattle, do you recognize that domestic livestock make up the largest proportion of the 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity? It’s not just dirty-fuels and extraction eviscerating the ozone layer and drawing those flames higher. What some term wilderness but we call home was never intended to become cattle pasture alone. There is no balance.
The Biomass is now on life-support. We have an opportunity to come together to begin a healing process. Returning the wolf to these lands is part of that. We must return the balance.
Tom Rodgers (Blackfeet) is the President of the Global Indigenous Council.