Name: Eugene Little Coyote
Tribal Affiliation: Northern Cheyenne
Interview No.: NC041ELC031005
Topic: Cheyenne Leaders
Language: English
Time Code In: 00:05:09:15
Time Code Out: 00:08:25:27
Tape 2 of 3 - Clone
Q: “Okay I’m going to kind of go into the traditional government I guess you’d call it, how did the tribe evolve from Chief’s to President’s today?”
A: “I’d, I’d rather structure that question, how did the tribe devolve no [laughs] like well of course the IRA….looking at it from a historical perspective you know the, the Cheyenne Nation consists of as I know it as I understand it ten bands or clans you know we have things like the Harry Robe Band which kind of known to be the Southern Cheyenne right now, we have the, the Aortas, the Burnt Thighs, Suhtaio, things like that, ten collective bands comprises a Cheyenne Nation and with as little as four thousand tribal members we were we dominated a great swath with great points and this nation had these ten bands and you had a minimum of four warrior societies, we call them military societies like you know the Kit Fox, the Dog Soldiers there are others too, what else are there, forget what those soldiers, Elkhorn Scrapers I think I’ve heard of Red Shields, there are a few new ones in there too, Bow Strings and of course you had a Council of 44 Chiefs and after the, the invasion of America or they say you like to put it the colonization of America and, and the annexation of all this land and manifest destiny and the westward expansion that led to the conflict that we call the plains Indian wars. A lot of tribes had to surrender including the Cheyenne being killed to less than half of our numbers we surrendered and we couldn’t live a nomadic life based on the buffalo following them around and migrating following the patterns of their, the buffalo herds so we went from a nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary one on a very small reservation, in fact probably half of what we used to have I mean the reservation as we know it today compared to when we when it was first established it was very very small probably less than half of what it is today not to mention you know the vast territorial range we had from like North Dakota, parts of central Montana all the way south into Oklahoma and New Mexico. So we went from that huge nomadic lifestyle to that tiny reservation and we couldn’t live that way, our government wasn’t practical at the time or at least the way we used to and so that’s when the IRA form came in and so you kind of dismiss the historical traditional government and, and replaced it with this new, new form modeled after American government.”