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

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.”

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.

American Indian Breastfeeding Folklore from the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes

Over the years, much of the folklore of breastfeeding has been lost because women did not write history, they told stories. This article shares breastfeeding lore from stories told to the authors by American Indian women from the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes on the Wind River Reservation near Lander, Wyoming. These women related stories describing treatment for milk fever (mastitis), the white man’s influence on mother/baby separation and its outcome, elderly women inducing lactation, breastfeeding and birth control, and how women dressed for ease of breastfeeding in former times. It is with appreciation for other cultures that we add this information from American Indians to the archives of breastfeeding history.