Cheyenne Erotic

The Cheyenne call themselves Tsitsistas — "the people" — and their history is, more than most Plains nations, a history of movement. They were farmers in the western Great Lakes before they were horsemen on the high plains, and the shift took only a few generations. By the early 1800s they had remade themselves into one of the most mobile and militarily organized peoples on the continent, ranging from the Black Hills down into Colorado and Kansas, allied closely with the Arapaho and frequently at war with the Crow, Pawnee, and Shoshone. The buffalo economy they built was not ancient. It was a recent and brilliant adaptation, and it lasted barely a century before the herds and the open range were gone.

Their language belongs to the Algonquian family, which stretches from the Atlantic coast across the northern woodlands — meaning Cheyenne is a distant cousin of Cree, Ojibwe, and Mi'kmaq, even though it is spoken now on the dry shortgrass country of Montana and western Oklahoma. The sound of it is unmistakable: long vowels, a marked tonal accent, and consonant clusters that mark Cheyenne off clearly from neighboring Plains languages like Lakota or Crow, which come from entirely separate stocks. Fluent speakers number in the hundreds today, almost all elders, and the tribal colleges on both reservations run immersion programs that are working against time.

The split into Northern and Southern branches was not a cultural drift but a political one, hardened after the Sand Creek massacre of 1864 and the long forced separations that followed. The Northern Cheyenne hold a reservation in southeastern Montana adjacent to the Crow; the Southern Cheyenne share trust lands in western Oklahoma with the Arapaho. The two groups remain in close contact and continue to coordinate ceremonially, particularly around the Sun Dance and the keeping of the Sacred Arrows and the Sacred Buffalo Hat — two bundles of national significance that anchor Cheyenne religious life regardless of how Christian census forms have rendered the people on paper.

Most Cheyenne today identify as Christian, often Mennonite or Catholic depending on which mission reached which community first, but the older religion was never displaced so much as layered under. The military societies — Dog Soldiers, Elk Scrapers, Kit Foxes — survive in attenuated form as fraternal and veterans' organizations, and the Cheyenne reverence for combat service, traceable straight back to the warrior-society system, helps explain the disproportionate enlistment rates the tribe has posted in every American war since the First World War.