Once Upon a Time on the Rez: A Northern Arapaho's Review of "Wind River"

Once Upon a Time on the Rez
The Fiction and Fiction of Tyler Sheridan’s “Wind River”
A review by Ernest M Whiteman III

 “While there are missing persons statistics compiled for every other demographic, there are none for Native American women.

“No one knows how many are missing.”

Tyler Sheridan, writer of “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” ends his problematic directorial debut with this equally problematic quote. Why would he link his directorial debut about two white people trying to solve a murder on an Indian reservation to one of the most heinous things occurring in Native American communities across the US and Canada today? Simple, to lend his clumsy action mystery film an air of immediacy, timeliness, and an attempted connection with Native American peoples. But in the end, it is only to elevate his authority over the stories of the Northern Arapaho people that still live on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, the reservation of my birth and where I lived most of my life and the tribe to which I belong.

I have tackled the stealing of the Northern Arapaho voice before in my review of the Margaret Coel Wind River Mysteries Series. Native American representation and first-voice are issues at the heart of how everyone sees, treats, and reacts to Native peoples. Not only does representation matter, so does whose voice is raising the questions count in every issue across the societal spectrum. “Wind River” fails at this on every level, including basic mystery storytelling.

 “Wind River” opens with a Native woman, Kate Asbillie as Natalie, running across a frozen wasteland, barefoot. Later, she is found dead by Jeremy Renner’s Game & Fish hunter on the lookout for mountain lions that have been attacking tribal members’ livestock. FBI agent Elizabeth Olsen enters the story and when bureaucratic bureaucracy interferes with her being able to bring the FBI into the investigation, decides to solve it her self and asks Jeremy Renner to help her “track a predator”.

We learn that Natalie was the daughter of Renner’s Native friend Martin, played by the solid Gil Birmingham, who is good as the stoic, angry father. All the Native actors are good in this despite the representational baggage. I mean, really good. Funny, they should put them in more movies they are all that good. So, when the investigation turns toward the possible suspect being the dead woman’s white boyfriend (Jon Bernthal), the movie de-evolves into a standard action-western showdown in an oilfield complex.

The murder is solved with Jeremy Renner having cathartically exorcised his own failings over his own daughter’s freezing death, which this movie is really about – his grieving and need for revenge over the death of his own daughter. A daughter born from his marriage and divorce to a Northern Arapaho woman, and whom also happens to be the friend of the murdered woman Natalie. The movie ends with Renner and Birmingham sitting in the dirt – Renner in a cowboy hat, which is still a symbol of modernity, and Birmingham in face-paint, which is not, failing at dispelling stereotypes. Says Sheridan to Rolling Stone Magazine, "I am trying to demolish the stereotype behind those particular images with that scene. It's no longer the concept of two enemies fighting for the land; it's just two best friends bonded by pain, survival and the idea of making their world a better place to live.”

So why does one have to dress as the Indian from the old Western movies? The movie ends then, with them just sitting in the dirt, the everlasting image of the old west remains: a stereotypically, stoic Native American man in face-paint looking at the changing world under the saving grace of Jeremy Renner. Then that last problematic title graphic comes on screen before cutting to credits, the story having done nothing in service to those missing Native American women except to allude to them at the end for relevancy purposes.

It has been stated over and over again in other reviews and articles that Sheridan is making a loose trilogy with “Sicario”, “Hell or High Water” and now, “Wind River”, which are supposedly done in a “New Western” film style. But this new western does not seem all too different from the old westerns – Natives still get killed, Natives are still bad guys, Natives are still at the periphery of the story, lining the hills of our own representations, our own stories; still a threat, not to the white heroes of today, but as Jeremy Renner will always state in different ways, a threat to ourselves.

Armando José Prats writes about this in his excellent examination of the Hollywood western “Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western” in which he explores how the American western movie influenced audience perceptions of Native American peoples almost from the very beginning of the medium. In his book, he states that the battle for the west has not really ended and alludes to an ongoing, subtle war, which continues against Native people that is fought through their representations in films for over a century. That even the revisionist westerns, like “Wind River” continue to perpetuate a lesser representation of Native American peoples regardless of their announced progressive intents.

Many revisionist westerns will always work at making the Native visible simply to render them invisible. It is their very presence in the story that allows them to be rendered extinct, such as Natalie’s presence in the film. How many of these films do this lie in presenting Natives in such a manner that their destruction is all but assured. Such as the Native peoples inability to function like basic human beings because of “this place”. This place, this place; having all the Natives crying about “this place” is only tantamount to Grief Porn, which is the enjoyment of others’ suffering for the purpose of entertainment. You can tell a white person is trying to tell a “Native American” story because all the Native characters will complain about this place and almost all of the characters suddenly are spouting off reservation lifestyle statistics for some reason, a “Did you know that one in five Natives…” sort of thing.

Take a look at how the Natives in “Wind River” are depicted. The film is very orthodox in its depiction of Arapaho men. Why does everyone think that Native men treat white women like shit? Look at when first meeting Elizabeth Olsen, Gil Birmingham simply becomes an asshole and insulting toward her. This is not how a family on the Wind River Reservation would grieve – isolated and alone. Martin’s home would have been flooded with family and friends.

All the Native men, when first introduced become sexist and insulting as when Elizabeth Olsen goes to question the druggie son Chip and his friends. The young Native man who opens the door is high, rude, and then begins to hit on Elizabeth Olsen. So, she simply ends up killing him. This brings us to another trope of the Western film: why does the white woman get to survive? It is a common Western movie trope that, only the sanctity of white women is worth saving.

And she is saved, in the ending shootout; yet Jeremy Renner cannot save the Native BIA police chief, whose death can be seen as an insult to Native law enforcement, but he can save Elizabeth Olsen. Thus, the white heroine saved by our white western hero, again. But Natalie was doomed from the moment her character was written as a Native woman. As Prats writes in the Preface of Invisible Natives on the representations of Native women in Western films “Ubiquitous, to be sure, …yet somehow, hardly central to the action: she dies or else she disappears-all in docile compliance to the mythology that so harshly abuses her.”

Why then show her rape? Why is no one up in arms about this the way we got when Game of Thrones implied the rape of a major character? Using this horrible act to justify your own authority is problematic to begin with; but why use it, to add titillation and shock value to your film? That only cheapens the act and taints Natalie’s rape as exploitative. Yet Sheridan never accepts his responsibility for such portrayals, using the age-old excuse, “I don't like being lectured to when I go to the movies, and I don't imagine other people do either. I'm here to entertain. I like playing against expectations. And if you can tell my political affiliations by watching one of my movies, then I've failed."

"But," he quickly adds, "I want people leaving the theater with something to think – and think hard – about. My job is not to give you all the answers. My job is to ask the questions." The emphasis is mine because once again, Sheridan hides behind that old excuse, to remove his responsibility to the veracity of his representations and excuse his exploitation of Natalie’s rape, which has now been reduced to mere entertainment because, as he states, “I'm here to entertain”.

The real life situation in Native Country is that rape is all too real for almost every Native woman, that they do not need a white man, in front of or behind the camera, showing us how rape is bad. Again. Look at this Twitter Feed about that scene of the film. It can explain the problem with much better authority than I could about the real problem of the depiction of the rape in this film.

The scene only gives Sheridan the excuse to use that end graphic. Why tie this stupid movie to such a serious topic, to “Ask questions”? By the way, do you know who knows how many Native women are missing? Native people. Fucking ask them! According to the Native Law Resource Center “Native women are being murdered at a rate ten times the national average. Due to under-reporting, the actual numbers are almost certainly higher.”

But to ask Natives to speak for our selves would mean that Sheridan, and directors like him, would have to relinquish that authority his depictions of Native people give him. Who would give up that? Sheridan has the privilege to “ask the questions”, never once thinking to let the Northern Arapaho do this for ourselves, and the privilege to allow himself to walk away when it comes time to seek those answers, patting himself on the back the whole time as if he had something grand to contribute to the conversation.

The Native Americans of “Wind River” are still the “Other”, even in this film about them. As Prats points out, the Natives of western movies have their space, but it is at the edge of the space of the Same, of the white heroes, where they have always been, since the cameras first began rolling. Films such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, even Little Big Man and Dances with Wolves, relegate the Native to lining the hills and stoically staring down upon the changing world that leaves them behind. The only authority left being the white hero, who has become a better Indian than the Indian.

According to Prats, Revisionism seeks to act against the “Myth of Conquest” the old western movies upheld, as sort of “the conqueror’s remorse for vanishing the Indian” where the motif of savage becomes one of nostalgia. As Prats puts it “the past is the Indian’s place.” “Wind River” does this by following the three principle tenets of Revisionism in Western film: 1) that Native American vanishment is assured, irrevocable, complete, and irreversible; 2) Natives themselves cannot do the revision, and; 3) The Native can only confirm the white hero’s transformation into the “Self-other” or the “White Indian”, which “Wind River” does for Jeremy Renner’s character in spades.

Because it does so, Jeremy Renner can then proclaim about Natalie, “She’s a warrior” as if that is his right to confer that upon her. She is a warrior, sure, but she is still dead. It seems that in the world of the new Western movies, the only way for Natives to be Warriors is to die. With our white heroes crying over the fact Natalie ran six miles in the snow and yet, it still was not enough. It will never be enough. They are still alive at the end of the movie because Natalie was doomed the instant she was written to be a Native woman. You see: the battle for the Mythical West has never really ended.

Which leads us to the subtlest issue that revisionist films such as “Wind River” promotes. Who hold the authority over Native American representations and why? In “Wind River” Jeremy Renner represents the Double Other, a tired Western movie trope where to separate the hero from the actions of his race, his knowledge about Natives makes him separate from his own whiteness without denying it. Think Hawkeye from “Last of the Mohicans”, Jack Crabbe of “Little Big Man”, and John Dunbar of “Dances with Wolves”. They are a character etched in the solid foundations of western movies. Sheridan seems to think he is acting against those old western movie conventions, and he convinces his audiences he is doing so, but he is not smart enough to make a point about their obsolescence in doing so, but rather ends up reinforcing them; reinforcing the idea that the white hero is the authority over the Arapaho culture and place.

Throughout the movie, Jeremy Renner never fails to tell the Arapahos about their own situations. He is constantly telling Elizabeth Olsen and the Native people who live there, how tough it is on the reservation. He never stops doing this. Seriously, he even is allowed to jump into a police car and lecture his best friend Martin’s son about how hard it is on the reservation. Chip can only sit there and take it, plaintively crying “this place, this place.” He even tells the killer how it is for the Arapaho on the reservation for some reason. Then, he kills him. Why explain the reservation to someone you are going to kill anyway? Yes, you read that right. Probably the most heinous thing in this story is that Jeremy Renner is allowed to commit a murder. While he does kill to save Elizabeth Olsen as heroes do, but at the end, he kills someone who is virtually no threat to him. I mean, to me, this makes him no different than the mystery’s revealed killer.

It would have really upset the cliché, the trope to bring the murderer in for justice, especially on the reservation. Then have the white citizenry rush to defend the murderer, as would sometimes happen in real life. But Sheridan is not interested in asking those types of questions. So, Renner is allowed to get away with murder. Why exactly? Once again Prats leads us there. Because of revisionism of the Western form: “Images of white brutality thus set off the hero’s own claims, both about his Indianness and about his exemption from complicity of Conquest”. You can say that justice was meted out upon the rapist, but this is a falsehood, a lie. If it were justice, then Gil Birmingham’s Martin should have been the one to kill the rapist. “Wind River” once again points to this old Western movie idea that only the white hero is the one who sets morality.

Why not have Martin be the main character looking for justice, using his “innate Native skills”, steering Elizabeth Olsen in the right directions, telling her how tough it is here, cussing out his own son Chip about his life choices, before saving the county deputies and the BIA chief and Elizabeth Olsen in the end, before bringing in the rapist to the police. Plus, there is this racist idea that pervaded the Wyoming I grew up in, that this movie promotes, reinforces, that the Natives cannot take care of their own problems and need a white man to do it for them as when Jeremy Renner revenges Natalie’s death for Martin.

Talkin’ ‘Bout My Reservation

These directors like Sheridan, Jim Jarmucsh, and Kevin Costner, are not doing Native people any favors presenting us the way they do, by maintaining that authority over how audiences see us. Which only comes through their very specific gaze, truths be damned. Because in the end, it is never really about “asking questions”, it is about Tyler Sheridan asking the questions. To be seen doing so, which only makes Native Americans invisible once again in the very story he wanted to tell “about them”, like all those western movies did decades ago; so much for this “New Western” idea.

This has been problematic throughout Sheridan’s work. The first time I saw this subtle misrepresentation of Natives was in the film he had written, Hell or High Water, about two bank robbing brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) being chased by two Texas Rangers (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham). Birmingham, who is once again, very solid as the half-Mexican, half-Comanche sidekick, and is made present if only to pass on his identity to, well, white people in general. The scene where he is wistfully looking at the next bank that may be a target for the brothers, announces, “150 years ago all this was my ancestors land. Everything you could see, everything you saw yesterday. Until the grandparents of these folks took it. Now it's been taken from them. ‘Cept it ain't no army doin' it, it's those sons of bitches right there.” [He then points at Texas Midland Bank.] Basically, passing his Native identity on, never implicating Jeff Bridges, and tacitly giving his forgiveness for conquest, right before his gets killed in the climatic shootout. But the major difference being that now Gil Birmingham’s Alberto is as dead as his ancestors, and the banks will let their customers live.

Sheridan seems to think that identifying as a Native somehow excuses the actions of the heroes. When Tanner Howard, the more volatile, violent of the brothers, bear in mind, is confronted by a Comanche man ubiquitously name Bear, who declares to him, “I am a Comanche. Do you know what it means? It means 'Enemy to everyone'.” Of course, in these new Westerns, the hero can take a Native identity very easily, because, why not, as Tanner replies, “Do you know what that makes me? A Comanche.” Bear then sadly shakes his head, relinquishing his identity to Tanner. Bear accepts his vanishment while Tanner assumes the identity of a new American Amalgam which renders Bear invisible in its new found authority.

It is an authority that Sheridan is all too pleased to take for himself. Sheridan to Rolling Stone Magazine about “Wind River”, “…the only way I could guarantee that these things were handled in a way that did not betray that trust was for me to do it. I've built enough of a relationship with that community that I could go, 'I'm thinking about doing it this way – is that ok?' Which was a question I asked a lot. A person who's never spent time in that world, or who would go at it in what some people call a 'Social Justice Warrior-y' kind of way ..." He stops and laughs. "There are certain things they're just not going to get."

Sheridan is among those whom do not get it because these films only serve to show me, the gross misunderstanding of Native cultures and people. For instance, the languages; as there are two tribes on the Wind River Indian Reservation, and when first introduced to Elizabeth Olsen, Martin utters something in Shoshoni, according to the credits “Shoshone language Consultant”, it is the only Native language spoken in the film and it is an insult aimed at Elizabeth Olsen, yet, Martin’s and Renner’s families are depicted to be Arapaho with all the Northern Arapaho flags waving around. Even the BIA Police Chief understands what Gil said. Reductionism of making all tribes into a single tribe has been a problem from the earliest Western films.

But if this where an honest depiction, the police chief could have said, “I don’t know what he said. I’m not Shoshoni” because many BIA policemen do come from other tribes and areas. The misunderstanding of Native peoples in this film also made me realize that no one ever understood the concept of face paint and how it still continues, or the old plains custom of cutting in grief and why no one does it anymore. These are nothing more than an “I’m puttin’ that in my movie!” thing, because maybe one of his friends told him about it once.

For some time I had been under the impression that he has friends on Wind River. But then, re-reading this quote made me rethink that. Then, I recalled a line of dialogue from the film “You have six officers patrolling an area the size of Rhode Island” and realized that he was pulling his information from this NewYork Times article! It is nearly verbatim. Even the end title graphic is lifted from this “Indian Country Today” article. It becomes obvious that Sheridan has never been to the Wind River Indian Reservation, as I thought, or he would have known what Natives would really do when there is a death in the family. “‘I have a good deal of friends in Indian Country," Sheridan explains [to Rolling Stone Magazine].”

So, Sheridan has probably never been to the Wind River Reservation and learned about it in that article, but because he has “a good deal of friends in Indian Country”, he is allowed to become the authority on the Wind River Reservation, my reservation. Yet, I cannot for actually being a Northern Arapaho from the Wind River Reservation. Sherman Alexie states it better in his review of Ian Frazier’s book, “On the Rez” when Alexie writes: “Does he ever admit that somebody from "the rez" has a different life experience than somebody who is just writing about the rez? Does he understand that the title of his book should have been "On Their Reservation?" Let us face facts folks, “Wind River” is not about the Arapaho, it never is about the Arapaho, these progressive movies never are, but about Tyler Sheridan’s own real and imagined pain of being Tyler Sheridan on the fictionalized Wind River Indian Reservation as represented by Jeremy Renner.

The truth about reservation life being something Sheridan controls here. It is his truth of the reservation. "I wanted the vision executed exactly as I saw it in my head. There was a lot in this story, in the wrong hands, could come off as offensive. I didn't know if I could make a good movie," he adds. "But I knew I could make a respectful one."

He forgot to mention making a “truthful movie”. In spite of any respect he thinks he gives, it is a truth filtered through the gaze of Sheridan, a man who has friends in the community, yes, but has never experienced living there for the entirety of his life, never experiencing the life of being an Arapaho person and everything that comes with that. He has never experienced how the world treats an Arapaho person. No, he gets to leave this reservation when he wants, to “ask the questions” and walk away leaving the Arapaho to continue to deal with what life gives them.

The biggest problem with the movie as it purports to be about the Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming as shown in a bullet hole riddled highway sign. But from the beginning, there is nothing that rings true about the place and depiction of the area and peoples. To start, nothing was filmed on the actual Wind River reservation at all, opting instead for the more picturesque mountains of Utah. There is nothing evocative about this film to me. It does not look like home but merely a passing visitor’s remembrance of it. Much like Margaret Coel’s series, by presenting fragments of Native cultures as a whole, image much of what we learn from creators like Sheridan and Coel reduce Native peoples, in their cases, my Northern Arapaho people to merely desperate people whom cannot seem to get their shit together enough to solve a murder, and will allow a white hero to come in and do it for them.

The film represents my people in a way that is pretty standard for a “western” that Sheridan states he is remaking. I am very tired of having to say the same things over and over again. This is not a good movie by any means. It is not a culturally relevant film either. It is certainly not a “Native American film”. Let Native Americans make their own movies and tell their own stories. The soft reaction to this critique is that Sheridan is at least raising awareness with his film, that if not for him, the plight of the red man on the Wind River Indian Reservation would not be seen, and most certainly, not the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women. Yet, he barely does anything to address the truth of reservation conditions in his film and for all of his authority given him by receptive audiences, he does jack-shit about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) situation, only making them an invisible presence rendered absent again to sell his movie, and as a wise man once said, “raising awareness (or ‘asking questions’ in this case) is just another way of doing nothing.”

To try conclusions…

When I was a young teen, my family used to listen to the radio in the mornings. The small town station had a set play list and we knew when it was time to “go down to the gate” to catch the bus for school when a certain show or report played. Now, in that morning routine, we would be forced to listen to “Paul Harvey’s News and Commentary” in which he would just spout off nonsense about the news of the day, or yesterday in this case. What stands out in the jumble of routine memory is this particular morning, the esteemed Mr. Harvey stated, “If you want to get away with murder, go to the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. It is the Unsolved Murder Capital of the World.”

Now, this confused me a bit. Because, looking out the window, I saw no one getting murdered right then. But then, later on I realized the operative word he used was “unsolved”. What I learned from this was four-fold: 1. Having an esteemed authority figure state bullshit is not news, 2. Having an esteemed authority figure state bullshit does not make it fact either, 3. That media reinforcement of stated bullshit does impact how others who do not know you, or your people, see you, and, 4. That Paul Harvey is actually kind of an asshole. Think about it. He was encouraging listeners that if they come to my reservation they could murder with impunity.

What this did was made listeners also think that Natives were killing everyone all the time. But, if you examine the word “Unsolved” you see that maybe the unsolved murder rate is high due to that small population, because – any killing on an reservation falls under the jurisdiction of the government, and; do you think the government cares about solving murders on an Indian reservation since they have been trying to get the land for well over 500 years? I tried looking up the murder rate on my reservation and I all got were our tribe’s Wikipage, articles that some how found a way to quote that same New York Times article, and stories on this movie. What I also found is that none of the articles I looked at ever sourced their claim about Wind River’s high unsolved murder rates. Not. One. Article. So, Paul Harvey was full of shit. What does that have to do with the movie “Wind River”? I feel the connection would be obvious.

I hear you, ‘I don’t care about the “politics of race”. I just want a good mystery, a good story’. While “Wind River” on its technical merits alone, is a solidly made movie, its screenplay feels more like a college student’s presentation on Native America, where they would rather show off all the information they gathered about Natives rather than stick to the point – it is supposed to be a mystery but Sheridan seems to lose interest in building the mystery aspect of his “new western” to show off that “he knows people” and wants to “tell their story”. He states in Rolling Stone: "You have to remember, I was an actor in procedural television for 20 years, …so I know that structure really well." Which is why, I suppose, it played like a bad TV episode.

What makes a great mystery is that audiences are lost in the search for the suspect. Great mysteries focus on more than one suspect and the tension is about which one is the killer. Hitchcock excelled at providing the answer straight away and the tension came from if the protagonists would discover it in time or not. “Wind River” fails at being a mystery as its focus seems to be on the protagonist telling the Natives about their own problems, as if they did not know, or worse, too stupid to know.

I feel that most movie audiences are going to be fine with this because, unfortunately, not only do we learn history from movies more so than from school, we also learn about other cultures from movies as well. “Hidden Figures” being a recent example of general audiences learning something from the movies, yet the story and those who experienced it have always been here for decades. Many will take this film as a cultural learning experience, which it is not. It is a non-Native director just “asking questions”. Then, when such movies as “Wind River” become the cultural representation of a people rather than a gross misunderstanding of the people and place, history and culture that it is, we all just learn misinformation as truth. This is the biggest problem with “Wind River”.

Let’s face it; everyone does look at Native Americans differently than other ethnicities. When people look at African-American, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, Eastern Indian, Middle-eastern, they accept their oppressions, their troubles and triumphs, their stories and voices, and will stand behind letting these ethnicities tell their own stories; but not Native Americans. They defend Native pretenders and look the other way when we speak for ourselves. When we try to voice our own concerns, to own our own histories, traumas, triumphs, culture, to own our own stories, instead of power to represent ourselves, we get pepper spray, we get “you were defeated”, we get “you were conquered”, we get “your culture is vanishing”, we get “you’re all just drunks/druggies/criminals”, we get “I wasn’t there”, we get “just get over it”; and suddenly, we cannot “speak to all pain”.

All Native people ask for is an honest, balanced, human representation, blemishes, veneer and all – what other ethnicities seem to get. But that comes mostly from other ethnicities having control over those representations. Those fair representations never occur in “Wind River” in which all Native characters are either killed, arrested and taken away, or simply disappear from the story, after Jeremy Renner lectures them about the reservation lifestyle or treat Elizabeth Olsen like shit, as Tantoo Cardinal does in her only scene in which she scolds Elizabeth Olsen and serves to draw everyone’s gaze towards Elizabeth Olsen’s ass, (classy, Sheridan, classy) until all that is left is a suicidal, (because, “this place”) face-painted Gil Birmingham sitting in the dirt, impotent in his search for justice, getting permission to grieve from Jeremy Renner.

You are now probably thinking that I spent way too much of this writing telling you about how bad “Wind River” is in its Native depictions and not enough on genre and technical critiques. Then, you understand the problems I had.

Representation matters. Because when you portray Natives as the conquered bad guys for nearly a century, instead of fellow fallible human beings, then you cannot help but always see us like that, to paint us all with the same brush, view us with all the same gaze, filtered through decades of misrepresentation proclaimed as fact. Which gives many viewers the excuse to continue to see Native American peoples as always the enemy to defeat. Because then, there is the worst thing about this movie: Tyler Sheridan, writer of “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” begins his problematic directorial debut with this equally problematic quote: “Based on Actual Events”.

Tyler Sheridan’s “Wind River”: SKIP IT.

I will end this writing with a quote of my own, one that I hope to be found problematic in the right way; once again, from Prats:

“The harder I looked at the Western the harder it was to reconcile its moral claims with its image of the Indian.”

Respectfully submitted;

Ernest M Whiteman III (Northern Arapaho)

Suggested Reading:

Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western, Armando José Prats

Willow Pengree's Post to Counter a Brutal Article