Maize farmers by the Great Lakes became the Arapaho, horse nomads of the plains
Around 3,000 years ago the ancestors of the Arapaho grew maize in the Red River Valley. Pushed west by the Ojibwe, they reached the Great Plains before 1700, swapped dog-drawn travois for horses and built a territory stretching from Montana to Oklahoma. Today their language survives among roughly 250 fluent northern speakers.
Nobody is sure where the name Arapaho comes from; one idea links it to a Pawnee word for trader, another to a Crow word for tattoo. The people call themselves Hinono'eino, meaning our people. Neighbours coined vivid alternatives: to the Cheyenne they were Cloud People, to the Lakota Blue Sky People, while several southern tribes knew them by names meaning dog-eaters.
Arapaho society grew from five related groups, each with its own dialect. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber listed them from south to north, ending with the Haa'ninin, or White Clay People, whom the French called Gros Ventre, meaning big bellies, a name that arose from a misread hand sign. By the late 18th century the four southern groups had merged into the Arapaho, while the Gros Ventre stayed separate and were looked down on by their former kin. Elders recall a struggle between two divisions over the sacred pipe and lance, which the Northern Arapaho now keep; in Plains sign language they are signed as the mother people.
Horses arrived in the early 1700s and made the Arapaho mobile hunters able to carry heavier loads over longer distances. An alliance with the Cheyenne around 1811 widened their hunting grounds, and by 1826 they and the Lakota, Dakota and Cheyenne had pushed the Kiowa and Comanche southward. In 1840 the fighting stopped, and the Kiowa and Comanche turned from enemies into partners of the Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne.
By the 1850s the bands had settled into northern and southern tribes. Since 1878 the Northern Arapaho have shared the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming with the Eastern Shoshone, while the Southern Arapaho live alongside the Southern Cheyenne in Oklahoma. The Algonquian language is fragile: only a handful of elderly southern speakers remain. In the north a language commission produces recordings, and in 1995 S. N. Greymorning founded an immersion preschool, though schoolchildren often retain only memorised vocabulary.
Source: Arapaho
