Placed Here Temporarily in 1878

The Wind River Reservation was established for the Eastern Shoshone under the Fort Bridger Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight. One nation, one reservation, one treaty. The Shoshone had agreed to a specific territory in exchange for giving up claim to the larger domain their people had ranged across for generations.

In eighteen seventy-eight, the federal government placed the Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation as a temporary measure. The government intended to relocate them elsewhere when a permanent arrangement could be made. The language of the placement was explicitly provisional. The Arapaho were Plains people whose territory had historically included lands east of here, not this high-elevation basin. The Eastern Shoshone objected to the imposition. The two nations had been enemies.

More than a century and a half later, the Northern Arapaho are still there. The temporary arrangement has outlasted every federal policy that produced it. The two nations now govern the reservation jointly under separate tribal governments, with separate councils, separate social programs, and separate cultural institutions. They speak languages from entirely different language families: Shoshone belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family; Arapaho is Algonquian, related to the languages of the northeastern Algonquin peoples, with nothing linguistically in common with Shoshone. They share land by the logic of a federal government that needed a place to put people and used whatever reservation was nearest.

The Arapaho's territorial history includes the Bighorn Basin and the foothills east of Yellowstone. Their removal from those lands, followed by their 'temporary' placement at Wind River, is a case study in how federal Indian policy made permanent arrangements through provisional language. The arrangement was never meant to last. It has lasted longer than the careers of every federal official who designed it.