Wind River: Two Nations, One Reservation, a Long History

The Wind River Indian Reservation in west-central Wyoming is the only reservation in the United States that houses two federally recognized tribal nations that speak entirely unrelated languages and had, historically, a hostile relationship.

The Eastern Shoshone have lived in the Wind River country for centuries. Their leader during the treaty era, Chief Washakie, was one of the most consequential Native American political figures of the nineteenth century. He negotiated the Fort Bridger Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight, which established the reservation within the Eastern Shoshone's traditional homeland. He maintained peaceful relations with the United States through the Indian Wars period, partly as a calculated strategy of survival, partly from his own considered views on what the Shoshone could and could not sustain in direct military confrontation.

The Northern Arapaho arrived in eighteen seventy-eight and eighteen seventy-nine. They had been relocated there by the federal government as a temporary arrangement, following the end of the Great Sioux War. The temporary arrangement became permanent through bureaucratic inaction and eventually through a nineteen thirty-eight United States Supreme Court ruling that recognized their permanent status.

The two nations speak Shoshonean and Algonquian languages, respectively, which share no common root. They maintain separate tribal governments, separate economic development corporations, and separate cultural institutions on the same two-point-two-million-acre reservation.

The relationship between them has not always been easy. The history of being assigned together without consent is part of the record of what federal Indian policy produced. Neither nation chose the arrangement.

Washakie died in nineteen hundred at an age estimated to be between eighty and one hundred. He was buried with full United States military honors, a distinction almost no other Native American leader received.