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The Arapaho (in French: Gens de Vache) tribe of Native Americans historically living on the eastern plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Sioux. Arapaho is an Algonquian language closely related to Gros Ventre, who are seen as an early offshoot of the Arapaho. Blackfoot and Cheyenne are the other Algonquian languages on the Plains, but are quite different from Arapaho. By the 1850s, Arapaho bands separated into two tribes: the Northern Arapaho and Southern Arapaho. The Northern Arapaho Nation has lived since 1878, with the Eastern Shoshone on the Wind River Reservation, the third largest reservation in the United States. The Southern Arapaho Tribe lives with the Southern Cheyenne in Oklahoma.
There is no direct historical or archaeological evidence to suggest how and when Arapaho bands entered the Plains culture area. After a gradual westward movement, they split into northern and southern groups after 1830, the southern group settling in the region of the Arkansas River. Remnants of two or three other divisions have also been recognized. The Arapaho Indian tribe most likely lived in Minnesota and North Dakota before entering the Plains. Before European expansion into the area, the Arapahos were living in South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, and Kansas. They lived in teepees which the women made from bison hide. Before they were sent to reservations, they migrated often chasing herds, so they had to design their teepees so that they could be transported easily. In winter the tribe split up into small camps sheltered in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in present-day Colorado. In late spring they moved out onto the Plains into large camps to hunt buffalo gathering for the birthing season. In mid-summer Arapahos traveled into the Parks region of Colorado to hunt mountain herds, returning onto the Plains in late summer to autumn for ceremonies and for collective hunts of herds gathering for the rutting season. It is said that a whole village could pack up their homes and belongings and be ready to leave in only an hour. They originally used dogs to pull travois with their belongings on them. When the Europeans came to North America, the Arapaho saw the Europeans' horses and realized that they could travel quicker and further with horses instead of dogs. They raided other Indian tribes, primarily the Pawnee and Comanche, to get the horses they needed. Later on, they became great traders and often sold furs to other tribes and non-Indians. The name 'Arapaho' might have come from the Pawnee word for 'traders.'
They traded with the Mandan and Arikara Indians and with Spanish settlements in the Southwest. They were a highly religious people for whom everyday actions and objects (e.g., beadwork designs) had symbolic meanings. Their chief object of veneration was a flat pipe that was kept in a sacred bundle with a hoop or wheel. Like many other Plains tribes, they practiced the sun dance. Their social organization included age-graded military societies as well as men's shamanistic societies and other groups. From early times the Arapaho were continually at war with the Shoshoni, the Ute, and the Pawnee. Also, during November 1864, a small village of Cheyenne and Arapaho became the victims of a controversial attack by the Union Army, led by Colonel John Chivington. This attack is now known as the Sand Creek Massacre. The southern Arapaho were for a long period closely associated with the southern Cheyenne; some Arapaho fought with the Cheyenne against Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876. In the Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867, the southern Arapaho were assigned a reservation in Oklahoma together with the Cheyenne, while the northern Arapaho were assigned a reservation in Wyoming with the Shoshoni. In the late 20th century there were about 2,000 Arapaho living on a reservation in Wyoming and more than 3,000 intermingled Arapaho and Cheyenne in Oklahoma.
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