In Wyoming, July 3 is known to some as “Treaty Day” – a day that commemorates the signing of the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868. The Eastern Shoshone and Shoshone-Bannock tribes signed this treaty with the U.S. government 155 years ago, creating what is now the Wind River Reservation.
This year, the Fort Bridger Historic Site made some changes to its annual Treaty Day celebration to emphasize the ongoing presence of tribal communities in the area.
Native artists from both the Eastern Shoshone and Shoshone-Bannock tribes participated in a new exhibit called “My Treaty Ties” that opened at the Fort Bridger site on July 3 of this year. The exhibit aims to both educate the public about Indigenous history and create a space for Native artists to show their contemporary connections to their ancestors and lands.
Located about thirty miles east of Evanston, the Fort Bridger State Historic Site served as a crossroads for all sorts of people in the mid-to-late 1800s. In 1843, former trappers Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez established a trading post at the site, and it served as a stop along the way for the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Pioneer Trail, and the Pony Express Trail.
But Bridger and Vasquez certainly weren’t the first or the only people to trade in the area – Shoshone people had lived around the Great Basin of the interior West for thousands of years. Fort Bridger Superintendent Joshua Camp said that recent archaeological digs at the site have only affirmed the Shoshone presence there.
“The archaeological record indicates that there were huge amounts of Shoshone trade items [at the post], and the more we looked into it, probably a more accurate picture of what was going on was, yes, the trading post was there, but both inside and outside the fort walls would have been Shoshone trading booths – essentially, it would have been much more like a bazaar where you had all these different people trading goods,” Camp said.
The signing of the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 took place six months after the Bear River Massacre, where U.S. troops killed at least 250 Bannock and Shoshone people.
The treaty decreed that a reservation would be created in the Wind River Valley “for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Shoshone Indians herein named…” and that the Shoshone-Bannock peoples would be assigned a separate reservation at a later time. This led to the establishment of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation outside of Pocatello, Idaho, and laid the groundwork for fundamental treaty rights.
For Superintendent Camp, connecting all this history to the present has been an important change for the museum.
“So many people come through here, and they kind of walk through this area and they see all the older Shoshone items and they think, ‘Oh, the Shoshone was a past people.’ And that’s really not the idea we want people to have,” Camp said.
For the Superintendent, the seed for the “My Treaty Ties” art exhibit was planted five years ago, during the 150th anniversary celebration of the signing of the 1868 treaty. That celebration included a Native prayer ceremony and a reading of the treaty in Shoshone, Bannock, and English.
“It was one of those things that, it was good, but we felt we could be doing something more, something better,” Camp said.
The site got more input and landed on having a show highlighting contemporary Native artists in the area. Camp said the exhibit emphasizes that Native connections to the treaty are ongoing, rather than a thing of the past.
“Again, the Shoshone tribes and the Bannock tribes are both very much alive and very much present and very much active in this area still,” said Camp.
Robyn Rofkar, who works for the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center, came to see the exhibit on the way back from a trip to Utah. Rofkar said the Fort Bridger Treaty isn’t something to be taken for granted.
“We're very fortunate that we were one of the tribes that have a treaty,” said Rofkar.
The Wind River Reservation’s size is much smaller than the territory originally decided on by an earlier treaty. The Fort Bridger Treaty of 1863 allocated 44 million acres to the tribe. Then only five years later, the signing of the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 reduced the reservation’s size to 3.2 million.
In the following seventy years, a series of land cessions and court cases further reduced the reservation to 2.3 million acres. Following a 1938 Supreme Court Case, the reservation was renamed from the “Shoshone Reservation” to the “Wind River Indian Reservation” and is now home to both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.
Rofkar said that the treaty is an important part of upholding the sovereign rights of Tribal nations and is still very relevant to the Eastern Shoshone community today.
“We really feel that that treaty gives us some of the rights we have today since it's a legally binding document passed by Congress,” said Rofkar.
Rofkar said that treaty rights continue to make headlines in recent U.S. Supreme Court cases.
“[The treaty] gives us rights that we're still fighting for too, even in court – the off-reservation hunting thing is a big issue now," she said.
Rofkar is referring to the 2019 U.S. Supreme Court case Herrera v. Wyoming, in which the court held that Crow tribal members have a treaty right to hunt beyond the borders of their reservation on unoccupied lands.
Wyoming authorities argued that the treaty right ended when Wyoming became a state in 1890, but the Supreme Court disagreed.
Cases like these are helping some people realize that treaties like the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 are very much alive and impacting tribal communities today.
Still, Rofkar said that it’s difficult for a lot of tribal members to come down to Fort Bridger for celebrations like Treaty Day – the drive from Fort Washakie takes right around three hours one way.
“I wish we had some buses or something to charter or take to bring some of our people down, because I know they would love to come and see stuff,” said Rofkar. “But yeah, it's a ways.”
Prior to the art exhibit at Fort Bridger, the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center hosted a blessing event for the artwork in Fort Washakie in June. All artists who contributed to “My Treaty Ties” will be reimbursed for their artwork, thanks to a grant from the Wyoming Arts Council.
In order to let the exhibit evolve over time, Superintendent Camp wants to give all artists the chance to share their reflections on the treaty, even if they didn’t submit their creations in time for the “My Treaty Ties” July 3 opening.
“I'm more than happy to take more artwork and if more artwork wants to come in still, we will readjust again to get that up, because I feel very passionate that this is something that should be on display and should be showing,” said Camp.
By mid-day on Treaty Day, one wall of the exhibit held four whimsical paintings of Indigenous flower fairies set against backgrounds of strawberries, hydrangea, roses, and sunflowers by Eastern Shoshone artist Lauren Garrett.
Part of Garrett’s artist statement said that she “hopes to carry forward the vision of hope of Chief Washakie and our ancestors by making a space where Shoshone and other Indigenous peoples can experience imagination, healing, and enjoyment through these playful and harmonious images.”
A series of black-and-white pen sketches by Shoshone-Bannock artist Sienna Wolfchild sat on another wall, depicting three faceless Native figures in traditional regalia.
Other artists listed in the exhibit were Aiyana E. Perez (Eastern Shoshone), Joanna Brings Thunder (Eastern Shoshone), Carlino Goggles (Eastern Shoshone), William Chippewa (Eastern Shoshone), Jacqueline Washakie (Eastern Shoshone) and Chasity Teton Moccasins (Shoshone-Bannock).
In addition to hosting the “My Treaty Ties” art exhibit, the staff at the Fort Bridger Museum took on the task of updating their own interpretive imagery for the site.
One of the prominent pieces of their interpretive plan is a wagon wheel, which sits as a nearly floor-to-ceiling painting right at the entrance to the museum. In between the spokes of the wheel are painted panels that help guide visitors through the different overlapping eras of the site.
Camp said that an older version of the wheel only depicted the site’s original “five interpretative M’s” – mountain men, migration, military, milk barn/motel, and, then of course, museum.
Originally, the bottom three panels of the wheel depicted the landscape of the site. However, Camp said that was “an unfinished wheel.”
The site consulted with members from the Eastern Shoshone and Shoshone-Bannock tribes, and then commissioned the wheel’s original artist, Bonnie LaFond, to update the wheel with their suggestions.
Now, three new panels depict three additional parts of the story of the site: one for the Eastern Shoshone tribe, one for the Shoshone-Bannock tribe, and one to honor the first inhabitants of the area over 13,000 years ago.
Those three panels represent the museum’s new sixth “interpretive M” – the moccasin era.
“[The wheel] gives us the full circle to the present,” said Camp. “It’s very much including everything now and that very much makes the wheel feel complete and whole at this point, whereas before, we were missing that.”
And that serves as a reminder – that we can find ways to tell a more complete history, and that history isn’t just history – it’s also now.
