Northern Arapaho

Culturally-informed care is at the core of the White Buffalo Recovery Center, an outpatient addiction treatment facility in Riverton and on the Wind River Reservation. We take an inside look into how they’re helping tribal members heal, as well as a new program they’re launching this June, which aims to address grief and intergenerational trauma for families.

For the last seven years, Shoshone and Arapaho Fish and Game Director Arthur Lawson has been working to create more economic development and ecotourism on the Wind River Reservation through a bit of an unexpected avenue: fly fishing. Those efforts are the subject of a series of short films that will play at the Center for the Arts in Jackson on June 4.

The White Buffalo Recovery Center is a culturally-informed outpatient treatment center that supports Native community members who are recovering from addiction and substance abuse. This June, they’re launching a new version of Mending Broken Hearts, a bimonthly, three-day workshop that provides healing around grief, loss and intergenerational trauma. In the past, the program has been just for adults, but now the workshop is expanding to include the whole family.

On a sunny May morning, more than a 100 fifth graders played and explored in an open grassy clearing, surrounded by pine trees on the banks of the rushing Buffalo Fork River. They were attending the annual Blackrock Field Camp, a two-day educational event put on by the U.S. Forest Service each year for students from elementary schools on the Wind River Reservation.

Land-grant universities, like the University of Wyoming (UW), largely got their start on land taken from Native peoples – and many of these schools continue to benefit from those lands today. Recently, some have started free tuition waivers for Native students as a way to acknowledge this history. Members of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes have been advocating for the same to happen at UW.

Last week, U.S. Congresswoman Harriet Hageman (R-WY) traveled around the state and held town halls with local communities in Carbon, Fremont, Washakie, and Hot Springs Counties. On April 25, she held a forum at the Wind River Hotel and Casino outside of Riverton in collaboration with the Northern Arapaho Tribe.

Riverton’s first Northern Arapaho police officer is suing the Riverton Police Department for racial discrimination, retaliation and a hostile work environment. Billy Whiteplume started working as a patrol officer in 2016 and moved to the detective division in 2021.

The Wind River Water and Buffalo Alliance is looking for a graphic artist to help design their logo. The coalition is based in Fort Washakie on the Wind River Reservation and is made up of tribal agencies, tribal councils and nonprofits working to advance Indigenous-centered conservation.

This story is part of our new Quick Hits series. This series will bring you breaking news and short updates from throughout the state.Indian Health Service director Roselyn Tso toured Wind River Family & Community Health Care clinics in Riverton and Arapahoe earlier this week.The IHS is the main federal health care provider for Native peoples throughout the U.S. However, the Northern Arapaho Tribe has operated Wind River Family & Community Health Care independently of IHS since 2016.

What are some of the challenges when it comes to preserving the Shoshone and Arapaho languages on the Wind River Reservation? And what’s being done to pass those languages down from generation to generation? Those questions are at the heart of an upcoming talk in Jackson on March 18th titled “Protecting Languages, Preserving Cultures.”