"We Are the Land": Denver's First American Indian History, Told by the People Who Lived It
The City of Denver has published hundreds of pages of official history over the decades. Until this month, not one of those pages was written by or with American Indian people.
That changed on February 4, 2026, when Denver’s Landmark Preservation division released We Are the Land: American Indian Life, Legacy, and Future in Denver, a 334-page historic context study built from 17 oral history interviews, two multi-day Tribal convenings, and four years of community collaboration. The city hosted a release event that included a screening of an accompanying documentary film, a panel with those involved in the production, and a panel of local Native students. The project is the first city-led effort in Denver’s history to document American Indian life through Native voices rather than the archives of settlers who displaced them.
The study is not a standard municipal report. It is organized around a Northern Arapaho framework called the Four Hills of Life, taught at the 2024 Tribal Convening by Councilwoman Teresa HisChase. Each chapter moves through four stages: Traditional Knowledge, Removal, Return, and Reconnection.
Forty-Eight Tribes, One City
Denver sits at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. Long before any European set foot in the region, this spot served as a continental crossroads for trade, ceremony, governance, and seasonal gathering. Forty-eight Tribal Nations have documented historical ties to what is now Colorado. Only two, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, still hold reservations within the state’s borders. Today, more than 200 Tribal Nations are represented in the Denver metro area’s American Indian and Alaska Native communities, according to History Colorado.
“I always say that coming into Denver, I see a cultural landscape,” Conrad Fisher, a Northern Cheyenne consultant and chair of the Montana Burial Preservation Board, said during the 2024 Tribal Convening. “I don’t necessarily see the town of Denver, but rather a place that our ancestors called home.”
One detail that might surprise outside readers: the study uses “American Indian” throughout rather than “Native American.” This was a deliberate community choice. During the project’s engagement process, participants most commonly identified themselves as American Indian, a term that carries specific legal and historical weight rooted in centuries of federal policy, Federal Indian Law, and institutions like the National Museum of the American Indian. Several community members noted that “Native American” can feel like a generic label imposed from outside Native communities during the 1960s and 1970s. The study honors that local preference.
What the Study Documents
The eight chapters cover ground from time immemorial to the present. Among them:
The Sand Creek Massacre chapter centers Cheyenne and Arapaho voices to document the November 29, 1864 attack in which Colonel John Chivington led approximately 700 soldiers against an unarmed encampment of mostly women, children, and Elders. An estimated 150 to 250 people were killed. Survivors’ oral histories describe mutilation and desecration of bodies. Soldiers later paraded through Denver with human remains as trophies. Federal investigations condemned Chivington’s actions, but he faced no criminal consequences.
The federal policy chapter examines more than 500 Indian boarding schools that operated nationally between 1870 and 1934, including Colorado institutions like the Teller Institute and Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School. Children were punished for speaking their languages, separated from their families, and subjected to violence, starvation, and sexual abuse. The study emphasizes that the term “stolen children” reflects not only physical removal but the theft of identity, belonging, and emotional safety.
The chapter on urban Native communities traces how the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ relocation program turned Denver into one of its primary hubs in the 1950s. Many relocatees experienced housing discrimination, unstable employment, and isolation. Those who stayed built organizations. In November 1955, twelve American Indians gathered at Cleo Factor’s home in Denver and founded the White Buffalo Council of American Indians, the first legally recognized Indian nonprofit in Colorado. Within fifteen years it had 300 members representing roughly 100 families and 40 Tribes.
That organizing eventually produced the Denver Indian Center, which opened in 1971 in the former Beth Hamedrosh Hagadol Synagogue. The center was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 29, 2025, as part of this project.
The study also documents the institutions that keep Denver’s American Indian community alive today: the Denver March Powwow, which now draws more than 1,500 dancers from close to 100 Tribes across 38 states and three Canadian provinces; Tocabe, the American Indian eatery founded by Benjamin Jacobs of the Osage Nation; the Four Winds American Indian Council in the Baker neighborhood; and áyA Con, an Indigenous comic and art festival whose name comes from the Lakota word for “to change, to become.”
Unfinished Business
The study’s authors are explicit that this is a beginning, not a conclusion. There are already concrete preservation outcomes: the Denver Indian Center’s National Register listing, and documented identification of sites like the Four Winds building, the TallBull Memorial Grounds, and others for potential future designation.
But the study also raises questions the city has not yet answered. The TallBull Memorial Grounds, a site in Daniels Park where American Indians have held ceremonies, powwows, and sweat lodges since the 1970s, remain city-owned with no permanent protection for community use. In 1986, the city unilaterally revoked its cooperative agreement and locked the gates without notice. Glenn Morris, a Shawnee political science professor at CU Denver who was involved with the American Indian Movement, organized a protest that ultimately restored access. The underlying power imbalance has not changed. The land remains the city’s.
“So finally, I told them, ‘Rich, they have until this Mother’s Day. That lock better be off of that gate, or we’re going out there and breaking it down on Mother’s Day in honor of our mother, the Earth,’” Morris recalled in his oral history interview for the project.
Publishing a 334-page study is one thing. Whether Denver follows through on what the study documents is another question entirely. The city now has, in its own official record, the testimony of people whose ancestors were murdered, relocated, and systematically stripped of language, land, and children. The question is what the city does with that record beyond filing it.
If you live in Denver, have ties to the American Indian community, or work in historic preservation, I’d like to hear how this project has landed in your world. What places matter to your community that still aren’t protected?