Lodge Grass High students, from left, Ashton Old Elk, Ferlin Blacksmith and Deallen Little Light stop with their horses on the top of small rim at the Grapevine Creek battlefield this week. (David Grubbs/Billings Gazette)

The first interpretive project ever to take place at the Fort C.F. Smith site in southern Montana took place this week as part of a collaboration between the Crow Tribe and the National Park Service.

The site — now deonated only with a stone and metal marker — was built by the U.S. Army on the Bozeman Trail along the Bighorn River to protect people traveling to Virginia City’s gold camps, Brett French of the Billings Gazette writes here.

“Anywhere else in America, this would be a really big site,” says Col. Berris Samples, leader of the Lodge Grass Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, who brought Crow students there this week. He also took the students to the site of the Grapevine Creek battle between the Crow and the Blackfeet.

The sites, on the Crow reservation, are typically closed to anyone other than Crow tribal members, but because of a collaboration with the Junior ROTC group, Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area staff was able to accompany the group and give presentations to the students. (Watch a video of the day’s events, here.)

“This is the first interpretive program ever given at the site of Fort C.F. Smith,” Chris Wilkinson, chief of interpretation for the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, tells French.

Wilkinson told the group that the fort — the most isolated along the Bozeman Trail — was built in 1864 to protect white emigrants from raids by the Sioux and Cheyenne:

Chris Wilkinson, chief of interpretation for the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, speaks to Lodge Grass students about Fort C.F. Smith on Tuesday near the site where the flagpole once stood. (David Grubbs/Billings Gazette)

“Your ancestors, the Crow Nation, were stuck in the middle of this,” Wilkinson told the JROTC students.

Without the help of Crow Indians acting as scouts, mail carriers and providing food to starving soldiers in the winter of 1867, Fort C.F. Smith might not have lasted two years.

“I do not believe there is any greater example of hospitality to the U.S. Army,” Wilkinson said.

“Why do I tell you this today?” he asked rhetorically. “By celebrating your legacy, you are following in your ancestors’ footsteps and extending hospitality. We thank you for allowing us to visit your sites.”

At the site of the Grapevine Creek battle, where the Crow defeated a Blackfeet band, students raised a tepee.

Theo Hugs, who retired last year from the Bighorn Canyon NRA, tells French that the interaction between the tribe and the National Park Service is long overdue.

“I think the kids need to know their heritage,” she says.

Gwen Florio

Tags: Apsaalooke, Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, Blackfeet, Bozeman Trail, buffalo post, Cheyenne, Crow Tribe, Grapevine Creek Battle, Gwen Florio, National Park Service, Native American news, Sioux, U.S. Army, Virginia City

The University of Nevada-Reno women’s basketball team goes up against New Mexico State tonight in a game expected to be well-attended because of the extra festivities.

As Jim Krajewski of the Reno (Nev.) Gazette-Journal reports here, local tribes got flyers that allow each person with one to bring four other people to the game for free. And, he writes:

Tahnee Robinson

Also, the Pyramid Lake Junior/Senior High School dance group will hold a pregame honor ceremony for Pack guard Tahnee Robinson. The drum group Red Hoop will sing and the Pyramid Lake High dance group and Numu Tookwaus color guard will join Robinson for the honor song and dance.

“The idea is to honor Native Americans and do a Native American Awareness day. It was their idea to honor Tahnee,” [coach Jane] Albright said. “They feel like, for their culture, she’s kind of raised the bar on awareness.”

Robinson is a Native American (Eastern Shoshone, Pawnee, Cheyenne and Sioux) from Lander, Wyo., on the edge of the Wind River reservation. She’s the Pack’s leading scorer at 15.4 points per game.

See Tetona Dunlap’s blog post about Robinson, here.

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Cheyenne, College basketball, Eastern Shoshone, Gwen Florio, Native American news, Pawnee, Sioux, Tahnee Robinson, University of Nevada Reno, Wind River Indian Reservation, Wolf Pack

It’s a stirring quote, one that quite rightly spurs emotion:

“Our land is everything to us. . . . I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives.”

So stirring, in fact, that as Politics Daily tells us here, Sarah Palin uses it to begin Chapter 3 of her book, “Going Rogue: An American Life.”

One problem. Palin attributes it to legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.

Various sites are having a field day with this one, reporting that it actually comes an essay by John Wooden Legs that is included in the book “We Are the People: Voices From the Other Side of American History.”

That book says Wooden Legs was referring to the defeat of George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, and that the complete quote goes thusly:

“Our land is everything to us. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes talk the Cheyenne language to each other. It is the only place where Cheyennes remember the same things together. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it — with their life. My people and the Sioux defeated General Custer at the Little Bighorn.”

Well, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Gwen Florio

Tags: "Going Rogue", buffalo post, Cheyenne, George Armstrong Custer, John Wooden, John Wooden Legs, Little Bighorn, Native American news, Sarah Palin, Sioux, UCLA