by Gail Small

About the author: Gail Small is a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe and Director of Native Action, a nonprofit organization in Lame Deer, Montana. She graduated from the University of Oregon School of Law in 1982.

My tribe, the Northern Cheyenne, lives on 500,000 acres of beautiful ponderosa pine country in southeastern Montana. Our reservation has tremendous cultural significance for us. Two years after the Cheyenne defeated Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn [in 1876], they were taken as prisoners of war in reprisal, and marched to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Tribal oral tradition states that the Cheyenne were quickly dying there of malaria and other diseases, and agreed that they would rather die fighting to return to their beloved northland than die of the white...