(BOULDER, CO) I was hired at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1995 as a language professor. I relocated from Hawaii, where I had learned the Hawaiian language.
When I arrived in Colorado, I decided I needed to learn about the Indigenous language of the Boulder and Denver area, Arapaho. The Arapaho people had occupied the area for many years until they were forced to leave in the 1860s.
I first visited the Northern Arapaho people on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming in 1999. At that time, there were hundreds of speakers of the Arapaho language…