Native Voices Shaping Community

Celebrating Native American Heritage Month in Boulder

By Grace Adele Boyle

For millennia, the Arapaho, Cheyenne and Ute peoples lived, traveled and made their homes in Boulder Valley. Today, Native American Heritage Month (November) invites more than a momentary commemoration—it’s a reminder that an Indigenous presence endures here. Local leaders, artists and educators are working to ensure Indigenous voices are not just honored but are instrumental in shaping policy, art and community life. From city equity initiatives to powwows, galleries and cultural programs, the work of elevating Indigenous voices is alive in Boulder—not only in November, but year-round.

History, Memory and Teaching

“I remember walking and driving on the plains with my mother when I was younger, and we would see some chokecherry bushes, or we would see some cottonwoods down by a creek, and we would say, ‘Oh, you know, our ancestors must have camped there, or maybe our ancestors picked berries here,’” Nico Strange Owl reflects. 

A descendant of survivors of the Sand Creek Massacre (November 29, 1864, the deadliest day in Colorado history), Indigenous history is not a distant chapter for Strange Owl—it’s lived, remembered and taught in the present. Her mother and grandmother passed down stories while gathering chokecherries and making traditional foods. “It really makes me feel like this land is my home,” she shares. 

A member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana, who made northern Colorado her longtime home, Strange Owl sees her role as a bridge between memory and public understanding. Visitors to her art gallery, Eagle Plume’s Trading Post, north of Allenspark, often arrive with little knowledge of Native history, and she uses her family’s story to connect people to its reality. 

Strange Owl tells this story: “My great-grandfather survived Sand Creek as an infant. His mother, my great-great-grand mother, the woman that I’m named after—Esevonenahmeh’eneh’e—her name was Appearing Buffalo Woman, she had been shot in the shoulder from the back, and she ran and rolled under a cut bank where there was grass overgrowing the bank. She nursed him and kept him quiet while the massacre went on, and she waited until everything was quiet—and then she waited some more—and then she came out and she was in shock and loss … no food or water. She wandered with her baby, and some Arapahos picked her up and nursed her back to health and took care of her gunshot wound. My great-grandfather, his name was Henry Redneck, that’s how he survived. My grandmother always used to tell us that had her father not survived Sand Creek, none of us would be here.”

When she shares her family history as it relates to the history of Colorado, it changes people’s perspective, she says.

The hundred-year-old walls of Eagle Plume’s are lined with curated Indigenous art, including paintings, ceramics, jewelry, beadwork, sculptures and leatherwork—all handpicked by Strange Owl. Her family took over operations in 1992 after the passing of the longtime owner, Charles Eagle Plume. Nico began running the shop with her son after her father and mother passed in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Since then, she has helped bring the celebrated First Peoples Festival to Estes Park and started an artist-in-residency program, where Native artists from around the country stay in cabins, working on their craft and strengthening the local Native community.

“This last summer, for the whole month of July, I had artists in residence here. I had three different artists: one from Taos Pueblo who has a skincare line like chokecherry oil serum; then Quill Bill, he does porcupine quill work; and Arthur Shortbull, who’s a watercolor painter,” Strange Owl says.

Mark Your Calendar
First Peoples Festival
January 17–19, 2026 | Estes Park
Celebrate Indigenous culture in the snowy Rockies with:

◊ Art market featuring Indigenous artists nationwide

◊ Traditional powwow

◊ Film symposium

◊ Fashion show

◊ Dinner by award-winning Native chefs

The Work of Equity and Repair 

As Equity and Belonging Officer for the City of Boulder, Aimee Kane stewards how the city moves beyond symbolic gestures of acknowledgement into lasting commitments of collaborative policy and the deeper work of structural change. 

“A lot of times when people think about Native history, they think of it through a white supremacy culture lens and think of it as a population that was here, and white colonial settlers came over and decimated those people. And that happened, but that framing puts the emphasis on the negative, the whiteness, as opposed to the Native story of resilience and connection to the land. Native people are still here,” Kane reflects.

The idea that Native American History Month is about remembering a past that no longer lives and breathes in the present is incorrect. The ancestors of these original tribes are still here, and Kane is ensuring that these essential voices are being sought out and centered in decision-making policies for the land and its people. 

Kane notes that the foundation of Boulder’s Equity Plan is around policy change and programmatic change. “As stewards of democracy, we need to make sure that we do our best to include the people [in the decision-making] who are most impacted by government decisions,” Kane says.

Since 2016, the City of Boulder has officially recognized the second Monday of October as Indigenous Peoples Day, refocusing the traditional Columbus Day commemoration with honest celebrations of Boulder’s past and present. 

Mark Your Calendar
Indigenous Peoples Day Celebrations
October 13–15, 2025
Boulder & CU Boulder
Celebrate Indigenous heritage and community with:

◊ Teach-ins & workshops

◊ Dancing & performances

◊ Poetry & storytelling

◊ Panels & keynote speakers at CU Boulder

Dairy Arts Center
October 12, 2025 | Boulder
In honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, Right Relationship Boulder presents Breaking Barriers to Native Education for All:

◊ Storytelling

◊ Native art market

◊ Speakers & panel discussions

◊ Breath Healing Buses

◊ Educator Resource Collaborative

Art as Cultural Continuity 

Through his background as an artist with a Juris Doctorate from Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU, Dallin Maybee explores how art functions as advocacy and inheritance—a practice of self-expression that strengthens identity, reclaims cultural space and invites others into a deeper, more respectful conversation.

“I’m telling a narrative through my art that is authentic to who I am and to my tribe. It’s very personal. A lot of our art forms come from utilitarian places, and whatever that culture looked like,” Maybee says. His creative work spans fashion design, painting, jewelry, beadwork and more. Maybee’s skill of connecting traditional Native art forms—such as ledger art, a Plains practice of narrative drawing and painting—with contemporary storytelling helps keep tribal identities visible in a society that too often flattens Native experience into a single story.

“I think a lot of people tend to think of Native American tribes and communities as one homogenized identity, but I would like people to understand that there’s a diversity to so many different tribes. There are 574 federally recognized tribes today with their own languages, their own ceremonies, their own culture and art forms,” Maybee shares.

As an enrolled Northern Arapaho and also of Seneca descent on his father’s side, Maybee’s foundation in philosophy deepened his exploration and empathy with different worldviews, while his career in law and work with groups like NARF (Native American Rights Fund) gave him the tools to protect the rights and sovereignty of Native people.

“Early Indian law has a broad range of practice areas. At NARF, we do environmental resource protection, water law, education and religious freedom, social justice, treaty rights, tribal sovereignty protection and assertion, voting rights and election protection—making sure tribal communities have a voice in the political process. Ensuring there is real representation in state and federal legislatures is a critical part of protecting tribal interests. I think at any given time, NARF has around fifty ongoing cases and programs that serve specific tribal nations and their legal needs,” Maybee says.

Mark Your Calendar
Museum of Boulder
Oct 16: Defiance in Native Arts & Representation: panel on resilience and creativity in Native art.
Denver Art Museum
Year-round: One of the world’s largest Indigenous art collections, from ancient to contemporary.

Advocacy and Preservation

As executive director of the Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Office, Crystal C’Bearing works at the intersection of history, justice and cultural survival. Though based in Wyoming, her leadership has had a profound impact across Colorado, including Boulder County.

C’Bearing was a central figure in the renaming of Mount Evans to Mount Blue Sky in 2022, leading public education efforts through webinars and even a 250-mile prayer walk. “The intent of tribal history is not to make you feel bad for what happened in the past,” she says. “It’s to learn from these events so they never happen again, and so we can move forward together in a positive direction.”

Her work often brings her into dialogue with Boulder-area institutions. She is currently collaborating with the City of Boulder on the Fort Chambers/Poor Farm project and with Right Relationship Boulder to strengthen connections between the Arapaho people and residents. For C’Bearing, these partnerships are essential to repairing trust. “Meaningful relationship-building requires parties to have difficult conversations and find a middle ground where both are heard respectfully and treated with dignity,” she notes. “I understand we will not agree on everything, but it’s important for tribes to have a voice in their history and their truth be heard as well.”

C’Bearing also emphasizes the importance of youth. She hopes younger generations of Arapaho and other Indigenous people will reconnect with ancestral homelands like Boulder Valley to build pride and identity. “My hope for the younger generations is to reconnect to the area and be proud of where their ancestors lived before settlement to build a strong identity for themselves as an Arapaho person,” she reflects.

For Boulder residents, she offers both an invitation and a responsibility: to seek out Indigenous perspectives, whether through books, events, museums or conversations. “Boulder is a beautiful place to live, and the Arapaho created a life here for their families, bands and tribe,” she says. “What many people today enjoy through recreation, such as fishing, hunting, hiking, etc., this was the way of life for the Arapaho tribe.”

Mark Your Calendar
The Peoples’ Crossing Event
October 4–6, 2025 | Boulder
Honor Indigenous history at the site once known as Settlers Park:

◊ Community ceremony and prayer walk

◊ Storytelling and history-sharing with Arapaho representatives

◊ Dialogue on healing, relationship-building and land acknowledgment