8 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Coming Home AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURAL EMBASSY GETS A JUMPSTART FROM VIBRANT DENVER BONDS. BY BENNITO L. KELT Y Plenty of people travel home for the holidays, but Lakota and Cheyenne tribal member Rick Williams asks people to consider where the Indigenous people of the Front Range would go. “What about Indians? What about In- dians on the Front Range?” asks Williams, founder of the People of the Sacred Land, a nonprofi t that helps Native Americans learn about and research the loss of their territory. “This is our homeland, and there’s nothing to come back to.” On November 4, voters approved the Vibrant Denver packages, which include $20 million to build the American Indian Cultural Embassy. Williams describes the funding as an “honorable” route to allow “these people to come home in a good way.” The embassy would teach and preserve Indigenous skills, cultures, languages and history, including atrocities during westward expansion and settlement of the Colorado Territory, such as the 1864 Sand Creek Mas- sacre, in which volunteer troops slaughtered over 230 members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. “There’s an opportunity for them to come here and build a new relationship with their homeland,” Williams says. “The embassy is a brilliant idea for healing Indians and non- Indians alike because, I imagine, they deal with the trauma of knowing what happened, too, and a way to start dealing with the reality that we’re on stolen land.” Days like Thanksgiving, Colorado’s 150th birthday on August 1, 2026, and the 250th anniversary of the United States next year are “somber” for Native Americans, says Denver Councilmember Stacie Gilmore, who pushed for the American Indian Cultural Embassy to be located in her northeast Denver district. “Those dates are somber, somber for the American Indian community, and they need help to hold onto their culture, their beliefs and, of course, economically,” Gilmore says. “The community is really excited about be- ing able to weigh in, and this is something for them.” Gilmore describes the cultural embassy as a cross between a museum, convention center and marketplace inspired by designs from descendants of Cheyenne Chief Tall Bull. The space could host shops, business meetings, pow wows, which are Indigenous celebrations with song and dance, she says. It would be about ten acres, the size of a large high school, and located near Denver In- ternational Airport at the corner of East 56th Avenue and Peña Boulevard, a spot where it’s also expected to attract tourists. “This could be a top- notch meeting [or] conven- tion space, ultimately a pow wow space,” Gilmore adds. “We’re talking about a mar- ketplace as well for jewelry makers, fashion designers, moccasin makers, painters. This could serve as a space for Kiowa tribal represen- tatives when they’re com- ing to Denver for business. There’s actually a location, an embassy, for them to con- duct their business, to come and feel safe and welcomed, that understands tradition and culture.” Williams has a much more sprawling idea for what can happen in and around the embassy. He imagines a “living” cultural center that teaches hunting skills, and offers instruction in bead and quill work, as well as tanning buffalo hides and making tribal garb like ribbon skirts. It would be a place where students can study Indigenous languages, medicinal prac- tices and historic and current land treaties and agreements. “I’m not really in favor of putting up pictures and maps that show what used to be,” he explains. “I think we need to look to see what the next fi fty years look like.” Williams, who previously served as CEO of the American Indian College Fund and is currently an Ingenious scholarship con- sultant for the University of Colorado, also wants to see an underground greenhouse that replicates the practice of growing plants year-round under earthen dwellings, where it stays 55 degrees. Many Native Americans along the Front Range lived in earthen dwell- ings, not teepees, he notes. Williams suggests keeping the cultural elements separate from the part that serves as an embassy. In that area, tribes could exercise agreements similar to sister-city re- lationships, in which sovereign governments keep an ongoing cultural and intellectual exchange while also looking for ways to en- gage in foreign trade. (Federal law prohibits tribes from direct foreign trade.) “No one has ever done a cultural embassy” that has both cultural and diplomatic sides, he points out. “The idea of what it’s going to be, it’s still evolving. Each tribe is going to have a dif- ferent idea of what it means to come home and be in an embassy,” Williams says, listing off tribes that used to call this area home, including the Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche and Ute. Letting the Land and People Speak Support for the idea of an Indigenous embassy emerged about three years ago, when the City of Denver organized the fi rst “tribal convening” to collect oral histories and survey what local Native American communities need. According to Williams, the People of the Sacred Land recommended the construction of a cultural embassy in its 2024 report on the Truth Restoration and Education Commission, a project launched to detail the “true history of Colorado and what led to the genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Colorado.” That recommendation went from a pro- posal to a project after voters approved it as part of Mayor Mike Johnston’s $950 million Vibrant Denver bond package, along with improvements to sidewalks and roads, reno- vations for existing facilities, including Red Rocks, and funding for the Park Hill Park. The $20 million in Vibrant Denver bonds for the embassy isn’t expected to fund the entire project, but to act as seed money for the fi rst phase, Gilmore says. Funding for the bond projects will come in stages; she’s urg- ing that the embassy funding be included in the fi rst round. “They’ll probably start with traffi c signals and smaller packages, but the embassy, the design portion of it, needs to be on the fi rst tranche,” she says. “I’d like to see it by late 2028.” Plans call for the embassy to be located at First Creek at DEN Open Space, a natural preserve near the airport. Gilmore notes that the area has the same mountain views, dry grasslands and native species, like red-tailed hawks, bald eagles and prairie dogs, that tribes would have seen centuries ago. The Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, which neighbors the site, hosts a herd of about 300 bison as well as colonies of black-footed ferrets. According to the city, a “shared vision” among local Native Americans of establish- ing the embassy by the bison herds at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal came up during tribal convenings. “We want to be a part of deciding how they handle the buffalo herds, or the eagle feathers,” Williams says. “Eagle feathers are sacred to us.” The confl uence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River at what today is the edge of downtown Denver used to be a crossroads for Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche and Ute tribes, among others, who camped there every winter and hunted buffalo on the plains for more than a thousand years. Gilmore believes that Colorado doesn’t showcase its Indigenous history as well as such states as Oklahoma, Alaska and North Dakota. “When someone asks me, ‘Where should I go to see and learn about Indigenous cul- ture?,’ I say, ‘Go to Oklahoma, go to North Dakota,’” Gilmore says. “I don’t say, ‘Come here, come to Colorado,’ because we don’t have anything that elevates our Indigenous voices. I’d like to be able to say that, because this was a meeting point for so many tribes and we have that history. That’s what we’re hoping we can bring back.” The cultural em- NEWS continued on page 9 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS The American Indian Cultural Embassy would be ten acres and operate as a cross between a museum and convention center. RITCHIE TALLBULL
