Kiowa Tribe member explores deep roots

State Parks Site Superintendent Sharie Shada and American Indian Student Interpretive Ranger Noah Tsotigh made an appearance on Sheridan Media’s Public Pulse. 

Tsotigh is a member of the Kiowa Tribe, who have ancestral roots in the Rocky Mountain Region. According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Kiowa’s ancestral homeland is near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River of western Montana. In the late seventeenth century, the horse-seeking Kiowa and affiliated Plains Apache had migrated southeast through Crow country and had reached the Black Hills of Wyoming and South Dakota by 1775. It was in the early nineteenth century the two peoples had been pushed south of the Platte to the Arkansas River by the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne. 

N. Tsotigh 

The Kiowa and Plains Apache homeland lay in the southwestern plains adjacent to the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado and western Kansas and the Red River drainage of the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma.

In the American Indian Student Interpretive Ranger program, Tsotigh has had an opportunity to speak with other people of indigenous ancestry and with those whose ancestors moved west to settle. Tsotigh comes from an urban background, but said his trip to Wyoming felt natural and “more real.”  

He said his favorite topic to speak on is the diversity of the US, creating connections and widening perspectives when visitors learn the history of the area. 

Shada said the program has enriched the visitor experience at Fort Phil Kearny. In its second year at the fort, the program allows a perspective from the indigenous side of history. 

S. Shada

Tsotigh will give his next presentation beginning at 6 p.m. Thursday Aug. 8, at Fort Phil Kearny.