Steven Amos feels hopeful for once. He’s finishing a drug and alcohol treatment program, living in a halfway house, and working a new job, doing carpentry. “I love anything outdoors,” he said. “I’m happy I’m not locked up.”
A member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, Amos, age 53, grew up with the snow-capped Rocky Mountains set like a painting behind his childhood home in Ethete, Wyoming, on the Wind River reservation. He loved hunting and fishing along the Little Wind River, but his family — as well as many Wind River neighbors — had no running water, sometimes no electricity, or enough to eat.
The reservation’s stunning landscape conceals more than a century of theft and neglect by the United States, whose officials stole Arapaho land, then doled it out to ranchers, real estate moguls, miners, and public institutions, while forcing the tribal nation to scrape together a future any way it could.
One of Amos’s most searing childhood memories is watching police beat up his father. “They call it g... Read more
