College of Liberal Arts
story by Jeff Dodge
Before he died in 2018, Mark Soldier Wolf reminded his daughter to keep her promise.
Yufna Soldier Wolf had promised him that the vast collection of historical documents regarding the Northern Arapaho he had amassed over his lifetime would be preserved, returned to their homeland, and made accessible to relatives, the tribe and possibly the public.
Mark Soldier Wolf was a descendant of a long line of chiefs who led the Northern Arapaho when its home was Northern Colorado, and his great-grandmother participated in the Battle of Little Big Horn. He had been involved in repatriation initiatives over many decades, from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 to a successful effort in 2018 to bring home the bodies of his uncle and other young tribal children who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where they had been taken in the 1880s to be forcibly assimilated into U.S. culture.