Cheyenne Religious Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, pressure along the emigrant trails of the central plains had split the Cheyenne into a northern group, which settled in present day Montana, and a southern group, which remained nearer Colorado. The two divisions lived apart from then on, yet kept up regular and close contact rather than drifting into separate peoples, and neither division ever set up its own separate authority over the tradition's two sacred bundles. The Sacred Arrows, tied to the culture hero Sweet Medicine, and the Sacred Buffalo Hat, tied to the culture hero Erect Horns, remain the whole nation's covenants regardless of which side of the divide a Cheyenne family lives on, and the Sun Dance that renews the people's standing with the earth and the powers above it is held by both divisions on their own ground each year. A documented Cheyenne Sun Dance gathering from around 1909 shows the ceremony already carried on in this divided but connected form. The nineteenth century was not gentle to either bundle. The Sacred Arrows were taken by a Pawnee raiding party around 1830 and later ceremonially restored; the keeping of the Sacred Buffalo Hat passed through a disputed handover in the 1870s that damaged part of what the bundle held, and a ceremonial pipe connected to that history was only returned to the Northern Cheyenne, who retain the Hat today, in 1997. What the two divisions share, across a border that has stood for more than a century and a half, is not a single reservation or a single government but the same standing obligation: to keep the Arrows, keep the Hat, and keep the Sun Dance, so the blessing both bundles were given to carry keeps reaching the whole Cheyenne people, north and south alike.

Cheyenne religious life is anchored by two sacred bundles, the Sacred Arrows, Mahuts, and the Sacred Buffalo Hat, Esevone, each entrusted to a keeper who holds it on behalf of the whole Cheyenne nation. Neither bundle is photographed or displayed for a general audience, and this article does not describe their appearance or how a keeper handles them. What can be said is their place in Cheyenne history and public ceremonial life: the Arrows are renewed in the Arrow Renewal ceremony, one of the longer continuously observed rites on the North American Plains, and the Sun Dance stands alongside the bundle rites as a major yearly observance.

The keeper's office is personal, passed on according to Cheyenne custom rather than by outside appointment, and it has continued through the nation's forced removal from the Northern Plains and the later division between the Northern Cheyenne of Montana and the Southern Cheyenne, now joined with the Arapaho in Oklahoma. That two communities separated by relocation still maintain their own ceremonial life around the bundles and the Sun Dance is itself the public fact worth recording, a religion that survived removal by continuing to practice, not by publishing what it practices.