Arapaho
tribe of Native Americans historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming
The Arapaho ( ə-RAP-ə-hoh; French: Arapahos, Gens de Vache) are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota.
By the 1850s, Arapaho bands formed two tribes, namely the Northern Arapaho and Southern Arapaho. Since 1878, the Northern Arapaho have lived with the Eastern Shoshone on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and are federally recognized as the Northern Arapaho Tribe of the Wind River Reservation. The Southern Arapaho live with the Southern Cheyenne in Oklahoma. Together, their members are enrolled as the federally recognized Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.
Names
It is uncertain where the word Arapaho came from. Europeans may have derived it from the Pawnee word for "trader", iriiraraapuhu, or it may have been a corruption of a Crow word for "tattoo", alapúuxaache. The Arapaho autonym is Hinono'eino or Inun-ina ("our people" or "people of our own kind"). They refer to their tribe as Hinono'eiteen (Arapaho Nation).
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q626136. The Library of Congress control number is sh85006422. Authority coordinates are 35.578, -98.965. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1878.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arapaho” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.