Anecdotes

When Custer's Seventh Calvary galloped into the sleeping Indian village at Washita with orders to spare no one, he was not targeting Chief Black Kettle. He had no idea who he was attacking.

When Custer found out that he was attacking the tribe of Chief Black Kettle, the tribe that was attacked four years earlier at the Sand Creek Massacre in southeast Colorado on November 29, 1864, where about 400 people were slaughtered, he ordered his solders to stop killing the women and children.

Chief Black Kettle was known as a man of peace. He signed the Medicine Lodge Peace Treaty with the U.S. Government for "perpetual peace". On the dreadful morning of his death, his tribe feared nothing and had posted no guards. A white flag of peace flew above his teepee as instructed by the U.S.

The soldiers looting after the massacre came across U.S. Army pots and pans, gifts from the peace treaty and evidence that the tribe was peaceful. Nonetheless, Custer ordered that each and every one of the 800 Indian spotted ponies be shot to impose "a severe blow to the tribe", as Custer would later write. The remains of the horses littered the site for decades.

An artist of Naive American regalia and paintings.

Speaks English, Cheyenne, and Spanish.

Went to college at Cal State University Long Beach.

The Cheyenne dialect script consultant and language translator for The Contested Plains. He solicited the help from his uncle, Eugene Blackbear Jr., who is also fluent in Cheyenne.

Cheyenne name is HE'amâhnee 'estse [ hey-hump-nest ], which means Stand Above. He received it in his late 20s. The Cheyenne name is given by the tribal elders after much prayer. It is important because it is considered to come from the Creator.

One of the highlights of Philip's year is leading the Trail of Tears Memorial Walk on Indigenous Peoples Day at the Mid-America All-Indian Center in Wichita, Kansas. 2022 was his fourth year to have the enormous honor of carrying the Eagle Staff, a unique and sacred symbol that is the Native American flag, in honor of the approximately 60,000 Native Americans who were forcibly displaced from their homes between 1830 and 1850 by the United States Government and required to walk a difficult and sometimes deadly 800 miles to Indian reservations in Oklahoma.