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their aboriginal claims to more than 1 million
square miles of territory.
1992Ben Nighthorse Campbell joins the Senate.
After serving in the Colorado legislature and the
U.S. House of Representatives, Ben Nighthorse
Campbell, a Northern Cheyenne from Colorado,
is elected to the U.S. Senate. Campbell was a judo
champion, jewelry maker, rancher, and tribal coun-
cilman before he entered U.S. politics in 1983. He
will be reelected in 1998 and retire from the Senate
on January 3, 2005.
“I am convinced that America,
which has failed so miserably in
fighting social evils from drugs
to crime, from prostitution to
hunger, is ready to learn values
of traditional Native Ameri-
can ways.... We need to help
lead this nation. We need not
abandon our traditional values—
that’s what makes our people so
unique in this nation—we need
to affect public policy to recog-
nize those values.”
—Northern Cheyenne politi-
cian Ben Nighthorse Campbell
in a 1991 speech to graduates of
Haskell Indian Nations UniversityA sculpture by Bill Reid is displayed in the
Canadian embassy.
After five years of work, Bill Reid’s massive bronze
sculpture of a canoe full of figures from Haida my-
thology is installed in the Canadian embassy in
Washington, D.C. A member of the Haida Tribe,
Reid is a central figure in the revival of traditional
woodcarving arts among the Indians of the Pacific
Northwest.A Superfund cleanup begins on
Coeur d’Alene lands.
The U.S. government begins a Superfund cleanup
of a three-by-seven-mile area in Kellogg, Idaho,
on the Coeur d’Alene reservation. The area is
contaminated with lead dumped by silver-mining
companies, which began operating in the area in
the 1880s. Their activities were largely unregu-
lated until the passage of the Clean Water Act in
1972.
The second-largest project in Superfund his-
tory, the 10-year cleanup will cost $150 million.
The Coeur d’Alene, however, are disappointed byA member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, Ben
Nighthorse Campbell served in the U.S. Senate from
1993 to 2005. (U.S. Senate)