My name is Heove ve 'keso (Yellowbird), Chief Phillip Whiteman Jr, I am a traditional Northern Cheyenne Chief. I have been awarded in both the rodeo and the traditional pow wow arena, as an old style grass dancer. I am also an award-winning recording artist and storyteller. My flute playing, traditional songs and stories, inspired the CD Spirit Seeker, which won its category at the Indian Summer Music Awards; and was nominated in two categories for the Native American Music Awards. We went on to develop a DVD on the Medicine Wheel Model to Natural Horsemanship, connecting spirit, human and horse. It took all my determination and teachings to make it in both worlds. I am a champion in the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association (PRCA), and a two times Indian National Finals Rodeo (INFR) World champion in the saddle bronc. I qualified 26 times for the INFR, won the Open Northern Rodeo Association title twice, and was a 7 times world finalist at El Paso, Texas. In 1990, I became the first PRCA European tour champion, in Helsinki, Finland and competed on the same tour in Paris, France, in 1991. I opened the World Equine Games and have been recognized for my work in national publications, such as the Western Horseman. I can also bring horses into the training, I have stayed connected to the horse medicine and the responsibility that has been passed through my grandfathers. In order to connect to the horse’s spirit, we have to elevate to the horse’s level, instead of pulling it down to ours. Much like our children, they do not care how much we know, they want to know how much we care.

My most important work has been with my community, empowering our children, including through our horse medicine, and by organizing runs that commemorate our Ancestors, including the Fort Robinson Spiritual Breakout Run (26 years) and the Little Bighorn Commemoration Run. Through these activities we shift our indigenous children’s thinking back to one of resilience and breaking out from oppression. 

I recently published this piece in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/17/only-love-can-stop-war-a-call-to-the-world-from-a-northern-cheyenne-chief. In it I make a call to end genocide. It addresses the bigger issues that we have been facing as Indigenous Peoples and how our Indigenous teachings that have been passed on from generation to generation can help counter the inter-generational effects of genocide. 

Let me just share an example about the inter-generational gifts and challenges in my family. My mother, Florence Whiteman (born: Bites) was born a month almost to the day, 50 years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn that many of her grandparents were part of and they later raised her. Her grandfathers were chiefs and medicine people. Some of them were injured in the battle and doctored in our indigenous way. One took her into ceremony when she was about 2 years old and she went without food and water and did not cry, when her mother was afraid she would. Another grandfather continued to dream until the day he died, about the young American soldiers who took poison rather than surrender to us, the people of the land. As a teenager my Mum was trained and initiated as the last warrior woman of the Cheyenne and her society brothers arranged her marriage and after she had her first child, she was infected with TB and shipped away from her daughter, spending years at the Cushman Indian Hospital in Tacoma. She said she would likely not have survived if she had not been initiated and without her connection to our medicine and teachings, she would have perished like so many of our children, buried in unmarked graves. She made it home, and raised us in the language, I was born 81 years after the Battle, just 4 years after the passing of my great-grandmother Sadie who had been at the Battlefield and was the last one to know where the secret Custer papers were located. Just imagine the huge changes my great-grandparents have seen through their lifetime and how it affected us. My daughter Florence was born 125 years after the battle, named after her grandmother who died 4 months before she was born in September 2001, within days of 9-1-1, when Americans for a brief moment felt like Native Americans. As Indigenous Peoples we carry the trauma in our bones, many of us suffer from autoimmune issues. 2026 will be the 150the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the 100th Anniversary of my Mother’s birth and I am committed to working on affecting the necessary change to make as many people as possible overcome their inter-generational trauma in the meantime.