A report released today aims to quantify the historic loss of life, land and precious resources for 10 Native nations historically in Colorado, and asks the state to help “mend all that has been broken between Colorado’s original inhabitants and the settler community.”  

The privately funded study took two years to complete and is over 700 pages long. It draws on treaties, governmental records, scholarly works, magazines, journals, newspapers, and other sources. It calculates the total market value of dispossessed land at $1.17 trillion.

“My role in this is to try to find the truth about what happened to Indians in Colorado,” said Rick Williams, who helped spearhead the project. He’s Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne and chairs the Truth, Restoration, and Education Commission (TREC).

“We don’t want to alienate anybody. We just want people to think about that this is somebody else’s homeland.”