From the Ashes of Exile:

Chief Dull Knife College and the Northern Cheyenne Pursuit of Self-Determination

The History Behind the Name

On a broad, rolling plain in southeastern Montana, in the small community of Lame Deer, there stands an institution whose very name encodes a century of grief, endurance, and aspiration. Chief Dull Knife College occupies the tribal seat of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, a people whose path to this ground was neither peaceful nor simple. To understand the college, one must first understand the man it honors.

The Northern Cheyenne leader known to history as Dull Knife – born around 1810 near the Rosebud River in present-day Montana – carried in his own language the name Morning Star, or Vooheheveone. The name Dull Knife, by which he became known among Anglo-Americans, was a Lakota Sioux designation, Tamílapéšni, applied to him by neighboring peoples and subsequently fixed in the historical record. He was, by multiple accounts, a seasoned warrior and a signatory of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, a man who recognized as clearly as anyone the shifting balance of power on the northern plains. Following the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, federal forces attacked his village in the Bighorn Mountains, and by spring 1877 he had surrendered, only to be relocated with his people to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma (Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, “Dull Knife”).

The conditions in Oklahoma proved untenable. The land was unfamiliar, the climate was harsh for a people accustomed to Montana winters, and disease spread rapidly through the band. On September 9, 1878, Dull Knife, together with co-leader Little Wolf and some three hundred men, women, and children, departed the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation without authorization and began a desperate overland journey northward (Britannica, “Dull Knife”). After months of conflict with pursuing troops, Dull Knife’s band surrendered at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in late October 1878. When federal authorities demanded they return to Oklahoma, the Cheyenne refused. Imprisoned and deprived of food and heat in a deliberate effort to compel compliance, the band broke out of the fort barracks on the night of January 9, 1879. In the fighting that followed, sixty-four people were killed and seventy-eight eventually recaptured. Dull Knife himself, with a handful of survivors including members of his family, eluded soldiers for ten days in subzero temperatures before reaching the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. His final years were spent in southern Montana; he died in 1883, and his remains were later reinterred at Lame Deer in 1917 (Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, “Dull Knife”).

The Northern Cheyenne Reservation, formally established for the tribe in 1884 on the Tongue River in southeastern Montana, would eventually become the permanent homeland for which Dull Knife and Little Wolf had fought. It is on this land, covering approximately 444,000 acres, that the college bearing his name was founded nearly a century later. The choice of his name was deliberate and philosophically precise: Dull Knife had been, by all recorded accounts, an early and consistent advocate for Native education. As longtime college president Dr. Richard Littlebear has noted, Dull Knife urged his people: “We can no longer live the way we used to. We cannot move around anymore the way we were brought up. We have to learn a new way of life. Let us ask for schools to be built in our country so that our children can go to these schools and learn this new way of life” (Chief Dull Knife College, History, www.cdkc.edu/node/1, accessed 2 June 2026).

Founding Conditions and Federal Context

By the early 1970s, the Northern Cheyenne Reservation presented a stark picture of concentrated poverty. According to data gathered from the reservation, per capita income among reservation residents was less than half that of surrounding non-Indian communities in Rosebud County, and unemployment stood at figures that would be alarming in any context (Access Genealogy, “The Northern Cheyenne Reservation,” accessgenealogy.com, accessed 2 June 2026). More recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, as compiled by aggregators of tribal census data, indicates that approximately thirty-seven percent of reservation residents continue to live below the federal poverty line, and the average household income remains roughly three-fifths of the national average (Native Partnership, “Montana: Northern Cheyenne,” nativepartnership.org, accessed 2 June 2026). These numbers are not historical curiosities; they describe the conditions that made the college necessary and continue to shape its mission.

The institutional response to these conditions emerged in concert with a national legislative shift. In January 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, Public Law 93-638, which authorized federally recognized tribes to contract directly with the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the operation of schools and other services, displacing the long-standing pattern of top-down federal administration (Bureau of Indian Education, bie.edu, accessed 2 June 2026). The Act represented, in the words of subsequent commentary by federal Indian policy scholars, a reversal of thirty years of termination policy that had sought to dismantle the treaty relationship between the United States government and tribal nations (Library of Congress, Law Library Blog, “Anniversary of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act,” blogs.loc.gov, accessed 2 June 2026). Tribes could now, in practical terms, build their own institutions.

The tribal college movement had already taken its first steps. Dine College, founded in 1968 by the Navajo Nation in Tsaile, Arizona, had demonstrated that a tribally controlled institution of higher education could survive and serve its community in ways that off-reservation colleges had demonstrably failed to do. Studies of the period had documented high attrition rates among Native American students enrolled at mainstream institutions: Cheyenne students who left the reservation for college faced not only geographic separation from family obligations but cultural dislocation from a fundamentally different institutional environment. As the college’s own published history acknowledges, many Cheyenne students attending colleges away from the reservation were not graduating; the barriers were both practical and structural (Chief Dull Knife College, History, www.cdkc.edu/node/1, accessed 2 June 2026).

The Northern Cheyenne Indian Action Program

In September 1975 – the same year the Self-Determination Act was signed into law – the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council chartered the Northern Cheyenne Indian Action Program, Incorporated, the organizational body that became the institution now known as Chief Dull Knife College. Funding was provided through the Indian Technical Assistance Center of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and six Northern Cheyenne representatives were appointed by the Tribal Council to manage its affairs (Tribal College Journal, “The Spiritual Journey of Chief Dull Knife College,” tribalcollegejournal.org, accessed 2 June 2026).

The institution’s founding vision was shaped in significant part by John Woodenlegs, a former Northern Cheyenne tribal president who had served the tribe from 1955 to 1968 and was, notably, the grandson of Wooden Leg, a warrior who fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Under Woodenlegs’s leadership, the nascent college established its earliest program not as a liberal arts institution but as a vocational training center, reflecting the immediate economic needs of the reservation community. The college operated initially in surplus army tents, offering instruction in mining, construction, and forestry – practical trades tied to development activity in surrounding southeastern Montana communities, including the coal industry centered near Colstrip (Chief Dull Knife College, History, www.cdkc.edu/node/1; Native Sun News Today, “Chief Dull Knife College Receives One Million,” nativesunnews.today, accessed 2 June 2026).

This was not an institution with pretensions toward the purely academic. It was a response to a labor market that was expanding around the reservation without employing its residents in proportion to the surrounding extraction activity. As a 1978 report submitted to the federal government’s Education Resources Information Center noted, the college at that time had approximately seventy-five students enrolled in vocational programs and between fifty and one hundred twenty in academic courses, with accreditation provided through Miles City College, located some one hundred miles to the northwest (ERIC, “Past, Present and Future: Dull Knife Memorial College,” eric.ed.gov, Document ED171439, accessed 2 June 2026).

Academic Expansion and the Path to Accreditation

The transition from a vocational training program to a fully functioning community college was neither rapid nor effortless. In 1979, the institution entered into a formal arrangement with Miles City College to begin offering credit-bearing post-secondary courses, establishing the institutional foundation that would eventually support independent accreditation (Tribal College Journal, “The Spiritual Journey of Chief Dull Knife College,” tribalcollegejournal.org, accessed 2 June 2026). That same year, the Tribal Council issued a separate formal charter establishing the college as an autonomous entity – distinct from the tribal governmental structure – giving it the administrative independence that accrediting bodies would later require (Native Sun News Today, “Chief Dull Knife College Receives One Million,” nativesunnews.today, accessed 2 June 2026).

A critical federal development came in 1978, when Congress enacted the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act, Public Law 95-471, which authorized direct grants to tribally chartered institutions for operating expenses and institutional improvement (Federal Register, federalregister.gov, accessed 2 June 2026). This legislation provided a structural mechanism for federal financial support that was independent of the older BIA contracting system, and it gave tribal colleges across the country a more stable, if perpetually underfunded, fiscal footing.

By 1994, the college had achieved another significant milestone. Under the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act of that year, Chief Dull Knife College – then still operating under its original name, Dull Knife Memorial College – was among the thirty-two tribal colleges designated as land-grant institutions, bringing with it access to additional federal resources under agricultural and extension program funding (AAA Native Arts, “Chief Dull Knife College,” aaanativearts.com, accessed 2 June 2026). Full independent accreditation from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities was granted in 1996, formalizing the institution’s standing as a legitimate post-secondary college capable of conferring associate degrees in arts, sciences, and applied science whose credits are transferable within the Montana University System (Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, nwccu.org, accessed 2 June 2026).

Culture, Language, and the Meaning of Self-Determination

If the early years of the college were defined by vocational necessity, its mature identity has been shaped by cultural and linguistic ambition. The renaming from Dull Knife Memorial College to Chief Dull Knife College in 2001 was not a cosmetic change but a deliberate act of emphasis: the addition of the honorific “Chief” was intended, as institutional publications explicitly state, to underscore the respect owed to Dull Knife as a leader, not merely a historical figure memorialized by an institution (Achieving the Dream, “Chief Dull Knife College,” achievingthedream.org, accessed 2 June 2026).

The cultural dimension of the college’s work is most visible in its engagement with the Cheyenne language, which belongs to the Algonquian language family and occupies a position of acute vulnerability. Decades of English-only policies in reservation schools had effectively broken the intergenerational transmission of the language; by the late twentieth century, active fluency was confined largely to elderly community members. The college’s response has been sustained and structured. Approximately ten percent of its students are enrolled in Cheyenne language classes at any given time, and the Cultural Affairs Department organizes linguistics workshops, two annual language immersion camps, and maintains archival resources on Cheyenne oral traditions and biographical history (Tribal College Journal, “The Spiritual Journey of Chief Dull Knife College,” tribalcollegejournal.org, accessed 2 June 2026).

The college’s ceremonial traditions also distinguish it within the landscape of Montana higher education. Under the leadership of Dr. Alonzo Spang in the mid-1990s, the institution began inviting elders to campus to share stories and reconnect with the college’s archived photographic collections. Spang also introduced the practice of presenting male graduates with coup sticks and female graduates with beaded medicine pouches at commencement ceremonies – a practice that frames academic achievement within a Cheyenne cultural context rather than exclusively within the conventions of Western academic ritual (Tribal College Journal, “The Spiritual Journey of Chief Dull Knife College,” tribalcollegejournal.org, accessed 2 June 2026).

The curriculum itself is structured to serve a population whose educational pathways have historically been interrupted. Seventy percent of students enroll on a part-time basis, reflecting the reality that most are managing employment, family caregiving responsibilities, or both (AAA Native Arts, “Chief Dull Knife College,” aaanativearts.com, accessed 2 June 2026). Associate degree programs do not require a declared major, allowing students to complete general academic foundations in one of eight fields of study before transferring to four-year institutions – a design that prioritizes completion over conventional academic sequencing.

Leadership and Institutional Legacy

For much of its modern history, the public face of Chief Dull Knife College was Dr. Richard Littlebear, a Northern Cheyenne scholar and linguist who served as president for an extended period before being succeeded in October 2022 by Eva Flying, the first woman to lead the institution. Flying, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe with a background in health and wellness program management, brings to the role an educational background that itself illustrates the institution’s purpose: she holds degrees from Sheridan College, Fort Lewis College, and Montana State University Billings (Tribal College Journal, tribalcollegejournal.org, accessed 2 June 2026).

The college remains small by any conventional measure. Its enrollment hovers between one hundred and three hundred students in a given semester, and its full-time faculty numbers approximately thirteen. Its campus in Lame Deer comprises a main building housing administrative and classroom space sufficient for three hundred students, along with separately housed facilities for the library – named the Dr. John Woodenlegs Memorial Library in honor of the founder – a cultural learning center, early childhood programs, adult literacy instruction, and vocational training (Chief Dull Knife College, 2025-2026 Catalog, cdkc.edu/CAT25-26.pdf, accessed 2 June 2026). The college has drawn outside recognition and philanthropic support, including a grant of one million dollars from the MacKenzie Scott charitable initiative that selected CDKC alongside five other western tribal colleges (Native Sun News Today, “Chief Dull Knife College Receives One Million,” nativesunnews.today, accessed 2 June 2026). On average, more than half of its graduates continue to four-year institutions.

The institution is now more than a half-century old, which in the context of Montana’s tribal college landscape places it among the founding generation of such institutions. It has survived underfunding, federal policy shifts, and the persistent economic pressures of a reservation community in which poverty remains statistically entrenched. What it represents, in the longer arc of Northern Cheyenne history, is something the college’s founding documents gesture toward but that the bare facts of its existence communicate more plainly: the determination of a people who walked four hundred miles through winter to return to their homeland, and who, a century later, built a college on that same ground to ensure their children would not have to leave it to be educated.

Works Cited

Chief Dull Knife College. “History.” Chief Dull Knife College, www.cdkc.edu/node/1. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Chief Dull Knife College. Chief Dull Knife College 2025-2026 Catalog. Lame Deer, MT: Chief Dull Knife College, 2025. www.cdkc.edu/CAT25-26.pdf. Accessed 2 June 2026.

“Dull Knife.” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society, www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=DU004. Accessed 2 June 2026.

“Past, Present and Future: Dull Knife Memorial College (Indian Action Program Inc.).” ERIC, Institute of Education Sciences, 1978, ED171439, eric.ed.gov/?id=ED171439. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Littlebear, Richard, ed. We, the Northern Cheyenne People: Our Land, Our History, Our Culture. Lame Deer, MT: Chief Dull Knife College, 2008. OCLC 277229592.

Littlebear, Richard. “What’s in a Name? Tribal Colleges Cultivate Students’ Cultural Identity.” Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education, Nov. 2011, tribalcollegejournal.org/what%E2%80%99s-name-tribal-colleges-cultivate-students%E2%80%99-cultural-identity/. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Littlebear, Richard. “The Spiritual Journey of Chief Dull Knife College.” Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education, vol. 30, no. 2, Winter 2018, tribalcollegejournal.org/the-spiritual-journey-of-chief-dull-knife-college/. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Bureau of Indian Education. “Tribally Controlled Schools.” U.S. Department of the Interior, bie.edu/topic-page/tribally-controlled-schools. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Library of Congress, Law Library Blog. “Anniversary of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.” blogs.loc.gov/law/2024/01/anniversary-of-the-indian-self-determination-and-education-assistance-act/. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Missouri River Basin Project (U.S.). Social and Economic Study of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Montana. Billings Area Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1951. Montana Memory Project, University of Montana Mansfield Library, www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/5724. Accessed 2 June 2026.

Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. “Chief Dull Knife College.” NWCCU Institutional Directory, nwccu.org/institutional-directory/chief-dull-knife-college/. Accessed 2 June 2026.

“Chief Dull Knife College.” AAA Native Arts, 31 Jan. 2021, www.aaanativearts.com/chief-dull-knife-college. Accessed 2 June 2026.