Speaker Series

A member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe who grew up on the little village of Birney on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, a traditional cultural community. Conrad was the Dean Of Cultural Affair at Chief Dull Knife College for 5 years before joining graduate school at the University of Montana studying cultural resources management. He served as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for 10 years and is currently serving as a member of the state of Montana Burial Board.

Cheyenne-So’taa’e Name: Ho’e-osta-oo-nah’e “Prayer Cloth Woman”

Henrietta Mann is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes and was the founding President of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College (Retired). She was the first individual to occupy the Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Montana State University, Bozeman, where she is Professor Emerita and was the Special Assistant to the President until 2016. She gained tenure at the University of Montana, Missoula where she taught in Native American Studies for the greater part of twenty-eight years, prior to moving to MSU in 2000.

She, also, has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, and Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. In addition, Dr. Mann has served as the Director of the Office of Indian Education Programs/Deputy to the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She, also, was the National Coordinator of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Coalition for the Association on American Indian Affairs.

In 1991, Rolling Stone Magazine named Dr. Mann as one of the ten leading professors in the nation. In 2008 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Indian Education Association. The College Board, Native American Student Advocacy Institute presented her with its first Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013 and has since created the Dr. Henrietta Mann Leadership award to acknowledge and thank leaders for their advocacy in improving lives within native communities.

In 2016 she became one of two Native American scholars ever to be elected to the National Academy of Education. Subsequently in 2018 she was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2017 she received a SPIRIT ALIGNED Legacy Award as a carrier of indigenous community values, memory and wisdom. Dr. Mann holds an Honorary Doctorate in Human Letters from Smith College in Massachusetts.

Ryan is an enrolled member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe (NAT) and an official Northern Arapaho representative to the National Historic Site as sanctioned by Tribal Resolution. As a direct descendant of Chief White Antelope, he has had the honor of working on the Sand Creek NHS project for the Northern Arapaho Tribe for past seven years. Additionally, he is the CEO of ARAPAHO FIRST the NAT's holding company for all of their for-profit business. Ryan has a MBA in Accounting and was the first Non-Governmental employee to obtain the Certified Indian Fiduciary Trust Specialist certificate through the Department of Interior. The Sand Creek Massacre Project is not just part of a job for him, it is a part of his life and is one of his highest priorities. It is a personal effort of his to bridge the generational disconnect that has been created due to the displacement from the Massacre. Ryan always reminds everyone when he talks to them that if our children forget about the Sand Creek Massacre then those soldiers will have succeeded in what they set out to do on November 29, 1864.

Alexa Roberts retired from the National Park Service in 2018 after 25 years of service. She has been involved with the Sand Creek Massacre site since 1999 when the first NPS efforts to identify its location began. She worked closely with Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants in the documentation of oral histories about the massacre and was then appointed as the project manager responsible for ensuring that the national historic site was established. Roberts was the park’s first superintendent, a position which she held until her retirement and one that she considers to be one of the greatest honors of her lifetime. After retirement Alexa moved back to reconnect with her New Mexico roots, but remains deeply committed to the enduring legacy of the Sand Creek Massacre in the lives of its descendants and for its relevance to global issues now and in the future.

Elleni Sclavenitis is an artist and filmmaker based in Denver, Colorado. Her work considers the world through the lens of history and explores repressed historical events in order to expose the power structures underlying conceptions of historical truth. Through all of her projects, she aims to show how the past reverberates throughout the present in significant and often unacknowledged ways. She has shown at venues including DOK Leipzig and Kasseler Dokfest in Germany; Schikaneder Kinosaal in Vienna, Austria; REDCAT and The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, CA; The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC; The Tallgrass Film Festival in Wichita, KS; The Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and the Santa Fe Film Festival, among others. She has worked as a film editor in Los Angeles and taught in the art department at Otis College of Design. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts.