The day Rory Spotted Horse stood at a Fort Collins City Council meeting with his eagle feather staff and was told to remove it was not the beginning of the story — and it will not be the end.
To many, it may have looked like a small disruption — a misunderstanding, perhaps. For those of us who carry the memory of the land, it was part of a much longer story, one that includes flooded valleys, vanished springs, displaced nations and ceremonies that still persist, even in silence.
Rory came with the law in his hands on the June 3rd council meeting — not the kind written in statute books, but the kind written in relationships, between land and water, elders and youth, this world and the next. The eagle staff is not decoration; it is governance. It holds memory and duty. That night, Rory was not just speaking; he was helping guide spirits home, tending to grief and helping the living carry what must be carried.
This is part of what it means to live under treaties that are rarely honored, especially in a university built on lands taken under the Morrill Act of 1862. The water around where Colorado State University’s Hughes Stadium once stood, land that was never meant to be sold or diverted without consent, is now dammed and piped around Fort Collins and CSU’s campus. It’s used to irrigate research crops, green sports fields and fill fountains, while the tribal nations who once drank from that valley were never consulted.
And the land remembers.
Long before CSU, dams or ballot initiatives, beavers shaped these rivers. Their dams weren’t obstructions but rather invitations — slowing water, giving it time to sink in, feeding the roots of willows and the hooves of bison. Beavers taught us that good governance is slow and meandering, not fast and forceful. They showed us that a river must bend if it is to sustain life, especially in times of drought, fire and change.
That is the vision we are being called to now: A Two Row vision, much like the Two Row Wampum Treaty created between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch. Two vessels, the canoe and the ship, traveling together down the river of life, neither trying to steer the other. That treaty still holds precedence as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.
At CSU, that balance has been lost. Indigenous corn, rematriated to teach about the Two Row relationship, was recently removed. Bread corn for ceremony, for stories and for survival has been replaced with ornamental flowers.
Is this what land-grant agriculture has become? Decorative rows with no roots? A place where aesthetics outrank ethics?
Meanwhile, the College of Agricultural Sciences continues to benefit from federal irrigation projects like the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which drowned sacred places and broke ecological systems in the name of “progress.” And yet, no tribal nations were part of that decision, despite the fact that under federal water law — including the Winters Doctrine in 1908 — they hold senior rights to these waters.
So now, we ask:
Will CSU return to the riverbank with us?
Will the university and the state attorney general investigate the misuse of the Hughes Land and fulfill the federal obligations that come with being a land-grant university?
Will student leadership step up — not to manage — but to share stewardship, to create Two Row co-governance rooted in relationship, not rhetoric?
The beaver doesn’t build for itself alone. It builds for the whole wetland: muskrats, turtles, herons, insects, roots.
It is time we build that way, too.
For Those Yet Unborn
