Basawunena

The Basawunena were one of the groups that formed the Arapaho people. Their name has been translated as “wood-lodge people” or “big lodge people”, and they spoke a distinct variety of the Arapaho language. Arapaho communities ranged across the plains near the Rocky Mountains, hunting bison and maintaining close ties with the Cheyenne. Horses acquired through Native networks in the eighteenth century made travel and hunting over the grasslands easier and changed the scale of their movements.