School Assignment -- Colorado Indian Shelters

Here in this picture you see a Cheyenne tipi with a brush windbreak right behind it. (I built this as a school assignment.)

The reason that the tipi is specifically Cheyenne is because it is tall, as well as white. Only the Cheyenne Indians had white tipis, and the only other tribe with tall tipis is the Arapaho tribe.

Different lifestyle and terrains had effects on what homes looked like.

In woods or on mountains many shelters were brush shelters (which looked like a tipi without the skin) which were immobile or in temporary shelters like wickiups which were a dome like shelter made of weeds, brush, plants, and grass, etc.

Most plains homes were tipis, although looks varied by tribe.

Now the tribe's lifestyle affected how the tipis looked in more ways than one. There were tall or short, white or a shade of brown, but many tribes used their tipis to tell their legends.

One of the tribes that went through a big change in both homes and lifestyle was the Ute (pronounced you-t) because they were originally forest Indians that lived in wickiups and hunted forest animals, but for some reason the Ute moved to the plains and became buffalo hunters. This action meant that they had to change their type of shelter into tipis.