Dr. Bill Unrau

Dr. Bill Unrau, as a Professor of History at Wichita State University, can fascinate you for hours, if you ask, with stories about Indians he's remembered from years of research and study.

To wit: Did you know the Plains tribes' sign language was comparable to the one used today by deaf-mutes? For rain, the gesture was to hold the hands at the level of the shoulders, and with the fingers pushing downward. Or, that some of the Plains tribes brushed their hair with the rough side of a bison tongue, while some used porcupine tails mounted on sticks? Or, that the great Kiowa chief, Satanta, took great delight in playing a French horn he had obtained from a white trader?

Yet, in contrast, he can be indisputably professional in class, speaking easily for fifty minutes on, say, the Chivington Massacre of Cheyenne Indians in 1864. "It was an act of political desperation on Colonel Chivington's part," he says, "and wholly in line with U.S. Indian policy dating back to the days of Jefferson and Jackson."