Denver American Indian Cultural Embassy to Receive $20 Million Kickstart. What Will It Look Like?

Plenty of people travel home for the holidays, but Lakota and Cheyenne tribal member Rick Williams asks people to consider where the Indigenous people of the Front Range would go.

“What about Indians? What about Indians on the Front Range?” asks Williams, founder of the People of the Sacred Land, a nonprofit that helps Native Americans learn about and research the loss of their territory. “This is our homeland, and there’s nothing to come back to.”

On November 4, voters approved the Vibrant Denver packages, which include $20 million to build the American Indian Cultural Embassy. Williams describes the funding as an “honorable” route to allow “these people to come home in a good way.” The embassy would teach and preserve Indigenous skills, cultures, languages and history, including atrocities during westward expansion and settlement of the Colorado Territory, including the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, in which volunteer troops slaughtered over 230 members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

“There’s an opportunity for them to come here and build a new relationship with their homeland,” Williams says. “The embassy is a brilliant idea for healing Indians and non-Indians alike because, I imagine, they deal with the trauma of knowing what happened, too, and a way to start dealing with the reality that we’re on stolen land.”

Days like Thanksgiving, Colorado’s 150th birthday on August 1, 2026, and the 250th anniversary of the United States next year are “somber” for Native Americans, says Denver Councilmember Stacie Gilmore, who pushed for the American Indian Cultural Embassy to be located in her northeast Denver district.

“Those dates are somber, somber for the American Indian community, and they need help to hold onto their culture, their beliefs and, of course, economically,” Gilmore says. “The community is really excited about being able to weigh in, and this is something for them.”

Gilmore describes the cultural embassy as a cross between a museum, convention center and marketplace inspired by designs from descendants of Cheyenne Chief Tall Bull. The space could host shops, business meetings and pow wows, Indigenous celebrations with song and dance, she says. It would be about ten acres, the size of a large high school, and located near Denver International Airport at the corner of East 56th Avenue and Peña Boulevard, a spot where it’s also expected to attract tourists.

“This could be a top-notch meeting [or] convention space, ultimately a pow wow space,” Gilmore adds. “We’re talking about a marketplace as well for jewelry makers, fashion designers, moccasin makers, painters. This could serve as a space for Kiowa tribal representatives when they’re coming to Denver for business. There’s actually a location, an embassy, for them to conduct their business, to come and feel safe and welcomed, that understands tradition and culture.”

Williams has a much more sprawling idea for what can happen in and around the embassy. He imagines a “living” cultural center that teaches hunting skills, and offers instruction in bead and quill work, as well as tanning buffalo hides and making tribal garb like ribbon skirts.

It would be a place where students can study Indigenous languages, medicinal practices and historic and current land treaties and agreements. “I’m not really in favor of putting up pictures and maps that show what used to be,” he explains. “I think we need to look to see what the next fifty years look like.”

Williams, who previously served as CEO of the American Indian College Fund and is currently an Ingenious scholarship consultant for the University of Colorado, also wants to see an underground greenhouse that replicates the practice of growing plants year-round under earthen dwellings, where it stays 55 degrees. Many Native Americans along the Front Range lived in earthen dwellings, not teepees, he notes.

Williams suggests keeping the cultural elements separate from the part that serves as an embassy. In that area, tribes could exercise agreements similar to sister-city relationships, in which sovereign governments keep an ongoing cultural and intellectual exchange while also looking for ways to engage in foreign trade. (Federal law prohibits tribes from direct foreign trade.) “No one has ever done a cultural embassy” that has both cultural and diplomatic sides, he points out.

“The idea of what it’s going to be, it’s still evolving. Each tribe is going to have a different idea of what it means to come home and be in an embassy,” Williams says, listing off tribes that used to call this area home, including the Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche and Ute.

Letting the Land and People Speak

Support for the idea of an Indigenous embassy emerged about three years ago, when the City of Denver organized the first “tribal convening” to collect oral histories and survey what local Native American communities need. According to Williams, the People of the Sacred Land recommended the construction of a cultural embassy in its 2024 report on the Truth Restoration and Education Commission, a project launched to detail the “true history of Colorado and what led to the genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Colorado.”

That recommendation went from a proposal to a project after voters approved it as part of Mayor Mike Johnston’s $950 million Vibrant Denver bond package, along with improvements to sidewalks and roads, renovations for existing facilities, including Red Rocks, and funding for the Park Hill Park.

The $20 million in Vibrant Denver bonds for the embassy isn’t expected to fund the entire project, but to act as seed money for the first phase, Gilmore says. Funding for the bond projects will come in stages; she’s urging that the embassy funding be included in the first round. “They’ll probably start with traffic signals and smaller packages, but the embassy, the design portion of it, needs to be on the first tranche,” she says. “I’d like to see it by late 2028.”

Plans call for the embassy to be located at First Creek at DEN Open Space, a natural preserve near the airport. Gilmore notes that the area has the same mountain views, dry grasslands and native species, like red-tailed hawks, bald eagles and prairie dogs, that tribes would have seen centuries ago. The Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, which neighbors the site, hosts a herd of about 300 bison as well as colonies of black-footed ferrets.

According to the city, a “shared vision” among local Native Americans of establishing the embassy by the bison herds at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal came up during tribal convenings. “We want to be a part of deciding how they handle the buffalo herds, or the eagle feathers,” Williams says. “Eagle feathers are sacred to us.”

The confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River at what today is the edge of downtown Denver used to be a crossroads for Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche and Ute tribes, among others, who camped at the confluence every winter and hunted buffalo on the plains for more than a thousand years.

Gilmore believes that Colorado doesn’t showcase its Indigenous history as well as such states as Oklahoma, Alaska and North Dakota.

“When someone asks me, ‘Where should I go to see and learn about Indigenous culture?,’ I say, ‘Go to Oklahoma, go to North Dakota,'” Gilmore says. “I don’t say, ‘Come here, come to Colorado,’ because we don’t have anything that elevates our Indigenous voices. I’d like to be able to say that, because this was a meeting point for so many tribes and we have that history. That’s what we’re hoping we can bring back.”

The cultural embassy is loosely modeled on the smaller, four-acre First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, which exhibits art and artifacts from the state’s 39 tribes and has restaurants and event spaces. The much larger 26-acre Alaska Native Heritage Center, which has offices, galleries, Indigenous gardens, a theater and preserved land, also helped influence Denver’s current concept, Gilmore says.

Once she learned that people wanted the cultural embassy in her district, Gilmore says she championed getting the project included in Johnston’s Vibrant Bond proposal; she told Native American communities that would be the best way to move the concept forward

Johnston and a committee selected projects for Vibrant Denver bond funding based on surveys of residents, community meetings and input from city agencies. Gilmore says supporters “coordinated” an effort to write the cultural embassy onto as many of the surveys as possible.

The American Indian Cultural Embassy isn’t the only Denver effort to honor Native American communities and their history. In March, Denver City Council changed Indigenous People’s Day from a commemorative holiday to a designated one, giving city employees a paid day off on the second Monday of October.

On October 6, the council also agreed to name a park in Gilmore’s district Amache Prowers Park, after the notable advocate, teacher and Sand Creek Massacre survivor. According to the city, it will be the first urban park in the country named after a Native American woman.

Denver has already started working on the Living Land Project at City Park, an effort to restore the land to the way it was before European settlement. The $1.5 million project will convert a meadow and picnic area in City Park into a “more naturalized” grassland, gathering area and “healing pond” that grows herbs used by Indigenous tribes for medicine.

Gilmore credits the six Latinas on Denver City Council with recent efforts to elevate the area’s Indigenous culture and history. Gilmore has ancestors who lived in New Mexico before U.S. expansion, and she identifies with her Mexican roots. Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, Jamie Torres, Amanda Sandoval, Diana Romero Campbell and Flor Alvidrez also have early roots.

“We know it’s a real intertwined history of Mexican, Indigenous and others’ culture and history, especially if you’re from New Mexico or Colorado,” Gilmore says. “I think we’re finally walking our talk and putting money towards this community.”

“When it comes to honoring Indians, there’s nothing really here that does that in Denver,” Williams says, adding that recent council efforts could reflect a commitment to changing that.

“I hope so, I really hope so,” he adds. “Even little projects can make us feel good, make us feel like they’re not still trying to exterminate us or send us to boarding schools or steal our land because of the sad history of Colorado.”