The Colorado Magazine

Composed around 1870, the photographic portrait of Amache Ochinee Prowers is a window into her complex world. Amache’s direct gaze at the camera exudes a confident strength. She seems at home in the Victorian studio setting, and her garb is fitting for a woman of that era, complete with heavy jewelry and a ruffled shirtwaist. Yet the careful observer might note that she lacks the foundation upon which proper women’s dress of that time was constructed: a corset. This, and her distinctly Indigenous facial features, let us know that she was no ordinary consumer of Victorian fashions. Amache was a full-blood member of the Cheyenne nation.

How Denver’s Black newspapers raised the alarm and rallied the resistance against one of Hollywood’s first—and most notoriously racist—blockbusters.

This essay is the Best Graduate Essay winner in the 2019 Emerging Historians Award. Additional awards went to Saya “Ted” Richthofen of Metropolitan State University of Denver, Best Undergraduate Essay winner for "'Openly and with Gusto': How Women Moonshiners Led to Denver’s First Female Cop," and Jacob Swisher from Colorado State University, Best Overall Essay winner for "Were They Mexicans or Coloradans? Constructing Race and Identity at the Colorado–New Mexico Border."

The Emerging Historians Award is a program of History Colorado’s State Historian’s Council.

The best way to stop a bad bug is with a good one.

Colorado lost an incredible Chicana this year. She was known for her active role in the Chicano Movement and her bookstore in Denver. Her granddaughter shares this booklist with us to honor her legacy. 
 

A century from now, archaeologists will make sense of 2020 based on everything we left behind. How will the things we discarded define 2020? What experiences and lessons will they illuminate? And how might the archaeologists of 2120 visualize the cultures of the past?