The 2025 Pilster Great Plains Lecture returns to Chadron State College September 18. This year’s lecture features Northern Cheyenne historian and writer, Gerry Robinson and will take place at 7:30pm (Mountain) at the Chadron State College Student Center Ballroom. The event is free and open to the public.
The lecture titled “The Northern Cheyenne Homecoming: Reclaiming, Renaming, and Reframing History” will convey a balanced and factual evaluation of the inspirational story of the 1878 Northern Cheyenne return to their homeland. It will showcase recent discoveries and developments that have occurred along the trail as the result of an ongoing archeological survey and a growing tribal commitment to relate what took place from the Northern Cheyenne point of view.
Robinson is a Northern Cheyenne tribal member and historian who was raised at the heart of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana. His book, The Cheyenne Story: An Interpretation of Courage, won the 2019 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Western Novel. It is the first book in a trilogy he is writing that shares the tragic, yet inspiring story of his ancestor’s exile to Indian Territory in the late 1800’s and their determined struggle to return to their homeland in the northern plains.
The Pilster Lecture is made possible by the gift of ranchland in northwest Nebraska near Whitney in Dawes County, by the late Esther Pilster. The gift, which established an endowment with the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society, was a tribute to her late husband Raleigh, who grew up on the ranch, and his parents John and Grace Pilster.
Beloved author Mari Sandoz, 1896-1966, is celebrated for her histories of the Native Americans and homesteaders living on the High Plains. She lived and wrote in Lincoln, Denver and New York City, but the dominant subject of her work was the place and the people of the High Plains where she was born and reared, where she centered her research and gained insights into the events and personalities that populate her histories.