Eastern Shoshone in the context of Wind River Indian Reservation

The Shoshone or Shoshoni (/ʃoʊˈʃoʊni/ shoh-SHOH-nee or /ʃəˈʃoʊni/ shə-SHOH-nee), also known by the endonym Newe, are an Indigenous people of the United States with four large cultural/linguistic divisions:

• Eastern Shoshone: Wyoming
• Northern Shoshone: Southern Idaho
• Western Shoshone: California, Nevada, and Northern Utah
• Goshute: western Utah, eastern Nevada

They traditionally speak the Shoshoni language, part of the Numic languages branch of the large Uto-Aztecan language family. The Shoshone were sometimes called the Snake Indians by neighboring tribes and early American explorers.

The Arapaho (/əˈræpəhoʊ/ ə-RAP-ə-hoh; French: Arapahos, Gens de Vache) are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota.

By the 1850s, Arapaho bands formed two tribes, namely the Northern Arapaho and Southern Arapaho. Since 1878, the Northern Arapaho have lived with the Eastern Shoshone on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and are federally recognized as the Northern Arapaho Tribe of the Wind River Reservation. The Southern Arapaho live with the Southern Cheyenne in Oklahoma. Together, their members are enrolled as the federally recognized Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.

Western Shoshone comprise several Shoshone tribes that are indigenous to the Great Basin and have lands identified in the Treaty of Ruby Valley 1863. They resided in Idaho, Nevada, California, and Utah. The tribes are very closely related culturally to the Paiute, Goshute, Bannock, Ute, and Timbisha tribes.

They speak the Western dialect of the Shoshone language. Other Shoshone-speaking groups include the Goshute (Utah-Nevada border), Northern Shoshone (southern Idaho), and Eastern Shoshone (western Wyoming).