This paper examines polar questions in Arapaho, from several perspectives. First, examples are given of consultants' elicited Arapaho glosses for English-language questions, along with consultant commentary and language ideologies on the proper forms. Of note is the consultants' preference for negative polar questions. Next, a series of native-speaker-produced bilingual curricular materials are examined, considered as idealized question models outside the context of a specific focus on polar questions. Again, negative versus positive polar questions are compared. Following is a study of polar questions in conversation. Finally, we offer a close examination of one variety of polar questions -- requests for verification -- using a conversation-analytic approach to examine positive and negative polar questions. The speakers' generalized ideologies about the preferability of negative polar questions are not supported by the corpus data. However, the data show that there is a preference for negative polar questions in situations where otherwise dispreferred responses may occur. Secondarily, use of negative questions is linked to politeness behaviors, where allowance for a dispreferred or negative response is a key feature of question construction. The study then notes that consultants seem to interpret elicited polar questions as potentially referring to very generalized public audiences. Without overtly saying so, they default to the "safest" and most "polite" usage -- negative polar questions. The paper illustrates the challenges of elicitation in the domain of pragmatics, the varying outcomes one gets from variable data sources and methodologies, and the value of micro-level and multi-modal analysis of natural conversation.