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Chapter 2 Remembrance, Contestation, Excavation: The Work of Memory in Oklahoma City, the Washita Battlefield, and the Tulsa Race Riot Edward T. Linenthal The eminent Chinese anthropologist and sociologist Fei Xiaotong spent a year in the United States during the Second World War. He was struck by how little regard Americans had for history and tradition. “When tradition is concrete, when it is a part of life, sacred, something to be feared and loved, then it takes the form of ghosts,” he said. “To be able to live in a world that has ghosts is fortunate.”1 He recalled that after his grandmother died he could almost see her going to the kitchen to check on lunch preparations, as she did every day. Her enduring presence registered as a “ghost,” but even more, changed the way he thought about time. “Our lives do not just pass through time in such a way that a moment . . . or a station in life once past is lost,”he said.“Life in its creativity changes the absolute nature of time: it makes past into present—no, it melds past, present, and future into one indistinguishable, multilayered scene, a three dimensional body.” Unlike Fei Xiaotong, western historian Patricia Limerick sees an American landscape of immeasurable depth, resonating with the same palpable presence as a departed grandmother. While some of this landscape is celebrated and remembered intensely, there are other, darker stories that mark the landscape that have for too long been denied, suppressed, forgotten. For her, it is not a case of whether there are unsettling presences on the land, rather a question of who has the courage to look. Like Fei, however, she believes that the past is part of our present. Neither time nor space, she writes, “can insulate us from these disturbing histories.”2 I too have felt the presence of the past—Fei’s “three dimensional body”—at evocative sites. I will never forget my first visit to Gettysburg in 1965. It was evening when we approached the “High-Water Mark” memorial, where the famous Pickett-Pettigrew charge almost broke the Union lines. I have returned often for both personal and professional reasons to sit, to walk the field on the anniversary with my family, to study and write. I understand well the sentiments of a Gettysburg guide who years ago spoke of the“brooding omnipresence” of the site. So I don’t dismiss it as merely psychological “projection” when National Park Service employees who are Crow tribal members leave the Little Bighorn battlefield before sunset. I understand why people characterize the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City—site of a terrorist bombing in 1995 murdering 168 people—as “sacred ground,” and I even forgive myself a dose of cowardice when in Poland some years ago. We visited the village of Belzec, site of a Nazi extermination center. We arrived at night, after spending a day at the Majdanek concentration camp, where the gas chamber was still changing color from the effect of the gas used to murder thousands more than sixty years ago, where a huge urn of human ash is part of the memorial, where barracks hold thousands of pairs of shoes of those murdered, a space too difficult to bear. Belzec, however, has no ruins. It is just an open field, with a few farmhouses nearby. To reach the memorial we needed to walk through the field that had been the site of the killing center. After a few steps, however, the ground was spongy, soft, and I learned that we were walking on layers of human ash just beneath the surface. I could not continue, and returned to wait in the van. Ghosts indeed. The touch, feel, sight of the past indeed. It has been my good fortune and an enduring challenge over the past quarter century to have had the opportunity to write about places populated by ghosts. These places are changed forever by the violent events that symbolically stain their landscape. Gettysburg will never again be a quiet farming community. Concord will never again be just a picturesque New England town. The World Trade Center site in New York will always carry the weight of the atrocity of September 11, as will the Pentagon and the small rural community of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a constellation of sites marking a day of mass murder. I knew in writing about the impact of the Oklahoma City bombing that I would...

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