Memories of Western Violence, Lost and Found

On November 29, 1864, Colorado militia attacked a group of around 700 peaceful Cheyennes and Arapahos camped along Sand Creek, near the Kansas-Colorado border. Led by Colonel John Chivington, an abolitionist and former Methodist minister, the soldiers had orders to find and punish “hostile” Indians responsible for raids on Colorado settlements. Chivington, however, failed to locate militant Cheyennes and chose instead to assault the “friendly” bands at Sand Creek, claiming that hostiles were hidden among them. Firing into the camp with rifles and field artillery, the soldiers killed more than 150 Indian people, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly. After setting the survivors to flight, the militia returned to the site to scalp and mutilate the dead. The incident had far-reaching consequences. It sparked intensified warfare on the southern plains, as Cheyennes and Arapahos retaliated with attacks of their own. It also helped to inspire a reform movement in American Indian affairs. When reports of the atrocity circulated in the Eastern press, critics of federal Indian policy cited the massacre as evidence that the United States must reorient its approach to emphasize peaceful assimilation over military conquest. Congress investigated the episode, condemning Chivington’s actions, and the United States even promised reparations to the Indian survivors. The massacre quickly became a symbol of the violence of American westward expansion. By the twentieth century, it joined the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the Navajos’ Long Walk, and the massacre at Wounded Knee on the short list of tragic events that Americans invoked as emblems of the nation’s unjust treatment of Indian peoples.

In A Misplaced Massacre, historian Ari Kelman examines the public memory of Sand Creek, focusing on the campaign by the National Park Service (NPS) to create a historic site interpreting the event. Launched in the late 1990s, the project enjoyed broad support among a variety of different interests. Local residents hoped that increased heritage tourism might help improve eastern Colorado’s stagnant economy. Cheyennes and Arapahos recognized the commemoration as an opportunity to honor their ancestors and bear witness to their people’s past suffering. NPS officials, meanwhile, saw the site as an opportunity to demonstrate the agency’s commitment to cultural pluralism, while showcasing its ability to interpret the darker chapters of American history. They also hoped it might become a model for future cooperative endeavors between the agency and Indian nations. As Kelman demonstrates, however, the Sand Creek project quickly became the focus of a series of rancorous arguments that, at times, came close to ending work on the site. While almost everyone agreed that commemorating Sand Creek was a good idea, the process of commemoration revealed fundamental incongruities over the meaning of the massacre and the uses of its memory in the present-day West.

Kelman’s book joins a small but significant recent literature on the public memory of Western violence. In the last decade, Michael Elliot has analyzed contemporary struggles over the Battle of the Little Bighorn, while Karl Jacoby has dissected memories of the Camp Grant Massacre in Arizona. As both a scholar and a participant, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson has written on the Dakota people’s commemorations of the Sioux War in Minnesota.¹ A Misplaced Massacre also reflects the renewed emphasis among Native American historians on charting the violence unleashed by American settler colonialism, a turn exemplified by Ned Blackhawk’s prize-winning study of Great Basin communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.² In examining Sand Creek, Kelman adopts what he terms a “nontraditional architecture” (p. x). His main subject is the creation of the Sand Creek National Historic Site, which opened to the public in 2007. While telling that story, however, he frequently flashes back to previous commemorations, arguments among Sand Creek participants over the massacre, and the mid-nineteenth century Indian wars themselves. Rather than proceed chronologically, the study moves around in time, while always eventually returning to the campaign to develop...