Remembering Sand Creek on the Eve of Its Sesquicentennial

Editor’s note:

The following represents the acceptance speech for the Watson Brown Prize for the best book published on the Civil War era in calendar year 2013. Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, awarded the prize to Ari Kelman for his book A Misplaced Massacre, published by Harvard University Press. These remarks were given at the annual banquet of the Society of Civil War Historians (SCWH), held during the Southern Historian Association annual meeting on November 14, 2014, in Atlanta, Georgia. The SCWH judges and administers the book prize.

On November 29, 1864, approximately seven hundred soldiers from the 1st and 3rd Colorado Regiments, led by Col. John Chivington, crept up to an Arapaho and Cheyenne encampment nestled in a bend along Sand Creek, near the Kansas border in southeastern Colorado Territory. Chivington’s men attacked without any warning, driving some 1,000 Native people, who believed they had recently made peace with white authorities, up the dry creek bed. The onslaught left perhaps 175 Indians dead, the vast majority of whom were women, children, or the elderly. Chivington’s troops disgraced themselves further in the wake of the slaughter by combing the field for grim trophies: scalps; fingers and toes; and, some observers later recalled, genitalia. The soldiers then burned the village before returning to Denver, where they were greeted as heroes.

Nearly a century and a half later, on April 28, 2007, the National Park Service opened the gates at its 391st unit, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site—the first site in the National Parks System to cast American soldiers as perpetrators rather than heroes or victims. The opening ceremony was equal parts celebration and memorial service. Speakers—members of the U.S. Congress, Colorado’s governor, leaders of four Native American tribes, and Park Service officials—initially struck an optimistic pose. Protecting the site, they said, honored the memory of the Sand Creek dead, promising long-deferred “healing” for the affected tribes while offering a blueprint for future cooperation between Native peoples and federal authorities. Collective remembrance, they suggested, could seal a rift cut by violence between cultures.¹

Memorials, of course, are always shaped by politics. Contemporary concerns inflect how history is presented at such places, because memorial designers look to the present and future as well as to the past when doing their work. This is especially true of national historic sites, as federal officials have long viewed commemoration as a kind of patriotic alchemy—a way to conjure unity from divisiveness by appealing to shared perceptions of the past. Historic sites around the United States thus evince an abiding faith in the nationalizing power of public memory. These monuments ostensibly serve the nation’s interests by linking its diverse peoples while also legitimating federal authority. Out of common memories, the theory goes, Americans have forged a common identity.

Memories of Sand Creek, speakers at the ceremony suggested, would help visitors to the historic site heal the deep wounds associated with historical trauma. The justification for collective remembrance in the United States in recent years has often rested on a similar promise: to comfort stricken communities and a grieving nation at large. That the Sand Creek site would be the first unit in the National Parks system to label an event in which federal troops had killed Native people a massacre promised to deepen its utility in this regard. By remembering Chivington’s victims and the country’s history of racial violence, visitors would supposedly be prompted to transcend their own prejudices. This palliative vision suffused most of the speeches early at the ceremony.

But Sand Creek is an unlikely source for such utopian sentiments. And so dissenting voices at the opening ceremony, especially those of the Native people who participated in the memorialization process, rejected what they saw as a hollow offer of reconciliation purchased on the cheap. They feared that the Sand Creek memorial might actually be a stalking horse for an older assimilationist project: the U.S. government’s longstanding effort to strip tribal peoples of their distinctive identities. Then other participants...