A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek by Kelman Ari

Author:Kelman, Ari [Kelman, Ari]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2013-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

A revised plaque placed in 2002 at the Colorado Civil War Memorial, Denver. This plaque reinterprets the memorial by suggesting that “the controversy surrounding this Civil War monument has become a symbol of Coloradans’ struggle to understand and take responsibility for our past.” (Photo by author.)

Laird Cometsevah, though pleased that the Civil War memorial had been reinterpreted, remained frustrated because of the turmoil complicating his tribe’s efforts to protect the Sand Creek site. He worried also that the ceremony at the Colorado capitol would allow “white people to think they’ve paid their debts to the Cheyennes” and that the new plaque would not substantively shift collective memory of Sand Creek. The Denver Post’s coverage of the rededication ceremony suggested that Cometsevah had reason to be concerned. The Post perpetuated myths about the massacre and suggested that white Coloradans had secured for themselves expiation on the cheap. An editorial in the paper began with wishful thinking (“Colorado and the country finally are coming to terms with the saddest episode in state history”) then suggested that Sand Creek could be blamed on a small number of convenient scapegoats (“a mob of 700 half-drunk militia volunteers, armed with field artillery and commanded by Col. John Chivington”) before concluding with a misreading of current events (“the effort [to preserve the massacre site] was saved by businessman Jim Druck.… Three cheers for Jim Druck”). Cometsevah, meanwhile, insisted, “the soldiers were guilty, but the federal government was responsible for the genocide committed at Sand Creek. And the federal government still owes my people.” Notwithstanding Jim Druck’s help, the effort to memorialize the site had stalled because Cometsevah’s “people were still dealing with what happened at Sand Creek.”45

The Post article, and Cometsevah’s reaction to it, recapitulated one of the enduring controversies surrounding the memory of Sand Creek: the question of ultimate responsibility for the bloodshed. In the wake of the violence, even those Coloradans, including Silas Soule, who allowed that Sand Creek had been a massacre pinned the blame on John Chivington or his ostensibly ragtag troops. Chivington, these people suggested, was an opportunistic coward, a politically motivated climber, a bloodthirsty madman, or some toxic combination of all of the above. His troops, another line of argument suggested, were the dregs of society: drunks, mental defectives, common criminals, or worse. From this perspective, the massacre could be dismissed as a one-off event, the work of a depraved element, marginal characters in no way representative of Colorado society. More than a century later, that view still proved alluring for some Denver-area journalists (just as it would for Senator Campbell at the site’s opening ceremony). Blaming the massacre on fringe characters, or their debased commander, allowed editors at the Post to ignore the structural issues lurking beneath Sand Creek: how a murderous federal Indian policy, carried out by the army, abetted the settlement of the West. The bloodiest chapter of the region’s history, then, could be redeemed through acts as simple as the casting and unveiling of a culturally sensitive plaque.

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