Friday, October 17, 2014

History lessons

You’ve probably heard about the brouhaha that raged around a school district near Denver recently. In case you didn’t, here are the Cliff Notes. A newly elected conservative majority on the Jefferson County school board floated a plan to “revisit” the AP history curriculum, their aim being, specifically, “to promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.” Along the way, they wanted to ensure that teachers don’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.” In short, they proposed a return to the dead-white-men, American exceptionalism, might-makes-right, sit-still-and-memorize-glorious-heroes version of history. You know, the sanitized version where disenfranchised groups are invisible at best, villainized at worst, and our leaders always got it right.

The immediate result was some relatively calm protests in the form of “sick-outs” by teachers that closed a few schools. But then the students got wind of it, and their demonstrations lasted for days stretching into weeks.  Their protests were undoubtedly fueled in part by the thrill of adolescent rebellion and a chance for a sunny day out of the classroom and into the news. But they were also enacting super-healthy and age-old resistance by youth to being told what they won’t be allowed to know or do. Fittingly, among the signs they waved were ones saying things like “This is what Democracy looks like!” and “Don’t censor my education.” 

I thought of that story as I was riding along in a bus last weekend, gazing out the window at the passing eastern Colorado prairie, thinking about what this land must have been like before we arrived—“we” being the intruders from the East, the folks with pale skin, nasty diseases, and seemingly bottomless greed for gold, land, and dominion. “Manifest Destiny” on steroids. 



I was looking at the scenery in this way for a reason: we were traveling with a contingent from the Boulder History Museum to a historic site that commemorates the Sand Creek Massacre—the only National Park dedicated to an atrocity committed by the US government against people it was sworn to protect. I’ve wanted to visit the site since I learned about it a year or two ago. We had considered visiting for Thanksgiving this year in homage to the “other side” of the Thanksgiving story. But the museum trip offered an opportunity to let someone else do the driving and also learn a ton in the process. It was a lovely drive, the short-grass prairie rolling by, alternating with green fields (alfalfa?) and tiny towns standing beside the railroad tracks and at the feet of grain elevators. Americana in the low autumn sun.

So, I was reflecting on this landscape and the prairie stories that have been silenced in standard histories. I thought of a long-time favorite book called Pioneer Women that I read many years ago (when I was way into women’s history)—an eye-opening journey through the little-known experiences of women settlers, the “other side” of the often glorified story of the “winning of the west.” That, in turn, reminded me of a blog I wrote recently about slaves in the Civil War, especially about a particular woman slave, and how unaware we are of their side of that story—though most of us learned plenty about the “other side,” i.e., the military, governmental, largely White side of that war. 




All of these trains of thought came together in this notion of what we do and don’t know, what we did and didn’t learn—or in the case of Jeffco schools, what will and won’t be allowed in school children’s history lessons. Another excursion into the necessity of a more inclusive “new history.” Which I also wrote about here before. I was approaching Sand Creek in this way, wanting to know more about what happened there, and especially wanting to know the “other side.” My previous experiences looking at history through new eyes had been enlightening and mind altering. That’s the sort of knowledge I wanted to take from Sand Creek. And I did. It was an excellent day—informative, troubling, exhausting, and excellent. 

I don’t want to dwell here on the details of the massacre; you can read about it here and more here. But a brief overview seems necessary for the rest of this to make sense. So … In November of 1864, exactly 150 years ago next month, as the Civil War raged in the east, the Colorado Territory was in the midst of its own escalating struggle. Gold had been found in the area, and settlers from the east poured in—and then decided to stay. They blithely occupied land that belonged—by treaty with the US government—to the Plains Indians. Some of the Native Americans wanted to expel the settlers; others saw their numbers and concluded that resistance was futile. They hoped for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. A large number of that latter group—several hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians led by elders sometimes called “peace chiefs”—gathered at a village in what is now eastern Colorado, assured that they would be protected there by Union soldiers. The lead chief flew an American flag and a white truce flag from his lodge.

At dawn on the morning of November 29—it will be the day after Thanksgiving this year—a large contingent of Union soldiers, led by Col John Chivington (ironically, a former Methodist minister) descended on the camp. Many of them were members of an untrained “100-day army” recruited specifically to kill Indians, who, in an echo of the enmity of the Civil War, were sometimes called “red rebels.” Throughout the day, the soldiers killed and plundered, chasing down fleeing people on horseback, firing howitzers at groups of women and children cowering in sand banks, beating, torturing, and mutilating. The carnage continued until they ran out of ammunition. About 200 Indians were killed, two-thirds of them women, children, and elderly people. Another 200 were wounded or maimed. The next day, the soldiers returned to claim the leftover spoils of the massacre—moccasins, headdresses, clothing, horses, body parts to display as trophies back home.

In the following days, the “battle” was celebrated in some quarters—including in the newspapers and on the streets of Denver. Before long, though, the government acknowledged that it had been a massacre—but did nothing to redress the losses. Sand Creek became a rallying cry for Indians across the plains, many of whom waged an ultimately futile battle to save their land and their way of life. More and more lands were taken to support the arriving masses, and the Indians were shunted into smaller and smaller territories, sent away from their traditional homelands to places that no settlers wanted.


I’ve long known something of how awful Europeans were to the indigenous people—here and elsewhere. And lately, I’ve learned more and more about how that genocidal push played out here, in my home state. In fact, I wrote about this topic in a blog last year. Still, this place on this day touched me in a new way. Maybe it was the beautiful sunny, windy day that so evoked those earlier times and the freedom of the prairie. Maybe it was the sense, as I approached the memorial hill that overlooks the massacre site, that we visitors were not alone there. That the spirit of the people who camped there that morning is still around. 

I’m certain that it was, in part, the ranger who walked us around the site, whose deep appreciation for these people and their history was palpable as he told us stories about them, about the descendants of survivors, and about how the park services has worked to respect this site and their story. I had a hint of that sort of respect when we attended a lecture about the site earlier in the week. At that presentation and later at the site, I heard about how closely the tribes have worked with the Park Service in developing this place. So closely that the elders were called in to oversee the post-hole digging process when they put in a new fence. Why? Because the massacre site extends over many square miles, and the people who were killedhundreds of them—were never buried, so human remains are still being found. That respect has served the project well. Recently, the tribes decided that they no longer needed to return every year for a prayer vigil because the site is now well honored and well protected. 

But there was another dimension, too, as the story became more complex—and therefore more realistic. Not another good side vs. bad side tale, only with the sides reversed, but a story of human frailty and human compassion on both sides. Among the stories the ranger told was of soldiers who were dumbfounded and then outraged by the attack, soldiers who refused to participate, soldiers who were emotionally damaged by what they witnessed. Two of these men wrote about their experiences, and their letters, full of detail and anguish, are also part of the interpretive material at the site. The Indians revere these men as allies who understood the grotesque outrage of this attack. One of these men, Silas S. Soule, testified before an army commission investigating the massacre. He was subsequently shot in the streets of Denver. Although his murderer was known, he was never charged.

This sort of story was also part of the “new history” I learned that day. The first departure from the standard, sanitized version of Colorado History that I learned as a child was this awful event, undertaken in the name of … what? Power? Status? Proof of superiority? But more surprising to me and just as crucial to “getting” what really happened here was the second departure from a simplistic version of the tale. These are the stories I don't hear if I hastily, even self-righteously portray this event as nothing but a victory of evil over good. There’s another layer. Here, in the midst of this horror were soldiers, men whom we could easily equate with evil—but who refused to exercise their might, who risked (and lost) their careers and their lives by saying "No." Allies, to be sure. Even on what this ranger calls the “killing fields,” there were allies. And the tribes honor them, too.

And then, to return to the more obvious story—though one that was absent in the history I learned as a child—there are the stories of the generations-old pain, the lingering costs to descendants of the Cheyenne and Arapaho who were here. The story of the social worker who couldn’t understand the profound sorrow of the Native American peoples she was working with, didn’t know why they kept referring to “Sand Creek”—some event she assumed had happened in the recent past. Learning about Sand Creek, she understood. Add to the lives of the people who died here and those who suffered physical or psychic wounds on those awful days, add to those days the generations who followed, 150 years now living with the painful stories of an event that has only very recently even been known to most people outside the tribes, much less acknowledged. And yet, the Indians have maintained the wherewithal to organize an annual healing run from Denver, to oversee post-hole digging as necessary, and to shepherd the site that will finally acknowledge what happened here through the slow-moving bureaucracy that is the US Park Service.

I left Sand Creek feeling both exhausted and enlightened. All evening, I thought about what I’d seen and learned and about that sense of the people’s presence. I awoke with them on my mind the next day, and they keep returning. I’ll go back to Sand Creek. There’s more to know about what happened there, in all its complexity, and more to learn from the good people who are preserving that knowledge.


© Janis Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post.

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