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 killed—hundreds 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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