In the early morning of November 29, 1864, elements of the first and third Colorado volunteer regiments surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. That day, more than 150 Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the vast majority of them being women, children, and elderly men nominally under U.S. protection, were slaughtered by the Colorado volunteer regiments. Today, I was invited by the National Council on Public History to deliver a presentation on one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. After finalizing my research on the memorialization of the Sand Creek Massacre of Colorado, I was able to develop three lessons that illustrate the history, memory, and commemorative of this historic event.
Three aspects of this Massacre that stood out the most to me …show more content…
This leads into my next lesson on how the lingering debate over the meaning of Sand Creek aggravated a serious disagreement about where the massacre had taken place, simultaneously leading to the repression of not acknowledging the Native American community. During the 1990s, the National Park Service became embroiled in a running fight among two local landowners, three Indian tribes, and their respective academic allies concerning the exact location of Black Kettle’s village. Efforts by the NPS to locate the Sand Creek Massacre site began in 1998 when Congress passed the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site Study Act. Predictably, as the search for the site unfolded, tribal representatives squared off with non-Indian bureaucrats and scholars over the discrepancies between written accounts and oral histories of the
Three aspects of this Massacre that stood out the most to me …show more content…
This leads into my next lesson on how the lingering debate over the meaning of Sand Creek aggravated a serious disagreement about where the massacre had taken place, simultaneously leading to the repression of not acknowledging the Native American community. During the 1990s, the National Park Service became embroiled in a running fight among two local landowners, three Indian tribes, and their respective academic allies concerning the exact location of Black Kettle’s village. Efforts by the NPS to locate the Sand Creek Massacre site began in 1998 when Congress passed the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site Study Act. Predictably, as the search for the site unfolded, tribal representatives squared off with non-Indian bureaucrats and scholars over the discrepancies between written accounts and oral histories of the