A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  Defenders of the status quo, meanwhile, mobilized to keep the statue intact. Duane Smith, a colleague of Dick Ellis’s at Fort Lewis College in Durango, bristled about meddlesome do-gooders, insisting, “it’s absolutely stupid to take [Sand Creek] off.” He admitted, “I know I sound like a bigot, [but] two American Armies were fighting for their homeland. That is not unusual in world history. We’re making it into something it’s not.” Of the statue’s original sponsors, Smith noted, “[they] weren’t devils incarnate.” The memorializers had understood what they were doing, he continued, believing that “for the future of Colorado, Sand Creek was a tremendously important Civil War battle.” Mike Koury, a local author, editor, and active member of a national heritage organization known as the Order of the Indian Wars, agreed with Smith and also parroted John Chivington: “I firmly believe that there were hostiles in that camp.” Political correctness run amok, he warned, would “dishonor people who fought in the Civil War.” Anyway, it did not matter, Koury continued, “whether [Sand Creek] was a massacre or not.” The men who fought there “were soldiers” who deserved to be hailed for their patriotism. After all, “they went where they were ordered to go and did what they were ordered to do.” Finally, Koury echoed Tom Noel: “Taking [Sand Creek] off a statue is not going to make it disappear. You gain nothing by hiding it under a blanket.” The only reasonable course, and certainly the only patriotic course, was to celebrate Colorado’s history, including Sand Creek.59

  When the legislature’s Capitol Advisory Committee met on July 31 to discuss the controversy, Halaas and Cometsevah testified that Sand Creek should remain part of the memorial—accompanied by a new plaque providing historical context. Halaas stated that the massacre had, in fact, been part of the Civil War. The previous day, he had made this point to the Colorado Historical Society’s president, Georgianna Contiguglia: that the best source for historians of the war, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (also known as the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion), included details of Sand Creek; that the soldiers “involved in Sand Creek were Civil War troops”; that Governor John Evans “believed the Cheyennes and other plains tribes were allied with the Confederate government”; and that Chivington was a “Civil War officer.” Halaas’s perspective broadened the war narrative and de-emphasized reconciliation, allowing for the inclusion of injustices like Sand Creek. Cometsevah, in turn, read aloud his and Brady’s letter to the legislature, “respectfully request[ing] that the words ‘Sand Creek’ presently engraved on the Civil War memorial be retained” and that new “signage be placed around the Civil War statue that would inform and educate the public about the holocaust of Sand Creek.” After hearing other witnesses, the committee recommended reconsidering the resolution. Within months, the legislature would adopt all of Halaas’s suggestions.60

  Cathy Spude, meanwhile, managed to work around the skirmishes taking place on the capitol steps. She convened a preliminary meeting with the descendants on July 25, hoping to secure their cooperation for the upcoming site search. The gathering proved disastrous, deepening the descendants’ frustration with the NPS. After Spude explained that the NPS would be dealing with the tribes on a government-to-government basis, Steve Brady exploded. Spude’s proposed structure, he argued, ignored intratribal divisions and the authority vested in the descendants on matters relating to Sand Creek. Laird Cometsevah then wondered why there had to be another site location study at all: “It is not the Cheyennes … but white people who question the location of the Sand Creek Massacre.” The descendants, he reiterated, knew where the bloodshed had taken place. Cometsevah and Brady then tag-teamed Spude, “explaining that this [memorializing the massacre] was not a tribal but a descendants’ matter.” Recalling their frustration at the way their cultural authority had been ignored by the NPS during Senator Campbell’s Sand Creek hearings, Brady and Cometsevah next insisted that tribal “oral histories would be part of any site study.” Finally, they demanded assurances that a prospective memorial would “not void Article 6 of the 1865 [Little Arkansas] treaty … which granted as yet unpaid reparations to the victims of the massacre or their descendants.”61

  Looking back on that fractious episode with a hint of a smile creeping across his face, Brady admitted that he and Cometsevah, along with worrying about the particular issues they raised, also were sending the NPS a message: the descendants would not be ignored by the federal government this time; their voices would be heard throughout the memorialization process. Regardless, a chastened Spude reassured the frustrated descendants that she would do everything in her power to comply with their demands. She then managed to steer the agenda at the meeting to a discussion of geomorphological investigations, explaining that “ground-disturbing” work would have to be done at the site. The descendants, having cooperated with Doug Scott in similar endeavors already, had no objections to that or the prospect of additional archeological surveys. The meeting adjourned on relatively good terms.62

  But controversy lingered. Spude, it turned out, had blundered by excluding Bill Dawson from the gathering with the descendants. She and Dawson had met twice already. Spude had traveled to his ranch first on July 7 and then again on July 23, just two days before convening her meeting in Denver with the Sand Creek descendants. At her first discussion with Dawson, the rancher acknowledged that he wanted to sell his property; he even showed her a copy of the letter, including his $1.5 million asking price, that he had written to Ward Churchill more than a year earlier. Reading the note reassured the jittery Spude, who knew that, because of Senator Campbell’s willing-seller-only provision, the site search likely could not proceed without Dawson’s cooperation. At the same time, the rancher’s attitude worried her. Dawson insisted that although he wanted “to actively participate in efforts to confirm the location of the massacre,” he would do so “only as an active participant.” Spude suspected this meant that Dawson wanted what she called “editorial control” over the process. Their next meeting deepened her concerns. Dawson became visibly upset when he learned that there would be no “press embargo” surrounding the search; he demanded a lump sum payment to secure his participation; and when he heard that Spude had not invited him to the upcoming meeting with the descendants, he seethed.63

  Spude’s reasons for excluding Dawson seemed sound at the time. Not knowing how deep the rancher’s ties ran with some of the descendants, Spude assumed that the tribal represenatives would not want to meet with outsiders present. She believed that Dawson’s presence might prove disruptive. From Spude’s perspective, Dawson “wanted to be calling the shots all the way from the beginning.” Dawson, in turn, viewed Spude “as a government bureaucrat”—as nasty a slur as he had in his repertoire—“a Park Service person who says that we’re going to do it my way and you’re going to like it or else.” Spude also did not realize that Dawson would use the perceived slight as an opportunity to consolidate his power in the search by asserting what amounted to veto power over the process. He did so first by attacking Spude for being secretive, demanding a “verbatim copy” of notes from the meeting. Spude responded icily, suggesting that the rancher file a Freedom of Information Act request if he wanted the documents so badly. Dawson then labeled her move a “breach of trust,” prompting Spude to reply that the descendants “did not wish for [him] to receive a copy of the meeting notes.” Dawson next wrote to John Cook, head of the NPS regional office in Denver, telling him, “problems with Ms. Catherine Spude have caused me to withdraw support for this project.” On another occasion, Dawson warned Cook: “If you want cooperation from the landowner of the focus piece of property, you’d better lose Cathy Spude, because I am not going to have anything more to do with her.” Dawson was not bluffing; the project would not move forward until he got his way.64

  Aware of the threat, on September 15, 1998, Cook met with Dawson, promising him that Cathy Spude would no longer direct the Sand Creek project. Spude, for her part, only
learned about that decision at the end of a contentious NPS planning meeting for the site search team—a gathering at which she found herself, in her words, “treated as an adversary, rather than a collaborator.” The difficult news, and the way she received it without any advance warning, “devastated” her. Spude had been certain that the job was hers. She had devoted months of her life to the Sand Creek project. And she hated the idea that Bill Dawson had pulled the strings that had unseated her. For the moment, though, she remained on the memorialization team, coordinating the archeological investigations. Then Dawson gainsaid even that. Eventually, after he and Spude clashed yet again, she realized that her participation “wasn’t going to help the Park Service any.” She informed her replacement, Rick Frost, then the Sand Creek site search manager, “I can’t work on the project anymore because Dawson is going to use me as an excuse to make trouble for you.” Frost accepted her resignation from the team, and Dawson, who chuckled when recalling his successful power play, said of Spude: “I’ll be real frank. She wasn’t involved in the project because of me.” NPS officials, having given in to Dawson’s demands on personnel matters once, would learn later, when grappling with him again, that they had emboldened rather than placating the rancher.65

  With Dawson at least temporarily mollified, Rick Frost put together the Sand Creek team. A native of Colorado who grew up in the foothills outside Denver, Frost looked like the poster boy for an NPS employee, a backcountry ranger even. He was tall, square-jawed, and handsome. In 1998, when John Cook tapped him to manage the site search, Frost had, only the previous year, joined the NPS as regional communications director. Still, with a wealth of experience in the federal bureaucracy, Frost was not exactly Bill Dawson’s kind of guy. He came to the NPS having worked a series of jobs in Washington, DC, both on and off Capitol Hill: as a staffer for Congressman Robert Toricelli; as legislative director for Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro; and then, just prior to joining the NPS, as communications director at the Consumer Products Safety Administration. Frost understood and excelled at politics and diplomacy, one reason that Cook selected him to head a high-profile project that was already stirring controversy. NPS shorthand suggested that, as a newcomer to the organization, Frost might not yet “bleed green,” but while working on the Sand Creek project, he would prove his loyalty time and again to his new employer.66

  A number of talented researchers worked on the team under Frost. Doug Scott, who led the archeological investigations during Dick Ellis’s site search, returned for round two. His friend, Jerry Greene, joined him as one of the historians working on the Sand Creek project. If Scott was rough-hewn, Greene appeared bookish, a walking stereotype of the scholar he was. Tall and slender, he spoke in soft tones lightly inflected with the flatness of the upper Midwest, where he went to school, rather than the rounder vowels of the West, which later became his home and the focus of his life’s work. Well known for his slender monograph Evidence and the Custer Enigma, Greene was a stickler for archival research and a demon for detail. His masterpiece remains one of the most influential accounts ever written about the Battle of the Little Bighorn. With its publication, Greene proved himself every bit the sleuth Scott was—the two had worked closely together on projects through the years—by treating the infamous fight as a kind of crime scene, sifting through evidence and debunking myths about how Custer and his troops had perished. One of the nation’s foremost experts on the Plains Indian Wars, Greene had been with the NPS for twenty-five years when he joined the Sand Creek team.67

  Working with him were Gary Roberts, a history professor and author of “Sand Creek: Tragedy and Symbol,” an unpublished dissertation that remains the finest available study of the massacre, and two other NPS historians, Lysa Wegman-French and the team captain, Christine Whitacre. At the time, Wegman-French referred to herself and Whitacre as “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” because they shared so much in common. Unlike Greene or Roberts, who both specialized in the history of the American West and the Indian wars, Whitacre and Wegman-French were generalists, asked to master new topics and produce work for the NPS in short order. Both were successful public historians, not academics. They were especially concerned with the intersection of history and place, including the impact of historic preservation on built landscapes. In that capacity, they compiled special resource studies, detailed assessments of whether a proposed site merited selection as a unit of the National Park System. The two women were also committed to the NPS, convinced that they had the “best job[s] in the world,” and proud of the work they did. Finally, both were outgoing and generous with their time, admired by colleagues and superiors alike. Together, Whitacre and Wegman-French would handle the archival research within driving distance of the Denver regional office, while Roberts and Greene would travel to document collections further afield. In addition, Whitacre, a graceful and enthusiastic writer, would compile her team’s findings for publication as part of the NPS’s site search.68

  The last two members of the NPS lineup, Alexa Roberts and Barbara Sutteer, would be assigned the most politically fraught and culturally precarious jobs in the search: working closely with the tribal descendants. Sutteer, the Indian liaison for the NPS, had spent her career in similar situations. She had worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs before joining the NPS in 1989. At that time, she became just the second Native American (Northern Ute/Cherokee) superintendent in the NPS. Her superiors charged her with overseeing the public relations powder keg at the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana, a site that has long occupired a pivotal position on the front lines of the fight over how the NPS interprets the West’s indigenous history. She lasted four years at the job. And though she could look back on many triumphs, including shepherding through the decision to open an Indian memorial at the site, she described that time as “rough.” The experience, like her tenure working on the NPS’s failed effort to memorialize the Wounded Knee massacre, thickened her skin. But the Sand Creek search would still prove alienating. Because of her heritage, Sutteer recalled finding herself in a series of “awkward positions.” She had an “inherent knowledge and understanding of Indian people that the Park Service does not,” but, at the same time, she said, “the tribes looked at me as a government person which made me not part of their circle.” She would find herself caught between worlds throughout the project, with her professional identity inside the NPS and her tribal heritage constantly in question.69

  Alexa Roberts, responsible for collecting oral histories from massacre descendants during the site search, also had a complicated relationship with her status as an NPS employee. At a bit over five feet tall, Roberts kept her brown hair shoulder length and looked young for her age. A quick laugh and unstinting optimism countered her sad eyes. For a woman working across cultural lines, often in patriarchal settings, these traits could be disarming. But Roberts’s charm and sunny disposition led people to underestimate her. Although she preferred compromise to confrontation, she was unafraid to stand her ground. And she had a utopian streak that left her committed to her core values: the importance of multiculturalism and public service. Roberts grew up in Albuquerque and stayed there for her undergraduate and graduate education, at the University of New Mexico, where she earned a PhD in anthropology. She studied the relationship between archeological evidence and tribal oral histories on the Navajo reservation in Window Rock, Arizona. After taking a contract position with the NPS in 1984, Roberts went to work full-time for the Navajo Nation, helping the tribe increase its involvement with federal historic preservation projects. Much of her work involved “inserting tribal perspectives into what had formerly been an Anglo-dominated preservation movement.” She had often found herself, she recalled, at odds with the NPS. But in 1991, she went to work there, hoping to change the agency from within. The Sand Creek project, Roberts believed, offered a rare opportunity to begin reconciling tribal and federal interests in representing the past.70

  Roberts’s dream would not be realized so easily. Even though the
NPS search team members all viewed the Sand Creek project as exciting and important and threw themselves into their work with something like evangelical zeal, it remained for them just that: work. Memorializing the massacre never meant for the NPS what it did for the descendants. Again, this was not because the NPS personnel did not act in good faith; they almost always did. Rather, the politics of memory separated them from the tribal represenatives. The members of the NPS team saw a potential Sand Creek National Historic Site as many things, including a symbol of the NPS’s commitment to pluralism and incorporating Native voices into the national narrative the agency constructs; a template for future cooperation between federal authorities and Indian peoples; and a way to satisfy a select group of influential politicians who wanted the massacre memorialized. The descendants were not necessarily opposed to any of those goals. But they also had their own: honoring the massacre’s victims to promote healing within their tribes; leveraging collective remembrance of Sand Creek in service of reparations claims; and maintaining cultural and political sovereignty throughout the painful memorialization process. As time passed, these disparate aspirations would broaden the divide separating the NPS from the descendants, no matter how much they shared in common.71