A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  Using “evidence gleaned from the Bonsall map, the two Bent maps, and a host of participant testimony and other documents,” by early spring 1999, the NPS historians had arrived at a series of hypotheses, including the following: Black Kettle’s village had stood on the north side of Sand Creek; the sand pits, the trenches where the Colorado volunteers had concentrated their artillery barrage, had been located less than a mile upstream from that point; the Arapahos had placed their lodges downstream from the Cheyennes’; Chivington and his men had approached the camp from the southwest; the troops had divided before the violence had begun; and following the carnage, the soldiers had bivouacked adjacent to the bloody field. Finally, the historians concluded: “The archival record leaves little doubt that the Sand Creek Massacre took place in the area of the South Bend of Sand Creek,” though “not precisely at the bend.” Here they aligned themselves with Jerry Greene’s interpretation, departing from George Bent’s efforts at mapping Cheyenne history. Instead, the event had unfolded upstream from the traditional site, apparently about three-quarters of a mile from the spot depicted by Bent. Archeological fieldwork, the NPS team hoped, would confirm this theory.32

  Site of the Sand Creek Massacre, based on archival projections. (Adapted from the Sand Creek Massacre Special Resource Study, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service.)

  Working on a track parallel to the historians, Alexa Roberts worried less about her sources’ credibility and more about her own. Charged with collecting ethnographies from the massacre descendants, she had to overcome their anxieties about federal authority and convince them to share their oral histories. This proved difficult because the descendants had generations of practice guarding their Sand Creek stories, especially from white outsiders. Compounding the challenge, Roberts had to work on an abbreviated timetable: the eighteen months laid out in Senator Campbell’s site search legislation. Cathy Spude worried that the tight calendar jeopardized the whole process. Because the oral histories represented the NPS’s best chance to forge relationships with the descendants, Spude thought, “the time frame was just not suitable to the task. We should have had at least three years to gain the tribes’ confidence.” But Roberts did not have the luxury of time. She got right to work, using a consultation meeting to begin discussing her plans with the leaders of the various descendants’ groups.33

  That gathering, unfortunately, threatened to further poison relations further between the tribal representatives and the NPS. Held on November 14 and 15, 1998, two weeks before the massacre’s 134th anniversary, the meeting took place in an antiseptic conference room in a Denver chain hotel. The descendants, who had traveled from as far away as Montana, Wyoming, and Oklahoma, streamed in bleary eyed, bone tired, and, in some cases, late. The issue of timing would crop up throughout the search. The Arapahos and Cheyennes seemingly arrived when they pleased, oblivious to schedules, calibrating their movements to so-called Indian time. Mildred Red Cherries explained, “Indian people don’t walk away from someone until we’re done talking. We don’t leave a relative or a friend just to be on time.” Norma Gorneau laughed, adding, “Well, there’s Indian time, then there’s Cheyenne time.” Otto Braided Hair noted that the phenomenon stemmed from his tribe’s long view of historical processes: “We’ve been waiting for more than a century for a memorial. And people like Laird and Colleen [Cometsevah] have been fighting for this for decades. We’re in no rush.” Context, though, did not matter to the NPS officials who anticipated the descendants’ arrival on the morning of November 14. Tardiness in that moment seemed less a marker of cultural difference than of disrespect.34

  In part, the NPS representatives’ irritation emerged from anxiety. If the descendants were wary of working with federal officials, the NPS team was skittish about the politically fraught task before them. Trying to alleviate these concerns, Mike Snyder, deputy director of the NPS, kicked off the meeting by welcoming the participants. Snyder kept circling back to one theme in his remarks: persistence. Finding the site, he acknowledged, would be difficult; the gulf dividing federal employees and the tribal delegates yawned wide. But because of their shared commitment to a common goal, they would, Snyder insisted, work together. They would persevere. Then, at the meeting’s first break, he left. The descendants wondered why an NPS official had just lectured them about constancy and then “bolted without so much as a goodbye.” Laird Cometsevah contemplated an appropriate way to respond to Snyder’s insulting behavior. Steve Brady smoldered, insisting, “We cannot trust the Park Service now.”35

  Rick Frost, the coolly efficient and politically savvy regional communications director tapped to replace Cathy Spude as head of the NPS search, then took over the meeting. This would be his first chance to place his stamp on the process with the descendants present. Frost recognized the challenge. Five government entities would collaborate on the project: the Northern Cheyenne, the Northern Arapaho, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, the State of Colorado, and the United States. Aware that keeping their representatives together, despite histories of antagonism, would be difficult, Frost cast himself as a court of last resort for the grievances that he believed inevitably would arise. As he recalled it, Mike Snyder had spoken in the morning and then strategically left the meeting, because “people would only deal with me if I was the person they had to deal with.” So he laid down ground rules: everybody would “have a voice.” But he “had to be seen as the person in charge.” Frost then announced that the search would be “an American project, not an Indian project.” This did not sit well with the descendants. Already reminded by Snyder’s performance of injustices that had punctuated centuries of Native-white relations, the Cheyennes saw in Frost federal arrogance embodied. Steve Brady and Laird Cometsevah decided to derail the meeting, simultaneously establishing the tribal representatives’ cultural authority and political autonomy.36

  The two men asked David Halaas if he would serve as the Cheyennes’ proxy, explaining to the NPS officials the massacre’s impact on the tribes. Halaas agreed. The next morning, after the meeting reconvened, Cometsevah interrupted Rick Frost and introduced Halaas. Halaas then played a role once familiar to George Bent, the man whose life story Halaas was writing: cultural intermediary and Cheyenne advocate. A gripping narrator, Halaas spoke with swinging rhythms, built characters like a novelist, and wove telling detail into his stories. On that day, he became emotional recounting the run-up to the slaughter, the desecration of bodies at the massacre, and the lingering effect on Cheyenne politics and culture. “There isn’t any other incident like Sand Creek,” he explained, “that resonates through the years like it has, whose importance is so central to understanding the relationship between Indians and whites thereafter.” Halaas’s story carried a message: the massacre was a watershed event in U.S. history, to be sure, but it was also too central a part of the Cheyennes’ past and future to entrust its narration to federal authorities; pursuing the site would not be business as usual for the NPS; the tribes’ cultural and political autonomy would not be sacrificed in service of other goals, even memorializing Sand Creek, because tribal sovereignty and persistence, as it had been for George Bent a century earlier, was their principal goal.37

  Rick Frost, to his credit, realized what had happened and why. He recalled: “What I learned from that initial meeting was the tremendous emotional resonance of this event for the tribes, the deep impact it had had on an entire people, a civilization, a culture.” And also, as David Halaas explained, that Sand Creek “was, for them, not a historical event, but an emotionally and psychologically present event.” These insights led Frost to abandon his one-size-fits-all strategy, a top-down approach that Steve Brady scorned as the “Park Service’s sacred playbook.” Frost instead adopted a pluralistic vision for the search process. He had never worked with Native people before, and only after Halaas hijacked the consultation meeting did Frost decide, “We were talking about two really different worldviews”—different enough that he realized, “if I was going t
o approach this thing insisting that everybody adopt my worldview, it was going to fail, that there had to be a deep and abiding recognition that there were two, at least two, clearly distinct ways of looking at things, and that they both had to be considered.” At the time, Frost explained contritely: “I’ve come to realize that this project belongs to Indian people.” For the descendants’ purposes, that revelation represented a significant triumph.38

  Steve Brady next took over the meeting, cementing the impression that the Cheyennes had imposed their will on the process and would not allow themselves to occupy a position subordinate to the NPS. After that, the tension did not evaporate, but it abated somewhat, in part because Rick Frost drew on his experience in politics, equating stoicism with professionalism: “The National Park Service, the Intermountain Region, had goals and objectives and criteria that I needed to meet.” Frost, therefore, imposed a gag order on himself: “Never respond to an attack on me or the federal government or on what my intentions were or the federal government’s intentions were, because you could be trapped in that argument forever.” From that point on, he would not allow any slight, no matter how damning—including being labeled a “Chivingtonite” at that meeting—to wound him. This was wise, because the barbs were usually tactical rather than personal. As Brady noted: “Sometimes I had to say some pretty harsh stuff about the Park Service folks. Because history teaches me that the federal government lies. Then, after I’d kick them around a bit in the meetings, I’d still shake their hands later.” It was not quite the level of trust the NPS hoped to establish, but it was the beginning of a working relationship.39

  Alexa Roberts, drawing on her experiences with Indian peoples, struggled to build atop the shaky foundation constructed at the consultation meeting. The descendants worried about the ethnographic element of the search, especially questions of “confidentiality and the chance that the government would somehow capitalize on their oral histories.” Here, again, George Bent’s specter loomed over the site search. David Halaas, Steve Brady, and Laird Cometsevah all believed that James Mooney and George Bird Grinnell had exploited Bent. Even George Hyde had broken some of his promises to Bent. From the descendants’ perspective, whites had used Bent’s stories for their own purposes. And in the view of Conrad Fisher, head of the Northern Cheyenne Cultural Center, not much had changed since. Fisher observed, “White scholars and Park Service employees come onto the reservation and take what they need.” Steve Brady made the same point with a joke: “You know the makeup of a traditional Cheyenne family, right?” He answered his own question: “A mother, a father, a few kids, maybe a granny, and an anthropologist with graduate students in tow.” The descendants did not want their stories to be objects of study, to be manipulated by outsiders; they wanted to assert control over own their heritage.40

  As well as worrying about intellectual property and exploitation, the descendants viewed oral histories as crucial to their cultural sovereignty. For Laird Cometsevah, oral traditions were the best way of transmitting Cheyenne history. Pointing to a link between language and identity, Cometsevah noted, “Some of us my age are real fortunate. We grew up at a time when Cheyenne was real fluent in our daily living. Our folks talked Cheyenne, and English was second.” Tribal history moved through “family stories,” from person to person, related in the Cheyenne language. Cometsevah recalled: “As young people we grew up with parents, grandparents, great-grandparents that experienced some of these [events], and that’s how we passed our information to our young people.” In his telling, poverty, ironically, helped the tribe’s culture persist, as the “Cheyennes never did have a book, pencil, typewriter; they kept [history] in their memories, and it was handed down that way.” “Today we do a lot of research, and I’ve met a lot of authors, professors, and anthropologists,” Cometsevah explained. “They’re afraid to go out of the boundary of the book to accept the truth of what happened to the Cheyennes.” Steve Brady concurred; the spoken word was “the traditional method of passing Cheyenne history” across generations. For Cometsevah and Brady, oral history was tribal history, not something to be dismissed as less legitimate or reliable than written accounts.41

  Because of their ongoing struggle to perpetuate traditional cultural practices, for Brady and Cometsevah the oral history project loomed larger than the site search’s other parts. Although neither man disparaged Jerry Greene’s forays into the archives for manuscript sources (Brady and Cometsevah were avid readers of tribal histories), and while both eagerly anticipated the site study’s archeological component (assuming that the sacred ground and any artifacts pulled from it would be handled with respect), the descendants would collect their ethnographies using “traditional approaches.” They would gather indigenous knowledge using indigenous methods. And because some of the Sand Creek stories would come from tribal elders nearing the end of their lives, the last generation of Cheyennes to have spoken directly with the massacre’s survivors, the descendants hoped that the collected memories would connect past and present, promising healing on tribal terms, rather than the false restoration through assimilation that the Cheyennes believed the federal government was offering them.42

  After the Cheyenne representatives to the site study met with David Halaas and Steve Chestnut, their attorney, they drafted an “agreement that laid out principles that were good for the tribes.” They insisted on leading the search’s ethnographic component; they would rely on Alexa Roberts as a consultant only. Roberts, while working for the Navajo Nation, had often clashed with the NPS over questions of cultural sovereignty. Over time, she had “quit thinking of [her]self as an archeologist … because digging sites or documenting sites is not what the Navajo people do or how they perceive their past.” Having embraced ethnography instead, she sympathized with the descendants’ skepticism of outsiders, especially federal officials attempting to document the past with approaches suspect to some Native people. And she saw the Sand Creek stories, gathered using “traditional methods,” as a “sacred matter,” the principal way that the descendants “would know their history.” Roberts agreed that the ethnography project could succeed only if the tribal representatives designed and implemented their own protocols for collecting histories. She would help when asked; otherwise she would do her best to “stay in the shadows.”43

  Roberts understood the cultural politics underlying her part of the search. When the descendants prepared to gather their oral histories, she shared her expertise and provided direct funding so that the Arapaho and Cheyenne delegates could administer their projects as they wished. Working in early 1999 with the NPS historians and Doug Scott, captain of the archeologists’ team, she compiled a list of questions intended to elicit information about the site’s location. Even then, Roberts took care not to appear prescriptive, explaining that the “questions were intended to be used as an interviewing guide … rather than as a formal questionnaire, and also were intended to be modified as considered appropriate by each tribe.” Finally, between November 1998 and June 1999, she traveled to the reservation towns of Concho, Ethete, Riverton, and Lame Deer, convening fora where she discussed the oral history project with various tribal constituencies.44

  From spring 1999 through winter 2000, the descendants collected their oral histories, with the Northern Arapahos first out of the gate. On April 6, 1999, Roberts drove from Denver to the Wind River Reservation, a four-hundred-mile trip graced by breathtaking views of the Rocky Mountains rising from the plains. Wind River sat less than two hours from the mountain playground of Jackson, Wyoming, one of the centers of the ersatz West, where trophy homes boasted prices that skied into the millions and visitors were greeted at the edge of town by a multistory arch fashioned from elk antlers. Grand Teton National Park, whose jutting peaks and Snake River were emblazoned in the American imagination by Ansel Adams, spread out an hour beyond Jackson. Yet Wind River, which the Northern Arapahos shared with their historical enemies, the Eastern Shoshones, could not have felt further away from such iconic
landscapes for Roberts. It, too, was beautiful, ringed by the relatively modest peaks of the Wind River Range: rounded, densely forested, often shrouded in mist. The reservation itself, though, was crushed by poverty—roughly 50 percent of its residents were jobless—and attendant problems: drug abuse, violence, and chronic illness. But if economic woes and social pathologies were what most outsiders saw, Roberts knew that they were no more Wind River’s whole story than arcing antlers were Jackson’s.45

  After arriving on the reservation, Alexa Roberts met with the Ridgelys: Eugene Sr., an artist, and two of his sons, Eugene Jr. and Gail, both educators. Together, they would oversee the Northern Arapahos’ oral history project. At Eugene Sr.’s house, Roberts viewed his painting, The Sand Creek Massacre, Northern Arapaho history depicted in oils on an elk hide canvas. The group then toured Wind River, as Gail Ridgely described his family’s ties to the massacre—his great-great-grandfather, Lame Man, had survived the ordeal—and their interest in the Sand Creek project. “Creating a national historic site,” he explained, “will allow our people to remember their ancestors and help put their suffering to rest.” Roberts and Tom Meier, a historian and advisor to the Ridgelys, cooperated with the Northern Arapaho team on their oral history project. With Roberts’s help, the following day they collected stories from two tribal elders at a community school in Ethete, one of the largest towns on the reservation. The Arapahos interviewed two more descendants on the reservation in July 1999 and then another two in February 2000, bringing their total to six.46