A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek
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Less than two months after visiting the Northern Arapahos in April 1999, Roberts got back in her car and headed for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes’ reservation. Unlike the journey to Wind River, this time she left the mountains in her rearview mirror and traversed the open expanse of the Great Plains. As she sped east on I-40, the soil gradually turned from Colorado’s brown clay to the red earth of Oklahoma. After six hours of driving, she arrived in Clinton, a small town of 8,000 people that puffed itself up as the “Hub City of Western Oklahoma”—a decidedly humble claim to fame. Hub or not, Clinton looked very much like other communities scattered across the country’s midsection: the highway defined it geographically; the usual array of fast-food restaurants, inexpensive chain hotels, gas stations, and twenty-four-hour convenience stores littered its compact business district; and a golf course, flanking the Washita River, along with a few attractions (“Oklahoma’s Official Route 66 Museum!”), promised diversions for visitors who had spare time on their hands. Given Clinton’s proximity to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes’ homeland, the impact of the Native American communities was less obvious than one might have anticipated. But a huge casino run by the tribes and a Cheyenne cultural center reminded tourists that they were indeed in “Indian Country.”47
When she arrived in Clinton, Alexa Roberts met Laird and Colleen Cometsevah, who, along with their daughter, Carolyn Sandlin, and David Halaas, would direct the Southern Cheyennes’ ethnography project. The Cometsevahs approached the collection of oral histories more informally than had the Northern Arapahos. They advertised locally that there would be an open house at the Cheyenne and Arapaho Elderly Nutrition Center in Clinton. Descendants could go there and share Sand Creek stories if they chose to. In part, the Cometsevahs’ relatively casual approach emerged from work they had already done: years of genealogical research on Sand Creek descendants, support material for an eventual reparations claim they planned. But Laird Cometsevah’s social position also guided their efforts; Cometsevah, a chief, took responsibility not just for protecting his tribe’s traditional practices but also, at times, for dictating what they would be. His Sand Creek story carried additional weight, a kind of representative history for the Southern Cheyennes. Regardless, the Cometsevahs’ team gathered eight ethnographies on June 1–4, 1999, at the Elderly Nutrition Center and a ninth from a descendent living in a nearby nursing home. The Southern Cheyennes organized a second session in August 1999, interviewing three more people, bringing their total to twelve.48
Because of tribal protocols and politics, the Northern Cheyennes only began collecting oral histories late in 1999. But they wasted no time while they waited. They focused on other ways of memorializing Sand Creek. In early fall, Otto Braided Hair opened the Northern Cheyenne Sand Creek Office, an administrative arm supporting the tribal descendants’ committee chaired by his older brother, Steve Brady. Braided Hair then coordinated a Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run. On November 25–29, approximately five hundred participants, mostly young people, ran a relay between the two most significant sites commemorating the massacre in Colorado. The runners began their journey with a prayer and a blessing, snaking out in a long line from the creek bed beneath the monument overlook on Bill Dawson’s property. They continued their journey across nearly two hundred miles of Colorado’s back roads, until they reached the Civil War memorial on the capitol steps in Denver. The Cheyenne runners and their families gathered there, listening to speeches and drum groups, symbolically reclaiming land that once had belonged to their forbears. As Braided Hair explained, the run promoted healing by using “traditional ceremonial practices” and offering some Cheyenne families their first chance to “return to their ancestral home” since the massacre’s aftermath. The Healing Run would become an annual event, reminding the descendants and the people of Colorado to consider Sand Creek’s ongoing significance on the massacre’s anniversary.49
Six weeks after the run, Alexa Roberts hit the road again, this time bound for Lame Deer on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. The first part of the drive replicated her earlier trip to Wind River. But instead of veering off I-25 and heading west amid the low-slung sprawl of Cheyenne, Wyoming, Roberts continued north. She next passed the city of Casper, at the foot of the Laramie range, before entering the verdant Powder River country, where year-round streams connected small pine stands shadowed by miniature mountains. In the years following Sand Creek, some Cheyenne and Lakota people fought a war to protect this land from federal troops. Historical markers scattered along the highway’s edge narrated part of that grim story: Fort Fetterman, the Connor Battlefield, Fort Phil Kearny. At those spots and others, tribal warriors engaged with U.S. cavalry as part of a doomed effort to keep white settlers from overrunning territory where, in the postbellum years, some of the last remaining bison herds in the American West roamed free. In the midst of this area, Roberts drove by the cities of Buffalo and Sheridan and then hit a steep climb leading up into the Bighorn Mountains and the Montana border beyond. Another hour and she turned east at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, where Cheyennes and Lakotas bested Custer and his men on June 25–26, 1876. Roberts made a right there, at the town of Crow Agency. After one more hour, she reached her destination.50
Luke Brady, younger brother of Otto Braided Hair and Steve Brady, hosted Roberts during her ten-day stay on the reservation, starting January 17, 2000. Intense and sometimes bellicose, but also famously good-hearted and funny, Luke Brady was an iconoclast, a champion of the oppressed, and a fierce defender of tribal traditions. To introduce Roberts to the Northern Cheyennes’ culture, and particularly to the lasting impact of Sand Creek on the tribe, Brady took her on a tour of his community. The Northern Cheyenne reservation, Roberts learned, occupied 440,000 acres of fiercely glaciated and widely varied terrain. Brady brought Roberts from its eastern boundary, Ashland, where the St. Labre Indian School sat, to the piney mountains in its center, through Lame Deer’s tiny strip of a downtown, where tribal government buildings, Dull Knife College, and a few beleaguered stores held fast, then to the small district of Busby, and finally on to the reservation’s western edge at the border of the Crow Reservation. He tried to impress upon Roberts the problems, in his view traceable to the massacre, plaguing his people: crude living conditions, rampant joblessness, widespread addiction to drugs, and high rates of heart disease and diabetes, as well as many other public health concerns. Having worked with the Navajos, Roberts understood the difficulties of reservation life. She found the Northern Cheyennes’ struggles poignant and the place where they lived somehow “familiar, like home.”51
Following the tour, Roberts and Luke Brady, with support from Steve Brady, Otto Braided Hair, and Arbutus Red Woman, began interviewing massacre descendants. From the first, the process was more fraught with tension than it had been for the Northern Arapahos and Southern Cheyennes. Luke Brady struggled to convey to Roberts the gravity of the task before them, but he remained frustrated with the NPS’s tight schedule. Time constraints, he believed, threatened to undercut the sanctity of their endeavor. Otto Braided Hair agreed. He recalled that the descendants’ committee, because of the NPS’s looming deadline, could not prepare adequately for the interviews, and as a result had not “earned” the right to ask tribal elders for their sacred stories. Had “time allowed … a respected, knowledgeable, older tribal member would have visited in advance and at length with each person from whom” the NPS sought an oral history. The descendants would also have received “a gift commensurate with the storyteller’s intellectual property.” And they would been allowed “as much time as they needed to think about whether or not [they] wished to give a story normally reserved only for family members.” Instead, Roberts’s and Brady’s youth, coupled with “a lack of time and access to funding,” undermined “traditional protocols.” From Brady’s perspective, these constraints “adversely affected the ability to gather stories.” In the face of these considerable difficulties, the Northern Cheyennes nonetheless collecte
d more than thirty oral histories.52
Even still, Luke Brady remained angry about the timeline and also concerned that the ethnographies might be misused or misinterpreted by NPS employees. On this point, he spoke for many of the descendants, who feared that the NPS would translate the oral histories inaccurately, robbing them of meaning and perhaps even rendering them false. For those “Cheyenne speakers … with important social positions, such as Chiefs or Society Men,” this worry was particularly acute. “Unwritten rules about truthfulness in storytelling” bound these people, who, because of venerable protocols, had to repeat their oral histories “exactly as they had heard” them. To do otherwise, even unintentionally, would dishonor the individual who had originally shared the massacre story and, in the process, undercut the memory keeper’s status. Accuracy also hinged on linguistic nuance available only to storytellers working in the original Cheyenne. Alexa Roberts recalled: “Some elderly Cheyenne speakers expressed concern that, as has often happened in the past, the rich meanings of the Cheyenne words would be lost with too casual an approach to translation.” Absent the subtleties conveyed by the storytellers when speaking their own language, stories of Sand Creek might become worse than useless: tribal history blighted by the federal government’s disrespect for indigenous culture.53
Here again, the past impinged on the search process. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, federal officials often twisted the words of Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders, achieving outcomes favorable to U.S. interests by employing incompetent or corrupt translators during negotiations. In one case, only a small faction of Cheyenne and Arapaho peace chiefs, including Black Kettle, White Antelope, and Little Raven, signed the Treaty of Fort Wise in 1861. In doing so, they agreed to cede to the U.S. government much of the land previously guaranteed their people by federal authorities in the Treaty of Fort Laramie, ratified a decade earlier. But federal representatives later insisted that the wording of the Fort Wise treaty bound all of the tribes’ bands to a small reservation in southeastern Colorado. Many Cheyennes, particularly the Dog Soldiers, viewed this perversion of the facts with open contempt. Their antipathy deepened when Governor Evans used violations of the Fort Wise treaty as a pretext for his infamous orders allowing white Coloradans to hunt and kill “hostile” Indians in August 1864. Linguistic distortions, the descendants remembered in 2000, had pushed Colorado Territory toward Sand Creek. They often “talked about how the Cheyenne people ha[d] been misrepresented in treaties and other legal processes.” Luke Brady felt bound by honor to ensure that nothing like that would happen again. One thirty-minute interview, consequently, took more than thirteen hours to translate.54
For most of the people involved in gathering and proffering the ethnographies, the oral history project prompted contradictory emotions. The stories included gut-wrenching accounts of brutality and misery—at the individual and tribal level—the sorrow made more tragic because, as Luke Brady kept insisting while guiding Alexa Roberts around the reservation, the violence had left deep scars on his people. Roberts agreed, writing that the oral histories provided “a direct link to the events of November 29, 1864.” She elaborated, “They represent a body of the descendants’ connection to the massacre that is still ongoing … the multigenerational effects of the federal government’s effort to conquer a people.” Recounting and hearing the stories meant experiencing painful ties between past and present. Still, Roberts also noted that collectively the stories formed a narrative of both “ethnic cleansing” and “cultural persistence.” That these memories were preserved at all, shared behind locked doors, after nightfall, or whispered from grandparent to grandchild, no matter the risks, underscored the durability of traditional practices. For the descendants, recounting and documenting the massacre, tasks uplifting and unsettling, represented acts of courage, self-sacrifice, and tribal patriotism.55
Ultimately, the oral histories, because of their content, proved more useful to the tribes—particularly the traditionalists involved in the site search—than to the NPS. Many storytellers indicted federal authorities by focusing on the persecution descendants had since endured for preserving their memories. Another group echoed sentiments that George Bent had shared in his memoir, suggesting that Chivington’s decision to fire on Black Kettle, who, in these stories, waited at the massacre beneath an American flag, demonstrated that the U.S. government would desecrate even “its own symbol of peace in the name of genocide, a practice that has characterized federal/tribal relations throughout history.” Other storytellers insisted that socioeconomic problems on the reservation could be traced directly back to the massacre, and that only reviving traditional cultural practices would heal the lasting wounds of Sand Creek, ensuring the Cheyennes’ and Arapahos’ future. The tales collected during the site search documented too much anger, and were both too substantively disparate and too culturally specific to be an integral part of a federally sponsored memorial, that, at root, remained an assimilationist project in which even incommensurable narratives of state-sponsored violence and dispossession would have to be reconciled as part of a single story of the American past.56
In another way as well, the NPS struggled with the oral histories. Read together, they suggested that no unified tribal memory of the massacre existed. And they offered little insight into the site’s placement. Instead, the descendants provided distinctive ethnographies, expressed as individual and group memories, asserting the storytellers’ place “in the history of the family, which in turn is integral to the history of the tribe as a whole.” Each oral history contained singular details. A few mentioned landscape features: bluffs, a fresh spring, water in the creek, hollowed-out tree trunks in which women and children had hid during the attack. Others did not. Some placed the number of people at the massacre in the thousands. Others tallied far fewer than that. One story even recalled that the violence had taken place far distant from Kiowa County, in Estes Park, Colorado. The ethnographies were literally all over the map. Alexa Roberts observed these disparities and the lack of precise information about the massacre location and realized that the descendants had passed along only “the most important aspects of these stories.” Other “story elements,” she noted, were “not salient enough to survive more than five generations.” Rather than preserve memories shared by the tribe, the descendants, for the most part, had focused on their unique genealogies.57
Some members of the NPS team, unable to pluck either a unified narrative or useful details about the site location from the oral histories, chose to focus on what they ostensibly represented—an uptick in the descendants’ trust in federal authorities, a step on the road to reconciliation—rather than their contents. James Doyle, who at the time still served on Senator Campbell’s staff, remembered the ethnographies as the high-water mark for federal-tribal relations during the search. The oral histories, he noted, were “one of the first times an Indian perspective on Sand Creek has been recorded.… We were able to convince people who have an inherent distrust of the federal government to speak to representatives of the federal government about the massacre.” In that moment, it “became clear that no matter how divided the various parties were, and as diverse as everybody’s views were, everybody wanted the same thing”—to set aside differences in service of memorializing the massacre.58
It was not that simple. The descendants shared their oral histories not with government representatives but with other descendants; the ethnographies rested on intratribal, not tribal-federal, cooperation. Barbara Sutteer, the NPS’s Indian liaison, dismissed the idea that the Arapahos and Cheyennes had begun trusting federal officials because of the site search. Instead, Sutteer suggested that the tribal delegates worked with the NPS out of necessity and only so long as the project suited their purposes—preserving family histories, invigorating traditional cultural practices, laying the groundwork for a reparations claim—and proceeded on their terms. Sutteer remembered “hearing one of the Park Service people say, ‘Well, the tribal people trust me.�
� ” She replied, “You really don’t get it. Because the last thing feds will ever get from a tribal person is trust.” Alexa Roberts agreed, suggesting that the descendants might have trusted individuals in the NPS but never their employer. It might be more accurate to say that Roberts trusted the descendants, allowing the ethnographic research to proceed. In the end, as Laird Cometsevah said, “We have no reason to trust the U.S. government or the Park Service. They don’t respect our culture or Indian ways.” The final component of the site study seemed to prove Cometsevah’s point.59
On April 19–20, 1999, the NPS held another consultation meeting at the Cow Palace, the by-then-familiar convention hotel located on Lamar’s main street. Rick Frost planned to take stock of the site search’s progress and also to ensure that the “stakeholders”—the NPS, the State of Colorado, various tribal delegations, and local officials and landowners—“remained at the negotiating table despite their differences.” But as so often happened at these events, the gathering exacerbated frustrations and fears rather than allaying them. The descendants remained concerned with the fate of their ethnographies. The Northern Arapahos had collected their oral histories two weeks earlier. The Southern Cheyennes would follow suit in early June, approximately six weeks after the meeting in Lamar. The Northern Cheyennes would wait until the new year before starting to collect their Sand Creek stories from tribal elders. At the Lamar meeting, the assembled site searchers touched on that controversial element of the project and then discussed the historical research before turning their attention to the upcoming geomorphological and archeological fieldwork, which would take place just a few weeks later.60