A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  If the Northern Arapahos’ support of the NPS highlighted the varied nature of tribal memories of Sand Creek, Ben Ridgely’s letter also suggested that the descendants’ recollections of the massacre were captive to politics. By fall 1999, the Ridgelys had wearied of what they labeled the Cometsevahs’ “sensationalism” and “hostility.” Several times during the search, the Cometsevahs insisted that there had been no Arapahos at the massacre. “The Northern Arapahos had nothing whatsoever to do with Sand Creek,” they stated flatly. Colleen Cometsevah also claimed that the Ridgelys had “no real oral histories because their people weren’t even there.” The Cometsevahs even suggested that the Arapahos had no historical identity distinct from the Cheyennes. The former had always orbited around the latter, the Cometsevahs said. The Arapahos were “pests,” Laird and Colleen Cometsevah charged. These claims infuriated the Ridgelys. And when Laird Cometsevah thundered that the Northern Arapahos had “betrayed their heritage by siding with the government,” the slight deepened the Ridgelys’ conviction that their interests more closely aligned with the NPS than with the Southern Cheyennes.39

  The Ridgelys did not allow what they saw as unprovoked attacks on their tribe’s historical and cultural legitimacy to stand. Rather than pointing to their recently collected Sand Creek ethnographies, though, they worked with Tom Meier, a historian and friend, to produce a seventeen-page annotated bibliography documenting the Arapahos’ presence at the massacre. Some of their sources originated with Cheyennes. For example, several times in his correspondence with George Hyde, George Bent mentioned Arapahos who had been at Sand Creek. That convinced David Halaas. “I believe the Arapahos were there,” he said. “I have to, because my guy [Bent] says they were.” Halaas even tried to persuade the Cometsevahs, pointing to “document after document,” but to no avail. Steve Brady also accepted that the Arapahos had suffered at Sand Creek. Once again forswearing oral histories in favor of the documentary record, Brady cited the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, which mentions the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes. Even Article 6, Brady conceded, applied to “certain bands” of the two tribes. Because of that, he said, “we have to be inclusive with all of the tribes. We have to work together.” Still the Cometsevahs would not budge—because, as ever, they too looked back to details of Article 6.40

  On October 12, 1865, emissaries of the U.S. government, including William Bent and Kit Carson, met on the banks of the Little Arkansas River in south-central Kansas with Black Kettle’s Cheyennes and Little Raven’s Arapahos. In prepared remarks, Little Raven revealed what he had learned from Governor Evans’s misuse of the Treaty of Fort Wise: the chief insisted that future agreements between his people and white authorities would bind only the signatories. Black Kettle then looked back to Sand Creek, admitting that he had been guilty of hubris for thinking that he could forge a lasting peace with white settlers. “[My] shame is as big as the earth,” he mourned. Two days later, the parties signed a treaty guaranteeing “perpetual peace” between them. Written at a time when the federal government acknowledged its culpability in the massacre, Article 6 of the document “repudiate[d] the gross and wanton outrages perpetrated against certain bands of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians” at Sand Creek. Those “Indians were at peace with the United States, and under its flag,” and so Washington wanted “to make some suitable reparation for the injuries then done.” Restitution would include both land and other material compensation for survivors who had lost loved ones or property during the slaughter. But the treaty lasted only two years (even by the U.S. government’s standards, that span represented a loose definition of “perpetual”) and federal officials made good on few of the promises contained therein, including Article 6.41

  For nearly a century after that, the reparations promised in Article 6 taunted the Sand Creek descendants, another broken vow punctuating the story of federal-tribal relations following the massacre. Then, in the early 1960s, the U.S. government began negotiating with both branches of the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes to extinguish outstanding land claims from the treaties of Fort Laramie, Fort Wise, the Little Arkansas, and Medicine Lodge. With the case proceeding before the Indian Claims Commission toward a settlement—resulting in payments of roughly $3 million to the Northern Arapahos, $4 million to the Northern Cheyennes, and $15 million to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes—federal officials realized what many Sand Creek descendants had long known: that Article 6 of the Little Arkansas treaty promised compensation not to the tribes, but to specific individuals, those Cheyenne and Arapaho people who had lost loved ones or property at the massacre. Several Southern Cheyennes, all descendants of Chief White Antelope, began pursuing the reparations that their forebears had been guaranteed in 1865.42

  The group actually had its origins in another struggle over Sand Creek memory. In 1938, curators at the Laboratory of Anthropology (currently known as the School of American Research) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, put up an exhibit featuring an 1850s-vintage Navajo textile, renowned for its extraordinarily fine craftsmanship and vivid colors, known as the Chief White Antelope blanket. A soldier in the 3rd Colorado Regiment had taken the weaving from the body of the dead chief at Sand Creek. After wending its way through multiple owners, the blanket finally arrived in Santa Fe, where the Laboratory of Anthropology displayed it, earning critical acclaim. At that time, Kish Hawkins, a descendent of White Antelope, began doing research at the Oklahoma Historical Society, before deciding to try to recover his family’s property. Officials at the Laboratory of Anthropology, though, maintained that they had acquired the artifact legitimately. They refused to return it to Hawkins. Hawkins then joined forces with Sam Dicke, another of White Antelope’s living descendants. The two of them, with help from an Oklahoma City attorney named Bliss Kelly, worked together on the issue until Hawkins died sometime in the mid-1950s.43

  While looking into the provenance of the White Antelope blanket, Hawkins and Dicke familiarized themselves with the Treaty of the Little Arkansas. And as they sparred across years with the Laboratory of Anthropology, the two men opened a second front in their memory fight. In 1949, they convinced their congressman, Toby Morris, to sponsor legislation clarifying the jurisdiction in which an Article 6 reparations claim would be heard. The bill languished in committee and, after Morris tried to reinvigorate it in 1953 and 1957, it died without ever having come to a vote. The Cheyenne descendants renewed their efforts in the early 1960s, part of their tribe’s huge settlement with the federal government. After chartering an organization known as the Sand Creek Descendants Association, the group began lobbying John Jarman, their new congressional representative, to introduce legislation to fulfill the government’s obligations under Article 6. But Jarman’s bill, like Morris’s, never made it to a vote in the House of Representatives. The claim remained open.44

  In the early 1970s, Laird Cometsevah picked up the quest. Cometsevah recalled worrying that “young people were losing touch with the Cheyenne way of life,” so he banded together with a group of other traditionalists to preserve their tribe’s culture. A few years later, Chief Cometsevah turned his attention to Article 6 reparations. He continued working with other traditional people, while his wife, Colleen Cometsevah, began assembling a vast genealogical archive: boxes and boxes of files establishing the lineal descendancy of contemporary Cheyennes to Sand Creek’s victims. By the time the NPS search started in the late 1990s, the Cometsevahs had spent more than two decades pursuing an Article 6 claim. They saw a Sand Creek national historic site as the thin edge of a wedge: memorializing the massacre, they hoped, would lay the groundwork for forcing the government to acknowledge their open treaty claim.45

  The Cheyenne descendants saw reparations and memorialization as intertwined, part of a broader project of revitalizing their tribes’ sovereignty and traditional culture. Colleen Cometsevah suggested, “Every time the Cheyennes signed a treaty we wound up with the short end of the stick. The reservation got smaller and smaller, and white people tried to destroy our way of life.�
�� The antidote for that poisonous history could be found in Article 6 and the massacre site: “Now all we ask is that the government make good on its promises after Sand Creek. Protecting Sand Creek is part of it. Reparations are the other part.” Steve Brady agreed. Recalling his tribe’s decision to extinguish land claims with the United States in the mid-1960s, Brady’s jaw set: “Our people didn’t understand the long-term implications of the settlement. And we still suffer as a result today. We signed away our treaty claims—with the exception of Sand Creek. That is the remaining flicker we have, a flame of hope.” In the early 1990s, when the Northern Cheyennes tapped Brady to preside over their descendants’ committee, he hoped to pile fuel atop that fire. Along with repatriating their ancestors’ remains and preserving the Sand Creek site, the Northern Cheyennes, like their southern kin, would seek Article 6 reparations.46

  So when they faced off with the Ridgelys, the Cometsevahs were not merely playing a high-stakes game of misery poker. They were policing the historical record and protecting their cultural authority in advance of a planned reparations suit. Because such a suit would hinge on the plaintiffs’ ability to demonstrate lineal descendancy to victims of the massacre, it seemed to the Cometsevahs that they had to protect their own credibility as a way of safeguarding their prospective claim. Once they announced publicly that no Arapahos had been at Sand Creek, they could not turn back, even if their assertions split the tribal representatives, leaving them vulnerable to what Steve Brady called the NPS’s “divide-and-conquer” tactics. “The U.S. government has always played that game,” Brady said with a grimace, “playing Indians off against each other.”47

  But as it happened, divisions between the descendants ended up undercutting the NPS’s interests. The Northern Arapaho representatives typically did not focus on reparations; they saw memorialization as their principal goal. “We wanted a historic site to honor our ancestors,” Gail Ridgely recalled, hinting that invocations of Article 6 endangered the search. The Ridgelys also increasingly resented being called traitors by the Cometsevahs. By January 2000, they were so angry that they walked out of meetings if they believed the Cometsevahs had insulted them. Coincidentally, Rick Frost decided at that time to update Senator Campbell about the NPS’s preliminary conclusions. Frost’s letter focused on the prospective historic site’s expansive boundaries, skirting the village controversy by noting that the search team had “not yet fully concurred on the precise locations” of some of the massacre’s “core features.” Frost then suggested that as the study wound down, “we intend to sort out and resolve by agreement any differences which may arise regarding such precise locations.” The Ridgelys, surprisingly, refused to sign the letter. They did not want their names on a document suggesting unity within the search team. Only after Frost implored them to reconsider did the Ridgelys comply with his request.48

  The Cheyennes’ emphasis on reparations placed Senator Campbell in an awkward position. He believed that the descendants deserved restitution for the abuses at Sand Creek. Recalling broken promises in the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, he suggested, “I’m supportive of giving reparations.” Nonetheless, he wondered how Congress would determine who should receive payment more than a century after the fact. Pointing to the approximately $1.6 billion that the federal government had recently meted out to families of Japanese Americans interned during World War II, the senator explained that eligibility in that instance had been clear-cut. But even then, there had been controversy, as the internees’ case reopened long-simmering debates about reparations for the descendants of African American slaves. “Where do you draw the line?” Campbell asked. Considering the political realities, he answered his own question: “When it comes time to get Sand Creek reparations passed in the Senate,” it would be “a nonstarter.” He then instructed James Doyle, his liaison to the search team, to disentangle the process of memorialization from an Article 6 claim. “Reparations is a separate issue,” Campbell insisted, warning that confusing that goal with memorialization would complicate the prospects of any legislation creating a national historic site.49

  On the morning of February 9, 2000, Rick Frost, hoping finally to move beyond the village controversy, waited for another consultation meeting to start. But the question of reparations threatened to derail the process yet again. Representatives from the NPS, the State of Colorado, and the tribes arrived in Billings, Montana, approximately a hundred miles west of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, where Luke Brady and Alexa Roberts were compiling the tribe’s recently collected oral histories. The consultation meeting’s agenda included a preliminary discussion of how the Sand Creek site would be managed—assuming Congress authorized its establishment as a unit of the National Park System. With that contentious issue already on the docket, the tension mounted further because of lingering bad feelings surrounding the NPS’s draft map of the village site and the widening rift between the Southern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho descendants. Then, as the search team members began trailing into the hotel conference room, both Laird Cometsevah and Steve Brady noticed that a newcomer, Homer Flute, apparently intended to join the meeting.50

  In the early 1990s, Flute and Cometsevah worked together on the issue of reparations. As time passed, though, Cometsevah decided that Flute was a “fraud” whose bad judgment concerning who qualified as a descendent—in other words, who would be eligible for compensation under the Little Arkansas treaty’s provisions—would doom any Article 6 claim. Flute, for his part, considered Cometsevah “arrogant” and believed he defined descendancy too narrowly. Cometsevah, Flute argued, focused excessively on cultural politics and blood purity when considering eligibility for reparations. From Flute’s perspective, Cometsevah’s insistence that only full-blooded Cheyennes should receive funds from an Article 6 payout meant that he was not representing “all of the descendants,” including some Northern and Southern Arapahos. Such a contention rankled Cometsevah, whose research and public pronouncements, as noted earlier, suggested that no Arapahos had been at the massacre. At the same time, Flute believed that Cometsevah worried only about “Cheyenne traditional [people]” at the expense of other deserving descendants. Years before the site search started, the two men had parted ways, forming competing organizations to pursue an Article 6 settlement.51

  Laird Cometsevah and Steve Brady treated Homer Flute’s unexpected arrival in Billings as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. First, they would seize the moment to reassert their centrality in the search, reminding Rick Frost that without the Cheyenne descendants’ cooperation, the process could not move forward. Second, Homer Flute would learn again that he stood on the outside looking in when it came to preserving the Sand Creek site (Bill Dawson, remember, had turned Flute away from his ranch nearly two years earlier). Cometsevah and Brady explained to Frost that Flute should not be allowed to enter the meeting room. Flustered by Flute’s claims of cultural authority—he was a massacre descendant, after all—Frost replied that the gathering was a matter of public record and open to all comers. Cometsevah and Brady then pointed to Senator Campbell’s legislation, noting that they were the official Cheyenne representatives to the search, and that the NPS had an obligation to work with them and them only. Either Flute had to leave or they would. Still uncertain, Frost announced that he would call an NPS lawyer. Brady, chortling, remembered: “So he talked to his lawyer, or maybe he talked to himself in a broom closet—I don’t know. But he came back ten or fifteen minutes later and patted me on the back. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘My lawyer agrees with you. Homer Flute can’t be here.’ ” With that, Flute left and the meeting proceeded.52

  The Cheyennes’ attorney, Steve Chestnut, believed that his clients had made a crucial stand. “It was big,” Chestnut noted with a smile. Moving ahead, he recalled, as the NPS team members decided important issues, including finalizing the historic site’s capacious boundaries, they “seemed like they just didn’t want to tangle with the Cheyennes.” Joe Big Medicine, a Southern Cheyen
ne Sand Creek representative, agreed: “We showed Rick Frost and them that we wouldn’t let them push us around. We’d push back if we had to.” So in early 2000, the memorialization process remained in tatters: the Southern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho descendants were not speaking because of the latter’s ostensible apostasy during the village controversy and the former’s insistence that no Arapahos had been present at the massacre; all of the Native people involved in the process, except the Ridgelys, believed the NPS had betrayed them; the NPS team thought the Cheyenne descendants were acting in bad faith; the State of Colorado’s representatives believed that the NPS had misread some of the evidence turned up during the archeological investigations; and local proprietors in Kiowa County, Bill Dawson and Chuck and Sheri Bowen especially, were preparing to flex their muscles.53

  In the months after that, as the descendants continued preparing progress reports on their oral history projects, the NPS oversaw several additional consultation meetings in Oklahoma, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. These gatherings offered the tribal representatives a final opportunity to provide the NPS with feedback and the public its first chance to comment on the search results. On March 22, 2000, the NPS convened with both the Northern and Southern Cheyenne and the Southern Arapaho descendants—the Northern Arapahos, still wary of the Cometsevahs, had chosen to meet with the NPS the previous week. The gathering unfolded much as others had over the previous year and a half; by that time, it seemed everyone involved in the search knew their roles by rote. The Cheyennes railed about Black Kettle’s misplaced village. The NPS defended itself by pointing to the boundary compromise. Then everyone went their separate ways. A bit more than a month after that, Laird Cometsevah fired off yet another broadside aimed at the NPS. In a letter to Rick Frost, Cometsevah reiterated that he wanted “to go on record as in total disagreement on said location of the campsite, which is located one and a half miles north of Dawson’s South Bend.” Pointing back to George Bent’s maps, Cometsevah insisted, “the correct location of the campsite and sandpits [should be] within Dawson’s South Bend.” The NPS then turned its attention to its obligation to solicit feedback from the public before adding new units to the National Park System.54