A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  By the early 1980s, fewer than 50,000 people visited the museum annually. Its endowment had sunk below the $5 million mark, and dusty exhibits—including dioramas such as “Chippewa Maple Syrup Camp” and “The Potlatch”—struck even unseasoned onlookers as anachronistic. At that time, Roland Force, only the third director in the museum’s history, began negotiating with other institutions (the city’s famed American Museum of Natural History), individuals (the Texas oil billionaire H. Ross Perot), and government entities (the New York City Council, the New York State Legislature, the U.S. Congress), playing one off against the next in order to secure the Heye collection’s legacy and ongoing autonomy. After initially striking a deal with the Museum of Natural History, Force backed out because of a dispute over space. He next used his flirtations with Perot as a threat, demanding and receiving additional concessions in exchange for a promise to stay in Manhattan. Still Force wavered, until Robert Abrams, attorney general of the State of New York, went to court to block a proposed move to Dallas. Only after New York’s U.S. senators, Alfonse D’Amato and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, began bickering over the museum’s fate did Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii broker a deal to bring the majority of Heye’s artifacts to Washington, DC, where they would be housed on the Mall as part of the Smithsonian.47

  Native people rarely figured in press coverage of the NMAI’s history—except as objects on display. But after the museum opened, Suzan Shown Harjo offered a different creation story, linking the NMAI’s genesis to the memorialization of Sand Creek. Harjo recalled discussions in 1989 about the Heye collection’s future. Those talks nearly broke down when the negotiator for the Smithsonian, which was exempt from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, refused to relent on the question of repatriating the remains of tens of thousands of Native people still stored within the institution’s archives. Many of those crania and other body parts, collected across more than a century, had figured in the federal government’s studies of the impact of military hardware during the Indian Wars. Harjo remembered phoning Robert Adams, secretary of the Smithsonian, and telling him, “we had to have a repatriation agreement,” or there would be no deal. As she spoke with Adams, Harjo leafed through documents detailing the Smithsonian’s grim holdings: “I was looking at bills of lading … showing how the remains of five of the Sand Creek massacre victims wound up in his institution.” An emotional Harjo cut the call short, explaining to Adams, “we were out of time.” Concerned that the Heye collection might be slipping through his grasp, Adams called back and promised, “we have a deal.” Months later, Adams, Harjo, Senator Campbell, and Senator Inouye announced that the Smithsonian would revise its repatriation policies as part of the legislation to create the National Museum of the American Indian.48

  As for the massacre victims whose remains still gathered dust in the Smithsonian, not long after Harjo’s conversation with Adams, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes and Laird Cometsevah’s descendants’ group put in a repatriation request with the U.S. government. Three years later, a group of Cheyennes arrived in Washington at the Smithsonian’s repatriation office. Archivists had removed the remains from the file drawers where they had been stored and arrayed them on a conference table beneath a sheet. As a museum curator pulled back the shroud, several Cheyenne people began sobbing. Women gathered around the cranium of a girl killed at the massacre before she reached her sixteenth birthday. Another skull, taken from a man in his mid-thirties, betrayed the trauma of having been scalped, definitive physical evidence, Cometsevah believed, of atrocities committed by Chivington’s men. After praying and placing the bones in small coffins, the Cheyennes loaded the remains into a yellow Ryder truck and drove back to their reservation. Once there, the Sand Creek descendants buried their ancestors, hopeful that the spirits of the massacre’s victims might find peace at last. More than a decade later, Harjo, recounting the origins of the NMAI, pointed back to those individuals and suggested, “these people were as much a part of the making of this museum as anyone living.”49

  With the NMAI in the news in September 2004, the Sand Creek site’s fate hung in the balance. Months earlier, during the Homecoming Project controversy, Senator Campbell had introduced the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site Trust Act of 2004. It seemed like a simple bill; it would place the former Dawson ranch into federal trust so that it could be incorporated into the National Park System. But as James Doyle, Campbell’s aide, explained, NPS lands were held by the U.S. government “for the common benefit of the people of the United States,” whereas federal authorities “must manage Indian trust lands for the exclusive benefit of the Indian beneficiaries of the trust relationship.” Campbell’s bill tried to reconcile these competing mandates. The property would be administered by the secretary of the interior “in accordance with the law generally applicable to property held in trust by the United States for the benefit of Indian tribes” and also “in accordance with the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site Establishment Act of 2000.” “The trust property,” the bill went on, “shall be used only for historic, religious, or cultural uses that are compatible with the use of the land as a national historic site.” Practically speaking, the implications of such language remained unclear. Politically, though, the bill promised that the Sand Creek historic site would attempt to serve the affected tribes and the American people more broadly.50

  On September 16, 2004, a week after Steve Hillard’s disastrous visit to Capitol Hill, Otto Braided Hair received an oddly muted e-mail from Paul Moorhead, lead staffer on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Moorhead informed Braided Hair that the Sand Creek trust bill had passed the Senate the previous day. But, he cautioned, because of ongoing “hysteria” over the Homecoming Project, the legislation might face challenges in the House. It remained important to keep Sand Creek separate from any of Hillard’s schemes. Senator Campbell would not issue a celebratory press release and would instead be “playing it low-key.” Six months earlier, Campbell had cited health concerns in announcing that he would retire from the Senate. He still hoped that opening the historic site would cap a career devoted, in his words, to “serving the American people and my people, Indian people.” Now he had to wait to see if the House would pass a final piece of his signature legislation.51

  The outcome disappointed the senator and nearly everyone else involved in the memorialization effort. With Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, who had sponsored the trust bill in the House of Representatives, still worrying about political fallout from the Homecoming Project, the legislation languished for months before getting bottled up in committee and then dying in mid-December. Despite all the hand wringing, casinos had nothing to do with the bill’s fate in the end. Instead, intraparty politics doomed the legislation. A California congressman who for years had nursed a grudge against Campbell would not, even as a courtesy to a retiring colleague, bring the Sand Creek bill up for a vote. A shaken Campbell explained, “House leaders refused to act.” Janet Frederick groaned: “It sets us back. And in these small towns, we can’t really afford to be set back.” And after Alexa Roberts wistfully recalled how “it sailed through the Senate so easily,” she wondered how the legislation would fare without Campbell’s backing in Washington: “I just don’t know how this is going to happen without Ben’s help.” Otto Braided Hair, though, remained philosophical and focused on the long term: “We got overconfident. We’ll just have to lobby harder the next time.”52

  The next time arrived early in the new year, when Colorado’s other U.S. senator, Wayne Allard, reintroduced the Sand Creek trust legislation. This time, the people of Kiowa County and the descendants lobbied Marilyn Musgrave relentlessly to stay on top of the issue in the House of Representatives. And when, in mid-April 2005, the House Subcommittee on National Parks held hearings on the legislation, Steve Brady traveled to Washington, where he described the lingering impact of the massacre and the importance of the historic site for his people. Mike Snyder, at the time deputy director of the
NPS, also testified at the hearings. Snyder explained that if Congress placed the former Dawson ranch into trust, “the NPS believes it would have sufficient land for the establishment of the National Historic Site and would forward a recommendation to the Secretary of the Interior to formally establish the park.” But until that happened, Snyder warned, the NPS had no authority to enforce federal law within the Sand Creek site’s boundaries. The property would have to remain closed to the public, generating no economic activity for Kiowa County.53

  Even with the reintroduced trust legislation making its way through Congress, the sting of the previous year’s disappointment remained fresh in Eads, where some people questioned whether they wanted any part of the historic site. Alexa Roberts recalled, “Walking down the street, people would stop me and ask, ‘Is this thing going to happen?’ It was a roller coaster for the county, and people were getting sick of the ride.” In June, the frustration came to a head when students from the University of Wisconsin, part of a seminar traveling across the West studying cross-cultural encounters, arrived in Eads to learn about the massacre. The course instructor had arranged for a panel of speakers, including Roberts, Laird Cometsevah, Joe Big Medicine, and Lee Pedro, along with Alonzo Sankey, one of the Southern Arapaho delegates to the memorialization project. Roberts had suggested that, if the class wanted a genuinely multicultural event, it would make sense to include Janet Frederick and Rod Brown to represent the local community. On June 15, 2005, the group—minus Cometsevah, who recently had been in a car accident and sent his assistant, Linda DeCarlo, instead—met in the basement of the Kiowa County courthouse.54

  The event quickly veered toward chaos when Linda DeCarlo claimed that the area around Eads remained a hotbed of neo-Chivingtonites. For proof, she pointed to the “Friends of Chivington Church.” DeCarlo would not be deterred, even when members of the audience corrected her, noting that the name of the Quaker congregation in the neighboring town was the Chivington Friends Church. Things went downhill from there. After DeCarlo linked memorializing the massacre with Article 6 reparations, Lee Pedro concluded his presentation by mumbling something about the 9/11 attacks. Because he spoke into his chest, nearly everyone agreed that his exact words were unintelligible. But Chuck and Sheri Bowen, seated in the audience, later insisted that Pedro had celebrated the 9/11 hijackers, labeling the destruction of the Twin Towers just deserts for a nation responsible for the violence at Sand Creek. Janet Frederick countered that Pedro had only suggested that having experienced the horror of 9/11, white Americans might be able to empathize with the plight of Cheyenne and Arapaho people affected by the massacre. Regardless, as Alexa Roberts prepared to leave at the end of the panel, Chuck Bowen confronted her. He accused Roberts, who had not heard Pedro’s comments, of having lied about the potential windfall the historic site would bring to Kiowa County. Bowen then blurted out, “You will be responsible for the next Sand Creek massacre.” A puzzled Roberts just walked away.55

  The event’s consequences boomeranged from Kiowa County to Washington, DC, to Lame Deer, Montana, to Clinton, Oklahoma, and back again to southeastern Colorado. The next day, Sheri Bowen called Alexa Roberts, letting her know how appalled she had been at the sight of a federal employee applauding Lee Pedro’s remarks. Roberts replied that she had no idea why the Bowens were upset, and that regardless, it was not the government’s place to censor its citizens. “We can’t tell people they can’t exercise free speech,” she recalled explaining. As it happened, after the panel discussion, the Bowens apparently had surfed the Internet, where they discovered a website linking Pedro and Ward Churchill, who at the time remained embroiled in a controversy surrounding an essay he wrote in the wake of the September 11 attacks. In that piece, Churchill explained 9/11 in part by pointing to American imperialism, going on to describe some of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks as “little Eichmanns”—technocrats implicated in genocide. Culture warriors nationwide seized on the Churchill case as proof of the American professorate’s liberal bias. As late as summer 2005, a seemingly unrepentant Churchill could still be found sitting above the fold in Colorado’s newspapers. Now, it appeared to Sheri Bowen, Lee Pedro had made common cause with Churchill, and the NPS had cheered them from the sidelines. She explained that from her family’s perspective the Sand Creek project had already done enough damage, and she demanded an audience with the Kiowa County commissioners.56

  At that meeting, which took place on July 14, Alexa Roberts learned that some of the commissioners agreed with the Bowens: the NPS, they believed, had bent over backward to keep the descendants happy, and the historic site might do their community more harm than good. Roberts left feeling dejected, she said, “[like] this thin crust of tolerance had formed through the years, so that we could all work together, and now the commissioners’ anger at the situation had come bubbling through.” She also wondered if “maybe there wasn’t something to what they were saying.” To that point in the memorialization process, the site had hovered in the hazy distance, a mirage, never really an immediate concern for Kiowa County. But as the opening drew nearer, the commissioners confronted the reality of having a unit of the NPS nearby: their county would change forever. Many local people did not want that. Thinking like an anthropologist, Roberts suggested that the county had been “almost like an island, and now we’re adding this unknown element into the mix. There’s no way of predicting the impact, no way at all.” She concluded, “So people got worried. And they decided they needed to express their concerns.”57

  Chuck and Sheri Bowen, meanwhile, believed that their Sand Creek story, hushed up for years, would finally be heard. The Bowens alerted associates from the OIW that while Lee Pedro had denigrated the 9/11 dead, an NPS employee had clapped politely in the background. The Kiowa County website lit up with posts. A man named Curt Neeley related, “Mr. Pedro reportedly said he thought the Twin Tower victims of 9/11 deserved to die because whites had swindled Manhattan Island from the Indians for a few beads.” The next day, a local Civil War reenactor sent an e-mail to the Sand Creek site threatening “serious repercussions” for the NPS officials who had applauded Pedro. After explaining that he was “very anti-Indian,” he warned that “this latest outrage can not go uncontested” before finally promising that he would “make sure that justice is served.” Back on the Kiowa County website, the Bowens asked, of the memorialization project broadly and the Sand Creek descendants specifically, “How is this for your economic development? Why does everyone have to walk on eggshells with these people?” Then, on August 4, Neeley added more grist to the mill, writing of the “7 white scalps” retrieved from Black Kettle’s village after Sand Creek and suggesting that the violence should be memorialized as a battle rather than a massacre.58

  The same day that Curt Neeley posted his defense of the Colorado volunteers, the Denver press reported that President George W. Bush had signed the Sand Creek trust legislation into law on August 2. The Rocky Mountain News hailed the act as “potentially healing” before closing its story with a quote from philosopher Theodor Adorno: “The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting.” The Denver Post’s tone, by contrast, remained measured, hinting, with an examination of the rhetoric surrounding current discussions of Sand Creek, that healing might be hard to come by. The Post’s Diane Carman noted that in a recent press conference Senator Allard had shied away from labeling Sand Creek “a massacre,” instead calling the violence “a dispute.” Such bloodless language did not sit well with Carman, who scolded: “In the face of all the evidence of treachery and savagery, and the dramatic gesture to acknowledge what really happened, Allard still couldn’t bring himself to call it what it was: a massacre.” Of course, in her own story’s lead, Carman had referred to Sand Creek as “a battle,” so perhaps it was a wash. Nevertheless, all of the news coverage agreed that it would only be a matter of time before the NPS finally opened the Sand Creek site to the public.59

  All eyes returned to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes
, which still had to convey the former Dawson property into federal trust before the historic site could be formally established. In order for that to happen, the tribes’ business committee had to prepare a resolution and bring it to a vote before the full tribal electorate. Unfortunately, as Alexa Roberts recalled, “they can’t get a resolution, because there is no functioning business committee.” With the tribal government as divided as it had been during the controversy over Jim Druck’s acquisition of the Dawson ranch, the business committee’s chairman, Bill Blind, called Roberts and said that Druck would be advising the tribes about the proposed land transfer. Blind asked Roberts to meet with him and the casino magnate.60

  On August 26, 2005, Alexa Roberts, Bill Blind, Joe Big Medicine, Lee Pedro, Laird Cometsevah, Jim Druck, and several other people gathered at the Cow Palace hotel in Lamar. Blind informed Roberts that they would “negotiate” issues important to the tribes, including special access to the site for the descendants. They would also, Blind said, hash out how the tribes would “lease” the land to the NPS. That word brought Roberts up short. There could be no lease, she knew, as the federal trust legislation stated that title to the property had to be conveyed to the U.S. government, which would then manage the land as part of the historic site. Moreover, the NPS leadership, facing a funding crisis, had grown tired of Sand Creek. What had once seemed like a chance to burnish the agency’s multicultural credentials while memorializing a national tragedy increasingly looked like a snakebit project. Roberts went to the Cow Palace to explain, “there’s only one thing that’s left to be done. Either the deed gets transferred and the park gets established, or it doesn’t. You don’t have to transfer the deed. But then we can’t establish the park. That’s where we are now.”61