by Ari Kelman
Meanwhile, Alexa Roberts and her staff continued with the day-to-day work of operating the site: improving the land, working with local authorities, considering questions of interpretation. As time passed, though, and the secretary of the interior seemed to be dawdling over the final arrangements for the national historic site, Roberts’s concerns mounted. Even after the NPS set an opening date, Secretary Dirk Kempthorne still did not sign the documents establishing the Sand Creek site. Officials in the Department of the Interior believed that the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, working under their new constitution, had not legally conveyed the deed to the Dawson property into federal trust. With that issue unresolved, a crisis over title insurance cropped up. Roberts wondered, “Will we ever get this done?” Then, in late fall and early winter 2006–2007, lawyers at the Interior Department determined that the Sand Creek trust had been established properly, and underwriters found a way to insure the property.77
A stand of young cottonwoods that have taken root in the dry bed of Sand Creek, upstream from the monument overlook. (Photo by Tom Carr.)
On April 23, Secretary of the Interior Kempthorne, along with Mary Bomar, the director of the NPS, and Senator Wayne Allard at his side, signed the paperwork formally establishing the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, the 391st unit of the National Park System. In a statement released to the media, Kempthorne expressed his hope that the site would guarantee that “as a country, we might never forget the events that took place along the banks of Sand Creek.” But he carefully avoided using the word “massacre.” Bomar added, “The history of this country is not complete without an understanding and respect for the tragedies that affect our national consciousness.” Less than a week after that, the site opened to the public. Laird Cometsevah, allowing himself a moment of rest, declared: “Now Sand Creek will never be forgotten.”78
Early in the morning of April 29, 2007, less than twenty-four hours after the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site formally opened it doors, volunteers cleared away evidence of the previous day’s furious activity. They loaded chairs onto flatbeds, pulled mobile command centers away behind semitrucks, and carted off loads of trash. At the same time, the Southern Cheyennes and Arapahos, who had camped near the creek bed the previous week, packed up their tents and prepared for the long drive east, back to Oklahoma. By midday, only a few stragglers milled around, taking advantage of the NPS’s decision to keep the site open for visitors. Finally, as the sun began setting, the prairie stood open, grass waving in the breeze, the tableau broken only by the low rise of the monument overlook, cottonwood trees beginning to leaf out in the riparian bottoms, and a two-story workshop, the last reminder of Bill Dawson’s stewardship of the land (the NPS had torn down his ranch house two years earlier). Although temporary signs led the way to the newest unit of the National Park System, a stout chain stood between the massacre site and the county road, warning away trespassers who might consider entering the property. It seemed, for the moment, that Laird Cometsevah was right: the Sand Creek site would be protected, the events of November 29, 1864, remembered. But it remained to be seen how, exactly, that would happen, how the NPS and the descendants would wrestle with the troubling question of interpretation, and what visitors, once they began arriving in numbers, would make of the memorial.79
EPILOGUE: WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH?
On June 8, 2008, just over a year after the Sand Creek memorial began welcoming visitors to Kiowa County, a small caravan of vehicles made its way westward into the teeth of an unseasonably bitter wind, traveling roughly an hour on Highway 50 across the plains of southeastern Colorado. The group began its journey in the parking lot of Lamar’s Cow Palace hotel before heading toward Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, the location where William Bent (George’s father), along with his two partners—his brother, Charles, and a fur trader named Ceran St. Vrain—set up shop along the Santa Fe Trail in the 1830s and 1840s. The National Park Service (NPS) has reconstructed that outpost in its original location: a gentle bend of the Arkansas River, surrounded by towering cottonwood trees, approximately ten miles outside of what today is the small town of La Junta. The historic structure’s squat buildings conjoin to form a rectangle that encompasses a dusty central plaza. Stout adobe walls and a formidable guard tower can be seen from miles away across the prairie. The NPS operates the fort as a historic site, and every day of the year except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s visitors are welcome to take tours guided by “living historians” wearing “period clothing.” Bent’s Old Fort is meant to look, feel, and even smell like the Old West.1
Otto Braided Hair, Steve Brady, Lee Lonebear, and several other descendants spent their early summer morning driving toward Bent’s Fort because the remains of six of their ancestors waited there. The NPS had stored those body parts, all removed from the Sand Creek killing field, in the site’s climate-controlled curatorial facility. The remains had previously been scattered across the Great Plains, from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Denver, Colorado, waiting in three museums and a private collection. The process of repatriating them had been long, stretching more than a decade in some cases. The Northern and Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes had worked together, cutting red tape and putting aside rivalries, ensuring that the massacre’s victims would no longer be housed in soulless repositories, where they sometimes were subject to academic study or idle curiosity. Now they would be buried in the soil where they had fallen, at a cemetery that the descendants had insisted must be part of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. This was how the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was supposed to work: by providing Native American communities with an opportunity to reclaim their cultural patrimony, seized from them during the wholesale dispossession and destruction that attended the conquest and colonization of the continent.2
Passed by Congress and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, NAGPRA mandated that within three years, even reluctant universities, museums, and other federally funded repositories had to catalog their collections of Native American sacred and ceremonial objects. Just two years after that, in 1995, these same institutions had to present a full accounting of the human remains they held, at which point members of “affiliated tribes” who sought the safe return of those items could begin submitting repatriation requests through the NPS. Some estimates suggested that the remains of approximately 1 million Native people were housed within affected organizations throughout the United States at that time, with still more individuals held by private collections, where many of them would remain, beyond NAGPRA’s reach, into the future. Prior to the law’s passage, the graves of Native people buried on federal property enjoyed few safeguards; the bodies they contained could be treated as “archeological resources” by researchers or removed by robbers and sold on the black market. NAGPRA extended protections already taken for granted by most other U.S. citizens to Native Americans as well—that their ancestors’ remains would not be disturbed by looters.3
From the beginning, the law generated controversy. Some physical anthropologists hailed the nation’s tradition of studying Native bodies for insights into human development, pointing to erstwhile masterpieces of the American intellectual tradition, including Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Other scholars warned that returning the vast storehouses of human remains to Native communities would cripple ongoing research by robbing scientists of crucial osteological data. Steve Brady, for his part, dismissed such warnings as a smokescreen for intellectual imperialism. The protests, he believed, hid the deeper misgivings of academics loath to cede control of indigenous bodies. Referring to anthropologists, Brady said, “they’ve had centuries now to desecrate the remains of Indians in the name of ‘science.’ ” He wondered, “When is enough enough?” Although Brady appreciated that NAGPRA provided a mechanism for repatriating artifacts and remains, he nevertheless scorned the law as “one more hoop that tribes must jump through to get their ancestors bac
k.” The other descendants agreed with him. But they had no choice. If they wanted to bury the massacre’s victims at Sand Creek, they had to comply with NAGPRA’s dictates. So they traveled to Bent’s Fort.4
When the descendants arrived there, they retrieved their ancestors’ remains from the secure location where the NPS had temporarily housed them at the tribal delegates’ request. After performing a purification ritual in private, the Cheyennes and Arapahos loaded the sacred cargo into their vehicles for the drive back east across Colorado’s plains toward Kiowa County. Approximately forty people waited for them at the Sand Creek site, gathered for a burial ceremony in the lee of the monument overlook. The NPS had built a temporary shelter there, providing relief from the sun. The wind, though, whipped across the open ground, stiffening the American and white flags that the descendants flew from a lodge pole over the ceremony. Lee Lonebear offered a prayer in the Cheyenne language before a drum group sang White Antelope’s death song. A descendant of Silas Soule read aloud the full text of the letter that the martyred hero of Sand Creek had written to Ned Wynkoop in the days following the massacre. The descendants then lowered their ancestors’ remains—interred within coffins fashioned by Karl Zimmerman, an NPS employee, from deadfall left by the cottonwood trees lining the nearby creek bottom—into graves dug deep in the sandy soil. Finally, the observers and participants at the event took turns shoveling dirt onto the coffins until they were safely buried.5
The repatriation and funeral ceremonies wove together strands of the descendants’ memorialization efforts: asserting their control over that process and the ceremonial space that it had produced, highlighting the efficacy of their traditional ways of understanding history, reiterating their commitment to stewarding connections between the past and present, and proclaiming their ongoing cultural and political sovereignty. At the Sand Creek cemetery, the Arapahos and Cheyennes reclaimed their ancestors’ remains and recast stories that had, through the years, attached themselves to those bodies. In one case, Caroline Downing, Major Jacob Downing’s widow, had in 1911 donated remains of one of the repatriated individuals to the Colorado Historical Society. For nearly a century, that scalp lock had stayed there, known only by an accession number, E 1748, and a brief description: “Scalp (Cheyenne or Arapaho), Taken from an Indian by a soldier at Sand Creek Massacre, by Jacob Downing Nov. 29, 1864.” Downing was one of John Chivington’s stalwart supporters at the massacre, and later, through his activities as a member of Denver-area heritage organizations, including the local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic, a guardian of his former commander’s Sand Creek memories. In that capacity, Downing squared off with George Bent early in the twentieth century, disparaging him as a “halfbreed” after Bent’s Frontier articles appeared in print.6
The descendants, for their part, tried at the burial ceremony to erase such slurs by honoring Bent’s massacre memories as tribal histories and foundational texts for their commemorative efforts. They did so by siting their cemetery at the foot of the monument overlook. That small hill rose above the creek bend in which the Cheyenne descendants believed that Bent had depicted Black Kettle’s village on the maps he had drawn at roughly the same time that Caroline Downing had donated her husband’s massacre trophy to the Colorado Historical Society. The thirty-three-star American and white flags flying over the burial ceremony also evoked Bent’s recollection of the standards that had topped Black Kettle’s lodge on November 29, 1864. Bent used those flags as evidence that the Indians at Sand Creek had been peaceful, that they had believed themselves to be under the protection of the U.S. government, and that they had nevertheless been massacred by federal troops. If the descendants had their way, Bent’s Sand Creek stories, not Chivington’s, would endure over time.7
The treatment of the remains themselves—that they would be accorded long-deferred respect and afforded a peaceful final resting place—also demonstrated the descendants’ commitment to memorializing their fallen ancestors and preserving their threatened tribal traditions. The disposition of corpses figured prominently throughout Sand Creek’s history: in the months leading to the violence, when the Hungates’ ruined bodies moldered in the public eye in Denver; at the massacre itself, when Chivington’s troops revenged themselves on the Hungates’ purported murderers by hacking apart the Cheyenne and Arapaho dead, removing scalps, genitalia, and other body parts as souvenirs from the blood-soaked field; and in the years afterward, when researchers on and off the federal payroll studied the remains of Sand Creek’s victims, using their corpses to improve the U.S. military’s weaponry and as data marshaled in support of elaborate pseudoscientific theories about human evolution and the inevitability of white civilization’s triumph over Native savagery on the frontier. That the descendants set aside a cemetery within the historic site to house those remains, which they buried following strict tribal protocols, spoke volumes about the persistence of the Cheyennes and Arapahos as well as their ongoing respect for a traditional way of life.8
Beyond that, elements of the reburial ceremony underscored the significance of the descendants’ contributions during the memorialization process, as well as establishing their exclusive claim to certain areas of the historic site. The decision to place the cemetery near the banks of the so-called Dawson South Bend, for instance, nodded not only to the work of George Bent but also to the leadership of Chief Laird Cometsevah, who had died only a few months earlier. Cometsevah had always suggested that a tribal graveyard should be located near the spot where, he insisted, Bent had diagrammed the massacre on his maps. The cemetery, consequently, reflected the ongoing significance of Bent’s cartography for the Cheyenne people, the Sacred Arrow Keeper’s consecration of the earth on William Dawson’s land early in the 1970s, and the uneasy resolution of the village controversy during the site search. At the same time, regulations governing the use of the cemetery made it clear that the descendants alone controlled that space. In the future, they, and not the NPS, would determine who walked the sacred ground there, in effect privatizing what otherwise had become a public landscape. For the descendants still involved in the site’s management, those special privileges helped mitigate the deep misgivings that Laird Cometsevah had expressed years earlier, when he had confronted the prospect of handing recovered tribal land over to the U.S. government.9
The descendants’ determination to leave an indelible mark on the historic site manifested itself again at another consultation meeting, held just three days after the burial. On June 11, 2008, stakeholders in the Sand Creek project met in familiar surroundings: one of the Cow Palace hotel’s conference rooms. The previous evening, the tribal representatives, emotionally spent from interring their ancestors’ remains earlier in the week, had sat down with Alexa Roberts and other NPS personnel, including Tom Thomas, the official charged with overseeing the creation of the Sand Creek memorial’s general management plan (GMP). That document, intended to serve as a road map for the site’s day-to-day operations in the future, would also have to cover the politically charged question of interpretation. But even with that contentious issue looming on the horizon, the evening meeting had been informal and collegial. Everyone there seemed to be looking forward to opening up discussion of how the massacre’s history would be recounted for visitors arriving at the site.10
The next day, though, proved anything but cordial. Thomas and Roberts, at the urging of the NPS’s Intermountain regional director at the time, had invited Patty Limerick, still on faculty at the University of Colorado–Boulder and among the most renowned Western historians in the United States, to serve as a discussion leader and, if necessary, a mediator at the meeting and perhaps occasionally for the rest of the planning process. Limerick had firsthand experience with the politics of memory surrounding Sand Creek. Years earlier, she had found herself mired in ugly controversy after recommending that Nichols Hall, a dormitory on the Boulder campus named for one of Chivington’s subordinates, should be rechristened. In the time since, Limerick had directed
the Center of the American West, a “forum committed to the civil, respectful, and problem-solving exploration of important and often contentious public issues.” In that capacity, she had dedicated herself “to bridging the gap between academics and the general public and to demonstrating the benefits of applying historical perspective to contemporary dilemmas and conflicts.” Thomas and Roberts selected Limerick because, “in an era of political polarization and contention,” she took pride in “striv[ing] to bring out ‘the better angels of our nature’ by appealing to our common loyalties and hopes as Westerners.” Because of her academic interests and experience uniting traditional antagonists, Limerick seemed like an ideal choice as the NPS began the process of sorting through the historical literature that would be used as a guide in interpreting the Sand Creek site.11
