In A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek, Ari Kelman argues, “For Native people gazing east from the banks of Sand Creek, the Civil War, looked like a war of empire, a contest to control expansion into the West, rather than a war of liberation. The massacre, then, should be recalled as part of both the Civil War and the Indian Wars, a bloody link between interrelated chapters of the nation’s history” (pg. xi). Kelman draws upon the role of historical memory in his analysis not only of the massacre itself, but how Native American and Anglo-American groups choose to remember and interpret it.
Kelman writes, “Linking such transcendent recollections of a noble war fought in freedom’s name to the murder and dispossession of indigenous people, to racial animosities rather than to soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism, to ill-trained cavalrymen committing atrocities rather than to volunteer soldiers lionized in American culture for fighting for their country, risked sullying popular conceptions of the Civil War” (pg. 31). He continues, “Irredeemable episodes like Sand Creek remind Americans that as much as they might wish that their history proceeded in a regimented fashion, the past cannot so easily be trained to fall into line. Events like the massacre belie national narratives of steady progress and exceptional righteousness” (pg. 31).
A significant issue with memorializing the site developed as a result of the National Parks Service’s methods. Utilizing primary source information privileged the narratives of the men under Chivington’s command who committed the massacre, rather than Indian oral tradition (pg. 89). This caused a great deal of animosity between the Native American groups that consulted on the memorial. Kelman writes, “Cometsevah, in other words, demanded that the descendants be allowed to interpret their own past, without ‘meddling’ from federal officials” (pg. 136). Later issues arose as a result of the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s, wherein right wing media pundits and politicians criticized the reinterpretation of the site as a massacre rather than a battle.
Kelman concludes, “San Creek, depicted as a massacre at the historic site, will buck the redemptive and reconciliationist currents running through most national memorials, including those recalling the Civil War. The massacre emerged out of corruption and malfeasance, race hatred rather than uplift” (pg. 279). He continues, “Westward expansion touched off the war that destroyed slavery, but also another war with the Plains Tribes, a brutal conflict that lasted decades and left behind no simple lessons for federal commemorators hoping to bend public memory to nationalist ends” (pg. 279). ( )

So this book was a complicated read for me. Normally I post my reviews of books I read for school before class, because I want to get my thoughts out there before we talk about it, but I genuinely couldn't tell how I felt about this book until after we talked about it, and even then, sorting out my feelings was complicated. At first, I couldn't tell if my reservations about the book had to do with the content of the book, or the way it was written, and ultimately it was a little bit of both, though I think really it was more of the former. I will admit that my feelings were clarified mostly because we got to speak with Ari Kelman in class (over Skype) and he explained some of the ways he went about trying to craft the narrative arc of the book, which hit on some of the roots of my problems with it. Kelman explained that he did his best to give every actor in the book the benefit of the doubt, and to portray them in as fair a light as he possible could, which is very reasonable! Except that at least I as a reader, and many, many others, exist in a culture of white supremacy that tells us that certain kinds of knowledges, epistemologies, ontologies etc. are more valid than others, which means that when it came to the debate about the "actual" site of the Sand Creek massacre, it really felt like the knowledges of white history and archeology carried more weight than those of the descendants. I absolutely know that that was not Kelman's intention, but it leads me to thinking about our role as historians and storytellers in keeping "balance" in our work when dominant narratives are present in and around the stories we tell. In short: I think Kelman needed to use a little more multipartiality in telling this story, and that is my biggest problem with it.

That being said: it's a very carefully (and quite well done) intervention into questions of public memory and the crafting of that memory based on certain types of epistemologies, and I would recommend it to people thinking about those types of questions. ( )

History of the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, in which many Native Americans were slaughtered by Union forces during the Civil War. The history is interspersed with contemporary disputes about how to memorialize the massacre—for decades it was a “battle”—and a lot of detail about the complex politics involving two tribes, local whites, and the federal government trying to figure out both where the massacre site was and how to create a memorial that would respect the dead, promote tourism, and reward the owners of the property on which the memorial would be built. The massacre was “misplaced” both because people lost track of where it had actually occurred and because it was hard for whites to acknowledge it as part of the Civil War, which in the West was more about expansion. Tribal members experienced some of the things that the National Park Service people thought would honor the dead as renewed insults; they repeatedly noted that native skeletons had been removed and studied to determine (and thus ultimately improve) the effects of weapons on human bodies. At some points, they almost scrapped the whole project, preferring “no memorial at all to one built upon the ruins of their cultural and political sovereignty.” Bonus points for the white apologists who even today argue that we should all forgive and forget, because not all the soldiers were indiscriminate killers. Also for the tentacles of corruption that reached even this project—Senator Ted Stevens threatened its viability because of economic interests linked to Indian gaming, with which his donors/friends were heavily involved. ( )