Sam Lanevi  examines memory of the November 29, 1864 United States Army massacre of Native Americans in Sand Creek, Colorado Territory.

On November 29, 1864, parts of the United States Army 3rd Regiment of Colorado Cavalry Volunteers and the 1st Colorado Infantry Regiment of Volunteers, murdered and mutilated over 230 Cheyenne and Arapho people, mostly women and children, in what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. [1] This massacre took place just months after peace terms had been agreed between Black Kettle, leading chief of Southern Cheyenne and Chief Niwot of the Arapahos and despite the presence of a U.S. and a white flag in Black Kettle’s camp. During the establishment of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historical Site in the aftermath of 9/11, concerned critics believed the word “massacre” blamed the United States Army and “flirted with anti-Americanism.” [2]

Over the past decade, there has been a reckoning in the language and names used for places, such as the renaming of the ski resort formerly known as “Sq--- Valley” to Palisades Tahoe in acknowledgment of its “racist and sexist” name. This renaming was one of the first which started a bigger movement to rename other sites with the same derogatory name. In a public statement, Secretary for the Interior, Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in this position, stated: 

“Words matter, particularly in our work to make our nation’s public lands and waters accessible and welcoming to people of all backgrounds. Consideration of these replacements is a big step forward in our efforts to remove derogatory terms whose expiration dates are long overdue…Throughout this process, broad engagement with Tribes, stakeholders and the general public will help us advance our goals of equity and inclusion.”

Thus, the debate surrounding terminology surrounding the United States’ and Indigenous peoples has and continues to have relevance. 

In his ground-breaking 1893 thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner’s use of words such as “primitive” positioned a primordial, undeveloped western frontier against the “advance of [civilized] American settlement.” [3] Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” conceptualized the American West and established its vocabulary. As anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserts: “Terminologies demarcate a field, politically and epistemologically. Names set up a field of power.” [4] These fields of power dictate memorialization. In the case of the Sand Creek Massacre, a site of gendered violence, word choice was and is critical to establishing the historical narrative.  

Historian Ari Kelman explores tensions between public memory, politics, and patriotism through the “hotly contested” creation of this historical site in his book Misplaced Massacre. [5] Kelman uses the narratives of John Chivington, “an enthusiastic perpetrator,” George Bent, “a victim and survivor,” and Silas Soule, “a reluctant witness” to demonstrate the wildly divergent first-hand accounts of the events at Sand Creek. [6]

In Chivington’s account of events: “Sand Creek had been a terrible and glorious battle…[wherein] agents of an ascendant civilization…had squared off against savages, the Cheyennes and Arapahos, guilty of countless crimes against white settlers in recent months.” [7] In contrast, Soule’s account portrayed a “topsy-turvy world of civilized Indians and savage whites” wherein soldiers committed “atrocious acts of violence [and] unspeakable cruelties on Cheyenne and Arapaho women and young people.” [8] Soule then described “a mother who killed first her children and then herself rather than allowing her family to be gunned down by the Colorado volunteers, or of the eviscerated pregnant woman, her unborn child ripped from her body and then scalped by white soldiers…” [9] Finally, in his account, George Bent unequivocally deemed it a “massacre and fix[ed] blame on John Chivington and his men for the years of violence that followed: ‘The real causes of the Indian War on the plains were the wanton attacks made by the Colorado volunteers on friendly Indians.’” [10]

The American sweep westward was viewed as a celebratory, and sometimes bloodless endeavour. While there were certainly skirmishes dotting this narrative, they bravely fought battles with the proverbial American “cowboys” always triumphing over their equally ferocious foes in battle right out of a John Wayne movie. The Sand Creek Massacre overturns this narrative. As seen through the various accounts, the massacre entailed American soldiers committed atrocities against defenceless Indigenous women and children. To acknowledge this fact, and the revised version of popular history, would mean overturning what many believe is the pervading story of the American West and the idea of Americanness. By acknowledging these heinous acts through terming the site: The Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, there is a fundamental and explicit challenge to the history of the American-Indigenous encounter. 

This reveals what historian Eric Foner describes as “a desire for a history that eliminates complexity from our national experience” which deems any history asserting injustices and genocides as “intentional or part of systemic racism and settler colonialism…they are [seen as] divisive.” [13] Narratives seeking to right public memory were not only seen as divisive, but also unpatriotic. This, coupled with the fact this was gendered and racial violence adds to the complexity of crafting a critical public memory. Critics of American popular history were seen as “denigrating American values, policing the nation’s thought and speech, promoted victimization theories, exalted women and people of color over while males, and pushed a divisive multiculturalism…[seeking] a ‘primitive type of historical revisionism.’” [14] Thus, anything contrary to long-held idealized American mythology was perceived as inherently unpatriotic and objectionable. [15] The desire to idealize American history obscures the state sanctioned gendered and racial violence which took place at Sand Creek and denies the culpability of these US Army regiments, and the United States as a whole. By examining the controversy in remembering the Sand Creek Massacre, we can see how a critical study of these highly gendered and racial instances of violence get obscured in the cultivation of the American frontier myth.  

[1] “History & Culture - Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service).”

[2] Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 6. 

[3] Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History, ed. Frederick Jackson Turner (New York, 1920), 1. 

[4] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 115. 

[5] Kelman, x. 

[6] Kelman, 8. 

[7] Kelman, 11. 

[8] Kelman, 25; Kelman, 24. 

[9] Kelman, 24.; Soule goes on to describe how the genitalia of both Cheyenne and Arapho men and women, as well as other body parts, were scavenged as spoils of war by the soldiers and later displayed in public places around the state. 

[10] Kelman, 35. 

[11] Jeffrey Ostler and Karl Jacoby, “After 1776: Native Nations, Settler Colonialism, and the Meaning of America,” Journal of Genocide Research, September 2021, 11. 

[12] Ostler and Jacoby, 12.

[13] Eric Foner, Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 22.; Ostler and Jacoby, 14. 

[14] Mike Wallace, “Culture war, history front” in History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan, 1996), 175. 

[15] Wallace, 179. 

Samantha Lanevi is a D.Phil Student at the University of Cambridge working on US policy towards foreign-born war brides in the twentieth century. She completed an M.Phil at Cambridge on secession rhetoric’s weaponization of white female vulnerability and other projects related to the American West and historical memory.