CHIVINGTON'S MASSACRE AND THE POLITICS OF AMERICAN MEMORY

Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2013) ("Sand Creek, depicted as a massacre at the historic site, will buck the redemptive and reconciliation currents running through most national memorials, including those recalling the Civil War. The massacre emerged out of corruption and malfeasance, race hatred rather then uplift. Its history indicts characters typically cast as heroes in the American imagination--citizen soldiers, rugged pioneers, Union officials--suggesting a darker vision of the Civil War's causes, prosecution, and consequences. Westward expansion touched off the war that destroyed slavery, but also another war with the Plains Indians, a brutal conflict that lasted decades and left behind no simple lessons for federal commemorators hoping to bend public memory to nationalistic ends. With Americans still looking to the Civil War as an origin story, a way to understand who wee are, the NPS [National Park Service] and descendants must contemplate how to interpret events like Sand Creek, an irredeemable tragedy that casts doubts on the enduring notion that the United States enjoys a special destiny, that it is an exceptional nation among nations, favored by God. The question of whether visitors to the Sand Creek site are ready to broach such difficult topics, to reassess their homeland's character anf fate, remains unsettled." "For in the end, this story of memorializing Sand Creek suggests that history and memory are malleable, that even the land, despite its implied promise of permanence can change, and that the people of the United States are so various that they should not be expected to share a single take of a common past." Id. at 279. From the bookjacket: "In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel JOhn Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. A Misplace Massacre examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site." One ways of reading A Misplaced Massacre is as, in part, a commentary on the ways in which misleading, if not false, assertions of public or national interests, and of what we now call "national security," are used to justify and rationalize questionable and wrongful conduct and policy on the part of the government and its officials. For example, in the heated debate as to whether to characterize Sand Creek as a "battle" or a "massacre," one cannot help but consider the heated contemporary debate as to whether certain form of interrogation do or do not constitute "torture" and whether the U.S. engages in and sanctions the use of torture. How will future generations of Americans remember--will they remember--My lai, Abu Ghraib, Gauntanamo Bay, and such? Or, for that matter, one cannot help but think about the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School is being interpreted and co-opted for political (and commercial) use. The past may never really be past. Yet, history is never etched in stone.).