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There are certain events in history that blur the lines of how we remember and represent them. Sometimes we remember them for being cornerstones and foundations of our national character and identity and as such, we think of them as pivotal movements in which we either came together as a nation to fight a common enemy like the attack on Pearl Harbor. While others, are seen as mistakes that shake our concepts of politics and government like the war in Vietnam. However, as we continue to move forward some events are forgotten and their significance is lessen to the point they lose their meaning or they are missed represented. Fortunately, Dr. Ari Kelman a McCabe Greer Professor of History at Penn State University seeks to uncover one of those forgotten events of American history the Sand Creek Massacre.
Armed with personal accounts, maps, courtroom testimonies, newspaper articles, and federal laws Kelman recounts the events surrounding the Sand Creek Mass acre by using a central narrative of the historic site’s creation as the book’s spine and flesh out that tale with flashbacks to the era of the massacre and various moments when people struggled over Sand Creek’s memory (pg. x-xi). As a result, Kelman describes how discrepancies in historical record can be ascribed to the so-called fog of war. Scenes of violence, especially mass violence are notorious for breeding unreliable and often irreconcilable testimony. The stories of Sand Creek with all their disagreements stem not only the havoc they experienced but also from the politics of memory surrounding the points, they dispute. In regards to what caused the bloodshed? Could it have been avoided? Who should be held accountable for what happened?, and was it a glorious victory or a horrendous massacre? Such questions still raised issues of racial identity and gender ideologies that structured an emerging multicultural society in the American West, their interplay of politics and violence on the American borderlands, and about the righteousness of the continental expansion and the bloody conflicts of both the Civil War and the Indian Wars that accorded by that process (pg. 8).
One he greatest strengths of Kelman work is that he acknowledges that historians need to drift comfortably between the humanities, the social sciences, and anthropologist who typically identify with the latter category, archeologist are social scientists who flirt with harder sciences. In addition, for a young subdiscipline like battlefield archeology, questions of scholarly taxonomy or methodological orientations became all more important. Meaning that to real uncover the meaning and truth of an event one wears many hats to better gain information to challenge and rewrite the established narrative of an event like the Sand Creek massacre. As such, historians become detectives who go into the archives to interview witnesses and possible suspects. Form those materials; they get the story down on paper. However, historians are often left conflicting stories and as such that when the anthropologist steps in to get the hard evidence. Only by combining the two disciplines is it possible to complete a more actuate picture of the past. Much like how archeologist Doug Scott hoped that his data would be unimpeachable answering without any doubt at all the questions of where the massacre happened and perhaps hinting at how blood was shed (pg. 125).
Another strength of Kelman’s work is much similar to the work of both Pekka Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire and Dr. Stephanie M.H. Camp’s book Closer to Freedom Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South which give agency to minority groups. To which I will agree with Robert when he stated, “it was interesting that no matter who was involved in the research and search for the official site of the massacre, political, tribal, and cultural tensions still played an integral part in the creation of The Sand Creek Massacre National Park, and continue to this day in some way, shape or form.” Since it is Kelman’s main objective to showcase how the native tribes of the Cheyenne and Arapaho who rejected what they saw as a hollow offer of painless healing and quick reconciliation at the opening ceremony. Concerned that the memorial might be stalking horse for an older assimilationist project these skeptics instead portrayed the site as an emblem of self-determination. They understood that controlling the interpretative apparatus at a national public space offered them an opportunity to define insiders and outsiders. As such, they fought for years to steer the commemorative process to call the site the Sand Creek Massacre National Site. In doing so they believed that the memorial would help them preserve their cultural practices and securing their future through venerating the past (pgs. 5-6).
Correspondingly, the story of memorializing Sand Creek suggests that history and memory are malleable, that even the land can change and that citizens of the United States are so various that they should not be expected to share a single tale of a common past. Sometimes their stories complement one another and sometimes they clash. Sometimes they intersect and other times they diverged. Depending on who tells it the story of Sand Creek for instance suggest that the Civil War midwifed in President Lincoln’s words, “a new birth of freedom,” but also that it delivered the Indian Wars; that it was a moment of national redemption for some Americans, but of dispossession and subjugation for others. While the National Park Service officials and the descendants will never concur on every element of Sand Creek’s interpretation, but they might agree that the historic site should challenge visitors to grapple with competing narratives of U.S. history to struggle with ironies embedded in the American past. As such, the massacre will no longer be misplaced in the landscape of national memory (pg. 279).