Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

and for exploring ways the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples both accommodate and resist the dominant US cultural narrative interpretations of the role the Sand Creek attack played in US history in order to accomplish the memorialization of Sand Creek. Identifying the contemporary narrative construction of Sand Creek lays the groundwork for the emerging performative scenarios in chapter 5.

Chapter 3 presents traditional rhetorical criticism of the most significant public historical documents that describe the Sand Creek attack and its outcomes to the American public. I have included news and investigative reports gathered locally in the Colorado territory, nationally in the larger-circulation papers on the East Coast, as well as the federal government’s final report on the attack, which the major East Coast and Colorado newspapers at the time included in their reporting. Using narrative criticism techniques, I examine the two competing narratives of the time—those that defined the events as a battle and those that called it a massacre—to discuss this first draft of Sand Creek’s history and the ways dominant US cultural interpretations of those two competing narratives inform an understanding of the formation of national identity for US Americans. The analysis shows that this identity was discursively shaped in part by an understanding of dialectical identifications of civilization and savagery and of culturally driven concepts: East and West, frontier and civilization, state and territory, freedom and security, autonomy and stability. This dialectical framework provides the foundation for approaching the contemporary memorialization of Sand Creek in terms of both narrative and performance.

Chapter 4 delves into the complex epistemological methods that the Cheyenne and Arapaho utilize to construct their own narrative history of what happened at Sand Creek, a narrative history particular to the cultural needs of the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples and is often inaccessible to non-Cheyenne, non-Arapaho audiences in terms of shared meaning but that is remarkably adaptive to the demands of the dominant, non-Indian US culture in providing a unique Cheyenne and Arapaho