Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

However, the uncertainty of Sand Creek’s exact location has not stopped people from memorializing it. There are plaques, street names, buildings, businesses, and similar public references to Sand Creek and its participants in Denver, Longmont, Boulder, and other parts of Colorado. These references are debated and discussed in city hall meetings, media outlets, public school classrooms and performances, and at Sand Creek–related events and activities. As a result, Sand Creek has multiple locations: the designated geographical location approximately eight miles east of Eads, Colorado, which had no monument and limited public access at the time of this study and the numerous spaces where Sand Creek is reproduced in performance, monument, text, and conversation.

The invested communities do not comprise solely ethnic or cultural groups that possess a lasting sense of unification and of shared experience per se, although they can include groups that share those traits. They emerge because of Sand Creek, which invents them as much as they invent Sand Creek. These sodalities are produced both at the physical location of Sand Creek and in a variety of other sites in Colorado and elsewhere through conversations, artifacts, texts, and performances generated by media interest, the investment of historical cultural centers of production, economic interests, and various group investments. These communities of sentiment and memory produce social dramas—living, breathing scenarios that not only frame the story and meaning of Sand Creek but also produce recognizable, meaningful, and actionable cultural and national identities that relate to the world of the twenty-first century.¹²

Sand Creek, as it is today, collapses time in that it stands more or less as it did when it was emptied of the human bodies that once lived and camped there. After November 29, 1864, it was populated by livestock and ranchers, but it never became a community or village again. In the interim between the sale of the land and the building of the park, there were no “bodies” permanently located on the site. So the idea of remembering Sand Creek is as much about re-membering the site—that