Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

to national tragedies in an effort to articulate the larger role national memorials play in shaping the cultural narratives of the United States of America’s destiny as a nation.

Conclusion

History and memory are inevitably linked to fundamental questions of time and space as ontological and epistemological phenomena salient to understanding human experience. They are linked to time in terms of how it is conceived individually and socially; they are linked to space because they inevitably involve localities, events in time located in spatial contexts both material and imagined. Because memory and history relate to such fundamental ontological and epistemological questions, they serve as intellectual inspiration for scholars dating back to the classical tradition, including Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.²⁸ The alienation of the self—from one’s historical identity, from a sense of belonging to community, from meaningful intrinsic attachments that may be materially manifested in texts and practices but that are contained solely by external, material realities—is also a result of the hegemonic enterprise of Western cultural capitalism.

As global capitalism spreads values of consumerism and watered-down versions of Western European and US American cultural values and practices, it also spreads the fear that a fully realized indigenous connection to one’s self and to others and to shared pasts will disappear in the fast-paced, ever-changing world of “new and improved” identities and realities. In the global era of rapid transportation, satellite linkups, instant communications around the world, and round-the-clock streaming sound-bite news, distinct borders and territories historically linked to communities and identities are blurred by the dynamic changes of economic materialism and by political and cultural sovereignty.

Because even the old becomes new again in consumerism, there is a search for some authentic connection to the past, some connection to a