Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

is, reembodying the site and all that process entails, for it involves what collective memories tell those who hold them about the story of Sand Creek. During anniversaries and important Sand Creek milestone events, people come to the Sand Creek site—members of tribes, Park Service representatives, scholars, media representatives, government representatives, and other invited and invested parties—and they re-member (re-embody) the site, creating a temporary community of sentiment there. And when they leave, Sand Creek stands quiet and solitary as it did on the days after the massacre, seemingly empty of live bodies and the collective bustle of community life.

These themes and patterns of community, performance, embodiment, discourse, and text drive my methodological interpretation of the memorialization of the Sand Creek Massacre. Through analysis of film, field notes, interview transcripts, historical documents, contemporary documents, and media texts, I develop two lines of analysis. First, in order to interpret performance, I gauge the performativity of the discursive practices that constitute the memorialization of the Sand Creek Massacre, articulating the various material, cultural, historical, and political conditions that motivate the production of Sand Creek discourses and the investments and desires of various groups driving those discourses. I examine the stories of Sand Creek as told through various voices: government, Cheyenne and Arapaho, scholarly or scientific, and media sources, both historical and contemporary. Second, I demonstrate how re-membering/reembodying Sand Creek is accomplished through performance and practice at historically and culturally relevant sites. Because Sand Creek exists in the collective imagination beyond the rural fields eight miles from Eads, Colorado, and it is manifest in conversations and deliberations of the US Congress, in theater productions around the western states, in a television miniseries, in commemorative occasions, and in meetings and powwows whose locations are often spontaneous and temporary, I move beyond the material boundaries of the sites, artifacts, and discourses of memory by presenting Sand