Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

perspective useful to memorializing Sand Creek. Using the oral histories in volume one of the National Park Service Sand Creek Massacre Site Study Document, I discuss ways Cheyenne and Arapaho people use their remarkable storytelling skills both to accommodate the epistemological interests of the National Park Service representatives in “locating” Sand Creek and to nevertheless maintain a degree of autonomy, preserving their own cultural interests in telling the Sand Creek stories. Their particular skills reveal the unique counterpoint, agency, and survivance strategies (outlined by Vizenor) common to many different Native American peoples.

In chapter 5 I use the contemporary narrative framework of chapter 2, the historical tensions between savagery and civilization of chapter 3, and the unique survivance strategies and Cheyenne and Arapaho identifications of chapter 4 to construct various Sand Creek performative scenarios that have emerged in lieu of a traditional physical monument to Sand Creek. These performative scenarios succeed in constructing the communities of sentiment at various Sand Creek locales and also invent the living collective memory of Sand Creek. Moreover, these performative scenarios operate in tandem with and in opposition to the national identity interests of the dominant US American culture.

The final chapter discusses how communities of sentiment—emerging within performative scenarios of the Sand Creek massacre—both define and are defined by the collective memory of Sand Creek. The organic latitude surrounding Sand Creek’s location and history ensures its unstable, organic, and dynamic qualities. Without a physical memorial, Sand Creek remains imagined collectively and individually, and that collective imagination is what will ultimately produce a physical monument. However, even when a monument has been created, it will not encompass Sand Creek’s memory. Sand Creek will continue to be a contested lieux de memoire, in Pierre Nora’s phrasing.²⁷ Its trickster qualities will destabilize any single monument’s claim to Sand Creek’s past. The final chapter of this study places Sand Creek in the larger landscape of memorials