Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

in history and science is part of a larger ongoing interrogation of North American history and memory.¹⁹ Further, in the context of postmodernity, the question whether it is possible to distinguish theoretically history, memory, and nation is also a larger ongoing subject of intellectual inquiry.²⁰

The Sand Creek massacre was a historic event, and so is its current memorialization because of the unique role that the Cheyenne and Arapaho have played in the process through the efforts of the National Park Service. Their consultation in the park design and maintenance signals a shift in the American cultural-heritage paradigm. Evidence of this shift is seen in the changes at the Little Bighorn Battlefield Memorial and in the new National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. Sand Creek is a site of contested cultural meanings, and the struggle to produce the definitive Sand Creek narrative persists today. Thus the massacre that occurred there constitutes an event that has consequences for how people create meaning as collective cultures and as nations.²¹ The contested terrain upon which historical narratives and memorials are built necessarily involves the negotiation and exercise of power and privilege, regarding both who may participate in crafting historical narratives that are interpreted as valid and who defines and constructs memorials and their significance.

Summary of the Data

Sand Creek is a multidimensional ethnographic case site of inquiry that includes multiple geographic locations, multiple texts, multiple bodies, and multiple time and space frames. Investigating Sand Creek requires a critical recognition of the material, performative, and textual realities of Sand Creek and the ways they are intertwined.

Sand Creek is commemorated through actions such as the “spiritual healing run” often conducted by different tribes in the months leading up to the anniversary of the massacre, and through the small