Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

involved in the memorialization. Interviews with members of the four involved Cheyenne and Arapaho First Nations were conducted without the use of any kind of recording device.

In Washington, DC, at the new National Museum of the American Indian, I examined a small display illustrating the treaty signed at the Little Arkansas River between the United States government and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians a year after the attack on Sand Creek. I collected historical material on Sand Creek from the National Archives, and I attended two congressional hearings on Sand Creek. Ideally, a draft copy of the Sand Creek memorial design would be incorporated into this analysis, but at the time of writing it is not available owing to the logistics of the planning timeline at this stage of the park’s development. It may be possible, however, to include the draft in a later analysis, along with more in-depth interviews and additional field observation work. Finally, I examined the television miniseries Into the West and the Kiowa County website discussions of Sand Creek in order to deepen my understanding of both how a memory community is created and how “imagined communities” emerge and coalesce around memorials.

Summary of the Project

Using a critical historiographical approach to history and memory, the second chapter of this study develops a window into the past, arguing that the inquiry into Sand Creek memorialization must begin with the present rather than with the past. Keeping this argument in mind, I develop several narrative themes that are designed to provide a discursive framework for understanding present-day Cheyenne and Arapaho narrative interpretations of the Sand Creek events, dominant US American cultural interpretations, and finally the points at which those interpretations coincide or conflict with one another. These narrative threads provide a context for understanding the historical narratives of Sand Creek that emerge as relevant and dominant in contemporary US culture