Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

concrete truth, for everything that is considered to be of cultural value is immediately co-opted into the heritage industry—and in cases of historical tragedy, into variants of the “holocaust industry”—for immediate consumption in a global marketplace.²⁹ This motivates people to seek identifications with the past that are somehow outside that consumption, that are somehow spontaneous and immediate, sometimes temporary and contingent, as in the spontaneous memorials erected at Columbine High School and at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall and along street corners and fence lines surrounding Ground Zero in New York. Those instantaneous and fleeting acts of commemoration illuminate collective memory’s cultural power in late modernity, perhaps even more than the reflective surfaces of onyx walls and messages carved in rock that often grace the memory landscape. The Sand Creek memorialization case study has much to contribute to an understanding of the cultural and political implications of both permanent and temporary forms of memorialization in contemporary American life.