Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

have conducted thorough investigations of that question both in terms of social, cultural, and political influences and in terms of socioeconomic pressures.⁹ Instead, I consider the discourses, representations, and performances that attempt to deal with the proposed answers to that question—and their historical and contemporary consequences for memorializing Sand Creek. How were the Sand Creek events discussed and initially framed in the media reports and government investigations of the event? How is the memory of Sand Creek constituted today through performance, practice, and text? What are the salient narratives that compose relevant cultural and national identities in the United States of America? How are these cultural narratives and identities enacted and performed in various collective memory contexts, both textual and embodied, including at Sand Creek consultation meetings, at ritual memorial activities, and in the media and government texts, policies, and activities directly related to Sand Creek?

Locating Sand Creek in the Landscape of Ethnography

Sand Creek found on a vast prairie strewn with sand dunes, bluffs, fallen trees, deep crevices, and dirt roads. At the time this research was undertaken, there were no visitor’s centers, no museums, and only limited tours were available.¹⁰ As a scholar I eagerly anticipate the development of the Sand Creek memorial but also fear the inevitable changes the memorial will bring to this landscape; I hope that some of its quiet isolation will be preserved. It is important to note about the Sand Creek site that its exact location is suspect, indeterminate, and contested. Although all the invested parties agree on the twelve-mile radius in which the massacre occurred and most parties agree that the attack occurred in the vicinity of the “big bend” of the creek—an L-shaped turn in the waterway—the archaeological evidence, oral histories, and the opinions of associated landowners do not concur on the camp’s precise location.¹¹