Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

Creek as it is collectively invented, imagined, and reimagined through performance and text in emergent and contingent sites of production.

Sand Creek exists in a three-dimensional sphere of memory production that is dynamic and organic and that cannot be solely contained by geography, texts, bodies, or bodies in action. The multiple dimensions of Sand Creek are produced in moving images and representations, such as television miniseries and documentary films; in the texts, still images, and electronic conversations on various websites that discuss, educate, and debate the various issues regarding Sand Creek; in the print media and journalism documenting Sand Creek; in the rituals, practices, and performances associated with commemorating Sand Creek performed and observed by both Cheyenne and Arapaho citizens, government officials, and participating non-Indian citizens; and in the government texts and reports both historical and contemporary that continue to keep Sand Creek a salient public policy issue. Collective memory occurs in this “time-fullness” of the human condition, meaning that a historical event with living communities of memory in the present cannot be closed or contained because it evolves with the human condition.

At the ever-changing intersection of space and time, humans imagine and perform remembrance and re-membering. They bring the past to life through the reembodiment of space and time, often reproducing the conditions of trauma and presentness, a sense of being in the exact moment that the event in question occurred. They “reexperience” (and sometimes are retraumatized) through re-membering the past in a nonlinear fashion. When members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho go to Sand Creek on November 29, they often speak of hearing the sounds of babies crying or whispers in the wind. They point out the presence of certain birds or animals as symbolic in relationship to the Sand Creek massacre and its anniversary. Some claim to have seen their ancestors among the high grasses there. Regardless of whether one believes these events occur in an empirically verifiable sense, that the Cheyenne and Arapaho often experience them as real suggests that time and space are