Public Memory of the Sand Creek Massacre By Lindsay Calhoun

Native American Perspectives on US American History

Owing to the controversial erasures and betrayal of American Indians throughout history, numerous indigenous and nonindigenous scholars alike are beginning to inquire into the rearticulation of Native American histories and the renegotiation of American history and historiography by multiple interest groups.¹³ These scholars critique traditional methods of epistemology and historiography in constructing Native American identities. In light of the postmodern turn in the study of the human condition, they have argued that the “Indian” is an invention of colonial legacies, modernity, and colonial histories.¹⁴ Anishanaabe (Ojibwe/Chippewa) First Nation member and scholar Gerald Vizenor stated that there is no translatable word in any of the indigenous languages for Indian.¹⁵ Scholars like Vizenor have argued in the shadow of the American Indian experience that social sciences and humanities scholars have to begin to see the already existing intersections and traces of Native American survivance, which according to Vizenor is the alternative stance to the native voice in historical, cultural, literary, and social science texts produced by the European colonizers, a constructed voice that shades the cultural representations and translations and that cannot contain the active différance of native peoples.¹⁶ These texts, written by representatives of the colonial power structure, attempt to contain, fix, and totalize native peoples. However, Vizenor argued that despite these efforts to stabilize and fix the experience of native peoples—ultimately a thinly veiled effort to annihilate them discursively—language is too dynamic and unstable for that to be possible.¹⁷ Hence there are “active silences” and traces of native histories that one must sift out of the colonial histories and texts that seek to freeze native peoples in primitive nostalgia and exotic otherness.¹⁸ Locating these traces of native survivance opens up more opportunities for indigenous peoples to intervene, disarticulate, and rearticulate their own histories.

The desire for native peoples to begin rearticulating their own histories and identities in the face of Anglo-European epistemological traditions