Several friends have let me know that Michael Elliott — whose book, Custerology, is really outstanding — penned a very kind review of A Misplaced Massacre in the most recent JAH. One of those friends was even nice enough to send me a copy of the offending document. So if you care (I’m thinking of you, mom and dad), here a pdf of the review.
Or, if you’d prefer, here’s the review:
A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek. By Ari Kelman. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. xvi, 363 pp.$35.00.)
Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre tells the remarkable story of the incorporation of one of the most nefarious episodes of U.S. history into the National Park Service (NPS). In November 1864 Col. John Chivington led an attack on an encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in present-day eastern Colorado who believed that they were under the protection of a nearby federal fort. Chivington’s men killed more than 150 Cheyennes and Arapahos, and in the aftermath the soldiers publicly displayed trophies of scalps, ears, and even genitals. The violence shaped the social landscape of the plains for decades and reverberated throughout the United States. As the Civil War neared its conclusion, multiple congressional committees conducted investigations into what was frequently called Chivington’s massacre, and Chivington’s name became a byword for excessive violence even among officers of the U.S. military.
A Misplaced Massacre describes the tortuous path toward national commemoration of these events from the 1990s to the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site — the first NPS unit to use the word massacre in its name. As Kelman explains, NPS officials saw in the events at Sand Creek the possibility of continuing their efforts to incorporate Native American voices and to model federal-tribal cooperation. Therefore, when the site was inaugurated, the dominant rhetoric was one of optimism about the healing power of memorialization. However, the process that led to the site’s creation did much more to expose deep and painful divisions between the various stakeholders than to heal them. “Rather than improving federal-tribal relations, creating the memorial had laid bare two centuries of conflict between the U.S. government and the Cheyennes and Arapahos,” Kelman writes. “As it had during the era of the CivilWar and the Indian Wars, a struggle over control of the landscape had ignited modern disputes” (p. 19).
Kelman’s argument that the commemorative struggles of the twenty-first century are rooted in nineteenth-century histories is one of the many strengths of A Misplaced Massacre. Another is his surefooted storytelling, featuring a cast of characters that includes tribal descendants of the victims of Sand Creek, NPS officials, professional and amateur historians, a casino operator, area landowners with their own complicated set of motives, and politicians and government officials at the state, tribal, and national levels. The book tells a story of shifting alliances, political compacts, historical sleuthing, and deep emotion. It is, finally, a story of the West — and Kelman’s sensitivity to the complexity of regional politics makes him an astute and compelling guide. He notes, for instance, the deep and abiding mistrust of the federal government that unites the rural communities of the West, whether they are populated by white ranchers or Native Americans. Kelman also understands the traditions of military service that join those communities, as well as the climate of patriotic militarism that dominates the post–September 11, 2001, landscape of the latter part of his tale. A Misplaced Massacre makes clear that what is most surprising about the National Historic Site is not that it took so long to establish, but that it ever opened at all.
Consider the simple question that drives much of the drama in Kelman’s book: Where was the precise location of the Sand Creek massacre? The enabling legislation for the site required that the NPS determine the exact terrain where the violence occurred so that the land could be purchased. For decades, local residents and tribal groups had believed that they understood the location of the massacre, but archaeological efforts in the 1990s generated more questions than answers. As a result, both the NPS and tribal groups engaged oral histories, historic maps, and contemporary archaeology in a long and often-fractious search for the correct ground on which to commemorate the massacre.
Kelman’s account of a 1999 archaeological dig that included NPS officials and representatives of tribal descendants is one of the most revealing episodes of the book. Even as the archaeological team assembled by the NPS celebrated a dramatic find of physical objects, the team’s emotional response left the tribal representatives distressed at the “whooping and hollering” that accompanied each find. Kelman quotes a Northern Cheyenne observer to the scene, who remembered that the NPS archaeologists “were jumping up and down, doing cartwheels and back flips when they found something. But the Cheyennes, they just walked off” (p. 129). It would be years before the groups could agree on an interpretation of the evidence that proved acceptable to all.
Here and elsewhere Kelman is a deft interpreter of the cultural conflicts at the center of this process of commemoration. He understands that they result from the incommensurability of the agendas that brought the parties to the table. For many of the tribal representatives involved in the process, the creation of the National Historic Site was only a means toward restorative justice, particularly through the payment of reparations that were promised — but never paid — to the survivors of Sand Creek in the 1865 Treaty of the Little Arkansas. For the NPS, the very act of commemorating the dark history of Sand Creek is an achievement — a testament to the ability of the United States to face its own troubling history, to overcome the divisions of the past in the hope of a better future. Kelman never tries to gloss over these differences, and he is forthright about their consequences.
The sheer difficulty of creating the Sand Creek National Historic Site is what makes A Misplaced Massacre essential reading. Kelman is alive to the thick emotion of historical commemoration and its political reverberations. The easy path for him would have been to tell a story of victory over division—of bridging gaps and mending fences to work for the common good. But Kelman refuses to replicate nineteenth-century triumphalism in his account of twenty-first century memory. Sand Creek was a “misplaced massacre” because it disturbs so many stories that Americans have told themselves about their nation, and it cannot be found through a simple tale of reconciliation.
Michael A. Elliott
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia