Genevieve (Genna) Kane

Genevieve (Genna) Kane is a PhD student in the American & New England Studies Program at Boston University. She has a BA in History from UMass Amherst and an MS in Nonprofit Management from Northeastern University. Genna worked as a museum interpreter at institutions such as Old North Church & Historic Site, the Paul Revere House, and the John F. Kennedy National Historic Site in the Boston area. In addition to her interest in museums, Genna researches twentieth-century urban development, historic preservation, and public history. She is particularly interested in the history of museums, and how they developed as sites for public history. Much of her work focuses on historic sites in Boston, such as the museums and institutions on the Freedom Trail.

Book Review, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, by Ari Kelman (2015)

Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (2015) follows the debates over the Sand Creek Massacre National Park Service (NPS) Historic Site, dedicated in 2007. The historic site commemorates the Sand Creek massacre in Colorado during the Civil War in 1864, where Union troops brutally slaughtered members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho indigenous tribes. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the federal government, indigenous tribes, and nearby residents influenced the interpretation for an NPS site, and these stakeholders passionately debated the original location of the massacre and the nomenclature of the site as a “battle” or “massacre.” Their debates illustrate how the past affects the present political landscape, and how the present affects the way stakeholders and visitors think about the past. The book’s strengths include a page-turning narrative that illuminates the personalities of the divided stakeholders in the process of interpreting Sand Creek. However, Kelman’s history is inherently limited due to its focus on the late twentieth and early twenty first-century developments of a historic site, begging the question: what kind of scholarship might effectively address the United States’ tragic and brutal massacre of indigenous peoples?

Throughout A Misplaced Massacre, Kelman weaves nineteenth and twentieth-century history into his contemporary narrative about the historic site to explain the significance of certain subjects and actors. In some instances, Kelman effectively intertwines the context with the twenty-first century events, and emphasizes their significance to the stakeholders. For example, when the NPS decided to invest in the Sand Creek Massacre as a historic site, they decided to conduct archeological digs to determine the original location of the massacre. For the most part, the NPS ignored the perspective of the Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants, especially their interpretation of the history and their knowledge the original location of the massacre. In addition, the NPS desecrated the indigenous peoples’ sacred burial grounds with their archeological digs. The NPS’s disrespect for indigenous peoples followed the pattern of the United States federal government well before the controversy of locating Sand Creek. Kelman describes the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which allows tribes to claim cultural artifacts and remains of indigenous peoples from universities and museums that harbored them for generations. Kelman writes that “these artifacts were ugly reminders of the years around the turn of the twentieth-century, when white observers had considered Indians a ‘vanishing race.’” [1] Digging through the burial ground of nineteenth-century massacres only exacerbated this painful history for the indigenous peoples. According to Kelman, the conflict over indigenous peoples’ remains exemplified one of many instances where the federal government ignored the indigenous peoples’ cultural and political sovereignty. [2]

Kelman underscores the history of institutions harboring indigenous peoples’ remains to illuminate the indigenous peoples’ distrust of the federal government during the NPS archeological digs, but Kelman’s failure to further analyze how the United States stewarded the dead was a missed opportunity to fully contextualize indigenous peoples’ history. For example, Kelman’s narrative about the federal government and indigenous peoples’ remains throughout the nineteenth-century overlapped with Americans grappling with immense and widespread death in the era of the Civil War. In This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Faust argues that the massive scope of killing and violence in the Civil War impacted the understanding of death for nineteenth-century soldiers, civilians, governments, and institutions. Faust examines how both the Union and Confederate governments attempted to return bodies of soldiers to families. The Southern states and private groups managed the Confederate fallen soldiers and civilians, and the Union established departments as an apparatus of the state to maintain the victims of the Civil War. Faust claims that the federal government’s involvement “acknowledged a new public importance for the dead. No longer simply the responsibility of their families, they, and their loss, now belonged to the nation. These men had given their lives that their nation might live; their bodies, repositories of their selfhood and surviving identity … deserved recognition and care.” [3] Whether through private groups or as an apparatus of the state, both sides assumed responsibility to steward the remains of soldiers and civilians from the Civil War.  

The treatment of the dead, both by the enemy soldiers and the Union and Confederate governments, contrasts starkly with the treatment of indigenous remains in the aftermath of the Sand Creek massacre. For example, Kelman’s epilogue considers reparations and the indigenous peoples’ advocacy to steward their dead long after the Sand Creek massacre. Kelman recounts how several descendants of the Sand Creek massacre traveled to Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, and obtained the remains of other descendants housed at the site. [4] The episode, among Kelman’s additional references to reparations and Article 6 of the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, demonstrates the tragedy of white scientists and professionals cataloging indigenous peoples’ body parts to fuel their theories of scientific racism and their systematic development of weapons against indigenous peoples. However, without additional contextualization from scholars like Faust, the contrast of state development through stewarding and commemorating the remains of soldiers compared to the disrespect and displacement of indigenous remains is less apparent. Kelman misses an opportunity to comprehensively consider how the nineteenth-century state expanded by stewarding the dead during and after the Civil War, and how the government disrespected the indigenous peoples’ remains in contrast.

Kelman’s analysis could have also been strengthened with additional contextualization of how the Sand Creek massacre exemplified the United States’ racial subjugation and imperialism in the West. Kelman analyzes imperialism and racism in his narrative overview of Colonel John Chivington, the leader of the Colorado Regiment and commander of the massacre in 1864. However, Kelman careens the background about Chivington into his narrative about the 2007 dedication of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, which disorients the reader more than clarifies the United States’ expansion West. [5] Further incorporation of historiography could have highlighted the depth of racial subjugation in the United States’ imperialism. For example, in Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, Amy Greenberg focuses on territorial expansion, and the United States’ filibustering and concepts of gender during the Antebellum period. Greenberg emphasizes that the concept of martial masculinity depended upon racial hierarchies, and describes how aggressive expansion into the West was shaped by “romantic racial nationalism” which “affirmed the witness that unified European-Americans at the expense of non-whites in the nineteenth century.” [6] Greenberg demonstrates how Westward expansion and racial hierarchy built the federal government’s authority in the West, which essentially fueled Colonel Chivington’s justification for the massacre of indigenous peoples at Sand Creek. While Kelman dedicates a portion of his narrative to consider Sand Creek as an episode of the United States’ expansion West, Kelman missed the opportunity to comprehensively consider how Chivington exemplified a pattern of racial violence because he focused mostly on the contemporary meaning of Chivington to the stakeholders of the twenty-first century historic site.

Kelman essentially fails to determine if A Misplaced Massacre tells the story of a contemporary historic site, or a nineteenth-century massacre. Kelman frames his interest in Sand Creek from the perspective of a Civil War scholar in his prologue, and explicitly argues that “the massacre, then, should be recalled as part of both the Civil War and the Indian Wars, a bloody link between interrelated chapters of the nation’s history.” [7] However, Kelman prioritizes constructing the twenty-first century narrative of the historic site instead of thorough incorporation of nineteenth-century history. Such a narrative implicitly demands a satisfactory ending for Kelman’s readers. Kelman concludes the story of locating Sand Creek in the epilogue with the consultation of criminal investigator Jeff Campbell, whose perspective implies that the solution to locating Sand Creek relies on viewing the conflict as a crime, or a true massacre. This unexpected and somewhat easy compromise to delineate a clear ending still fails to acknowledge the indigenous peoples’ perspective and knowledge about the location of the massacre. A Misplaced Massacre left me wondering if the true misplacement was in the memory of where the historic site should be constructed, as Kelman argues, or instead if the misplacement was Kelman’s contemporary focus of a complicated issue in American history.

Kelman’s choice to tell the story of Sand Creek from the perspective of a contemporary historic site also disregards the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes’ historical memory of the massacre. Kelman misses an opportunity to strengthen his readers’ understanding of the tribes’ methodology for locating Sand Creek, because he intentionally does not incorporate direct quotes from the Cheyenne and Arapaho’s oral and cultural history. Instead, Kelman tells us that the indigenous peoples valued their oral and cultural history by tossing in a few summarized, and frankly unsatisfactory, examples. Kelman buries his defense of his choice to remove the direct voice of indigenous peoples in a footnote that reads, “Because I did not seek permission from the Cheyenne and Arapahos who participated in the ethnographic study to quote from their oral histories, I have not done so. I have relied on summaries provided by the Park Service.” [8] In so doing, Kelman fails to detail the legitimacy of the descendant’s methods of interpretation and memory of the event, opting to instead rely on the federal government’s understanding of the indigenous peoples’ perspective. Kelman problematically infers their experiences from government documents, following the pattern of the government that omitted the indigenous peoples’ perspective about their own history. 

Kelman’s lack of historical context and indigenous perspective of the massacre not only muddies what this book argues, but also fails to advocate for indigenous peoples. By casting the federal government in a leading role, Kelman’s narrative missed an opportunity to highlight the unique and diverse perspectives of indigenous peoples. Had he thoroughly done so, he might have detailed decades of pain and loss, while also highlighting resiliency and community-building. Such evidence could serve as the basis for an argument for reparations, or outline the ways in which indigenous peoples define sovereignty. [9] Essentially, Kelman misplaced his evidence as a contemporary journalistic exposition instead of an argument for praxis. American Studies methodology often embodies social activism and praxis when researching the historic roots of systemic injustices. In American Studies: A User’s Guide, Philip Deloria and Alexander Olson write that “the methodological conversation in American Studies – always concerned with the politics underpinning social organization and cultural meaning – has moved ever more decisively into the realm of praxis.” [10] Scholars have an opportunity to develop arguments that not only tell a story of those typically left out of the narrative, but to also argue for active solutions for social justice, an especially important point to remember when recounting histories of massacres of indigenous peoples by the United States government.

Endnotes

1. Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015): 149.
2. Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre, 266.
3. Drew Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 101.
4. Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre, 265.
5. Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre, 11.
6. Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 45.
7. Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre, xi.
8. Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre, 311.
9. Amanda J. Cobb, “Understanding Tribal Sovereignty: Definitions, Conceptualizations, and Interpretations” in American Studies Vol. 46, No. 3/4, (Fall/Winter 2005): pp. 115-132.
10. Philip Deloria and Alexander Olson, American Studies: A User’s Guide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 235.