“I hurt myself today to see if I still feel.” Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails begins the song “Hurt,” a meditation on depression and chemical addiction, with these haunting words.Footnote 1 Ari Kelman's and Boyd Cothran's important studies of the Sand Creek Massacre and Modoc War suggest that he could just as well have been writing about contemporary public commemorations of the violence that so deeply scarred nineteenth-century Native America.
In distinctive ways, A Misplaced Massacre and Remembering the Modoc War force readers to reckon with the twenty-first-century implications of publicly remembering painful moments of the past. They ask whether, after years of forgetting to remember Indigenous perspectives on settler colonialism, collective acts of remembrance simply served as means of forgetting them through rituals of healing, reconciliation, and closure.
Many a scholar of memory has identified the simultaneity of remembering and forgetting. But they are not just coincident, but hopelessly conflated. Remembering and forgetting are so embedded and bound up with each other in public acts of commemoration that one has a difficult time discerning what just happened—in that dedicatory address, with that new plaque, through that monument, on the grounds of that park, in the exhibit hall of that museum.
What Kelman and Cothran show us, however, is that this perspective is easier to sustain if one assumes Indigenous people are not part of the public. Rather than reading the public in public commemoration as “white,” Kelman and Cothran locate Indigenous people as central actors in their stories of remembering and assigning meaning to violence. Cheyenne, Arapaho, Modoc, Klamath, and Warm Springs peoples not only survived traumatic episodes but also served as key stakeholders in the process of public memory making. The authors allow readers to see American Indians insisting—often (but not always) to the chagrin of non-Natives—that they be respected as peoples with a history and not as peoples of history.
In Kelman's and Cothran's tellings, American Indians act as memory makers; their presence in the present complicates the decisions to remember “collectively” what happened along Sand Creek and in the Lava Beds. Native people have brought to the fore long-standing if often unacknowledged contests over the meaning and the ownership of the past.
A Misplaced Massacre maps the struggle over the literal and metaphorical location of the Sand Creek Massacre, a devastating event in which the First and Third Colorado volunteer regiments laid waste to more than 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children from Black Kettle's band on November 29, 1864.
Over six tightly written chapters punctuated with carefully selected illustrations, Kelman details the event and early commemorative activity, then shifts to the fraught process of establishing the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site undertaken by the National Park Service in collaboration with the Cheyenne and Arapaho people, independent scholars, politicians, private landowners, and other interested parties during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
As readers of Jerome Greene's and Douglas Scott's Finding Sand Creek already know, it became apparent that the literal location of Black Kettle's camp was uncertain.Footnote 2 For years, it had been assumed by virtually everyone, including the Cheyenne and Arapaho who regard it as a sacred site, that it was located at the South Bend of Sand Creek on the Dawson ranch. The paucity of archaeological evidence on that site first complicated conventional wisdom; subsequent archival and archaeological research then revealed a preponderance of artifacts at locations to the north and west, some still on Dawson's land but others on another non-Indian couple's property. Kelman offers a fresh retelling of the search that positions Greene and Scott as actors who were not simply empirically assiduous “fact finders” but meaning makers implicated deeply and problematically in both the literal and the metaphorical locating of the Sand Creek Massacre. The greatest challenge involved in finding Sand Creek, Kelman shows, had more to do with where the various stakeholders located the event emotionally, psychologically, epistemologically, and (sadly) financially, both as individuals and as members of communities.
Readers come away with a clear sense that for many of the non-Native people involved, Sand Creek was over—and they approached it that way, even when they were trying to do the right thing. For most of the Cheyennes and Arapahos, however, Sand Creek was very much alive, and the ownership they felt proved equally complicated and complicating.
Kelman, for instance, allows us to see the rancher Dawson as at once utterly self-interested and genuinely committed to the Cheyenne and Arapaho communities. Dawson cultivated an alliance with the tribes that enabled him to maximize the amount he would eventually get paid. Other non-Indian landowners, meanwhile, tried to curry favor with independent scholars and the National Park Service to get what they thought they deserved—a financial windfall predicated on the authenticated “historic value” of their land—only to alienate everyone when they did not get it.
Kelman juxtaposes this method of assigning meaning and value to history with an unforgettable (and harrowing) portrait of the archaeological team celebrating the discovery of each new artifact that bolstered their theory of where the massacre took place. Initially, Greene “swallowed his excitement,” but once metal detectors yielded material evidence to confirm the hypothesis, Scott “celebrated” (105, 127).
Cheyenne and Arapaho people felt very different emotions. Laird Comestevah, one of the central Cheyennes involved, noted, “Our ancestors were scattered across that land. The site should have been treated like a cemetery. There was no call for all the whooping and hollering they were doing” (129). This was not merely an “artifact concentration” being uncovered but evidence of murder (127, 129). “It was emotional for us to find things like bullets or cannonballs. We wondered if they killed one of our ancestors,” Mildred Red Cherries, a North Cheyenne descendant, added. “Meanwhile, the white people out there were laughing and feeling good. It was hard” (129). The struggle over the location of the Sand Creek Massacre in memory, then, produced a very different map, just as the struggle over locating it in a literal place did. But readers are left with the sense that, even in light of all the repair work done in successive years, the former one left Native and non-Native people more than a mile away from each other.
The early twenty-first century brought new issues into this complex tangle: a controversial proposal to secure and bring into trust land near the Denver International Airport and persistent claims for reparations. All of these exacerbated tensions among and within northern and southern Cheyenne and Arapaho communities. Still other complicating factors followed, in the form of repatriation, the establishment of the National Museum of the American Indian, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, local non-Indian backlash in Colorado, and Cheyenne and Arapaho hesitations over whether to convey into trust the land they had independently purchased from Dawson. Kelman concludes with a surprise ending in the epilogue. I will leave it to readers to decide whether it suggests the attainment of common ground.
Cothran's Remembering the Modoc War carries readers to the homelands of the Modocs, Klamaths, and Yahooskin Paiutes in the Klamath Basin of present-day Northern California and Southern Oregon. The conflict at the heart of his story began on November 29, 1872, eight years to the day from the Sand Creek Massacre, when Captain Jack or Kintpuash and approximately 150 of his kin evaded the U.S. military's attempt to force them to return to the Klamath Reservation.
Fighting erupted, and for five months the Modocs held out in the Stronghold, a place of profound significance, within an area known as the Lava Beds. In April 1873, attempts to negotiate a settlement foundered after Modocs attacked and killed two men involved in the peace commission and wounded another. Within six weeks, the army captured the remaining Modocs. Captain Jack and three others were tried for murder and publicly executed in early October.
Over six engaging and economically written chapters, Cothran pursues a project that complements and differs from Kelman's. While A Misplaced Massacre focuses on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century struggles over memory, Cothran deals with the construction and evolution of “marketplaces of remembering” and the intersections they reveal between capitalism and historical knowledge production, particularly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
During the war, newspapers served as the initial marketplaces for shaping public memory. Here Cothran elaborates on a central argument of his book—that the narratives circulating during and after the war erased any hint of settler colonialism as a causative factor in the violence, instead describing Indian savagery and “American” innocence.
In the wake of the war, commemorative activity shifted to public performance: lectures, shows, and plays featuring Native and non-Native survivors. Cothran brilliantly recounts how Toby Riddle, a Modoc woman married to a non-Indian, became Winema, the “Pocahontas of the Lava Beds,” after saving the life of peace commissioner Alfred Meacham while serving as an interpreter. Riddle went on tour with Meacham and, over time, allowed her identity as Winema to be woven into an exculpatory narrative—a romantic origin story—that, like the others explored by Cothran, “reaffirms American innocence” (109).
Non-Indians reinscribed the romantic telling of Riddle's life by giving the name Winema to everything from monuments, forests, and lakes to schools, convenience stores, and even a species of potato. Lost in all of this commemorative activity was Riddle's own motivations for serving as an interpreter and performer of a fabricated story about her life. As her descendants explained, “She had to do what she had to do” (108). One can only wonder what the psychic consequences would be if all of the “Winemas” in the region were renamed “Toby Riddle.”
The final part of Remembering the Modoc War engages late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commemorative activities, including reenactments and the creation of the Lava Beds National Monument, to demonstrate the simultaneity of the memorial incorporation of the Modoc War as an event and the economic incorporation of the Klamath Basin as a region through allotment, land reclamation, and intrusion of the railroad and timber industries.
Complicating this process were Native peoples' own narratives, which Cothran invites readers to grapple with through a history written by Toby Riddle's son Jeff and military pension requests presented by Klamath Basin Indians during the early twentieth century. The author alludes to but does not pursue another intriguing act of reinscription when he notes that there was “vandalism” of a cross marking the place where Major General Edward Canby was killed during peace negotiations (178).
Cothran reflects on the 1988 addition of a new memorial to the “victims of nineteenth-century U.S.-Indian violence in the Klamath Basin,” as another moment in which Modoc people talked back to the dominant narrative even as it became more deeply embedded in popular consciousness. The National Park Service commissioned a plaque that Cothran sees as emblematic of the era's “liberal multiculturalism,” paralleling the violence experienced by Indians and non-Indians during the Modoc War. It featured the names of all the people who died, Native or non-Native; combatants or non-combatants. “[B]y suggesting that ‘we all pay the price’ and that ‘there are no true winners,’” argues Cothran, “the memorial normalizes the U.S. federal government's possession of a culturally, spiritually, and materially significant place and elides the fundamentally unequal nature of nineteenth-century U.S.-Indian violence and American settler colonialism writ large” (188).
Both A Misplaced Massacre and Remembering the Modoc War engage the challenges in forging collective memories, the dangers in attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, the fallacy of healing open wounds, and the impossibility of bringing closure to living histories. In the wake of forgetting to remember Indigenous experiences, narratives, and ways of knowing, it is not enough to remember in the interest of forgetting. At Sand Creek and in the Klamath Basin, the authors amplify voices saying, “It's our collective past.” “It's our shared suffering.” “It's our equivalent pain,” and “It's history.” On all counts, we hear the riposte, “No, it isn't.”
In the song “Hurt,” the narrator self-inflicts pain hoping that it will “kill it all away” only to find that “I remember everything.” Commemorative encounters with the violence of history and the history of violence suggest a similar dynamic. Kelman and Cothran take us into these difficult spaces without offering easy answers. Public commemorations of and historical knowledge production about violence do not offer final resolutions by killing pain or healing wounds—nor should they. A Misplaced Massacre and Remembering the Modoc War make important contributions to American Indian and Indigenous Studies, memory studies, and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
