And when you arrive at the Sand Creek Massacre site, you\u2019ll find open plains and a few markers. The rest is up to you.<\/p>\n
This quiet piece of land tucked away in rural southeastern Colorado seeks to honor the 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho tribe members who were slaughtered by the U.S. Army. It was one of the worst mass murders in U.S. history.<\/p>\n
My wife\u2019s grandma, Sally, said I shouldn\u2019t visit unless I\u2019m ready to meet ghosts. She meant it not to scare, but as a warning: The ghosts will have something to say, and if you want to venture out there, you need to listen.<\/p>\n
On Nov. 29, 1864, Col. John Chivington led around 700 U.S. volunteer soldiers to a village of nearly 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped along the banks of Big Sandy Creek. The Ohio-born Chivington had earned praise two years before by helping Hispanic Union soldiers in New Mexico beat back a Confederate supply train in the Battle of Glorieta Pass during the Civil War.<\/p>\n
But on that November day, he ordered his men to attack and kill mainly women, children and elderly at the camp. The village under the care of Chiefs Black Kettle and Left Hand had believed they were under the protection of the U.S. Army and even approached the unit with white flags.<\/p>\n
For two days, the troops shot and hunted fleeing women and children about a 35-square-mile region. Troops then cut off the body parts of those killed and kept human remains as trophies.<\/p>\n
An Army judge would later call the unprovoked attack amid tensions with white land speculators and Native Americans \u201ca cowardly cold-blooded slaughter\u201d and Territorial Gov. John Evans would be forced to resign. Chivington never faced a trial for his actions.<\/p>\n
Like most massacres against people of color in the U.S., the event was passed down by victims to family members, but the atrocities faded from the memory of the nation\u2019s narrative. Instead, it appeared in school books as a victory for Colorado \u201csettlers\u201d despite the slaughter being the equivalent of the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War during its time.<\/p>\n
Today, the reflective Sand Creek Massacre site has become a place where indigenous people from across the U.S., Latin America and New Zealand come to pray for indigenous populations affected by genocide. And it serves as a model for advocates seeking to turn historic sites connected to racial violence against people of color \u2013 from the 1921 slaughter of African Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the mass murder of Mexican Americans in Porvenir, Texas \u2013 into places of remembrance.<\/p>\n
A trail leading to a top of Monument Hill allows visitors to peek below toward where the village once stood. Most of those killed didn\u2019t die in the village; they were slaughtered by running in various directions. Today, its an open and quiet field.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a crime scene,\u201d Jeff C. Campbell, a volunteer ranger at the site, told me during my recent visit. \u201cAnd it should be treated as such. But it\u2019s also a place that represents something else to some people.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2007, the National Park Service established the location as a national historic site to \u201cprotect the cultural landscape of the massacre, enhance public understanding and minimize similar incidents in the future.\u201d The agency says it\u2019s the only national historic site with the word \u201cmassacre\u201d in its title.<\/p>\n
Some people of color in the U.S. believe there should be more.<\/p>\n
Walking on the premises, I was reminded what civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson said in the HBO documentary \u201cTrue Justice.\u201d As a lawyer in Montgomery, Alabama, he used to walk along the Alabama River outside of downtown and hear the cries of slaves from previous generations, asking the living not to forget them.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve heard a similar sound when the late civil rights leader Benny Martinez took me to a tree in Goliad, Texas, where mobs once lynched Mexican Americans. I heard it again when I visited the remains of the Amache Japanese American Relocation Center in Granada, Colorado \u2013 the site of the former World War II-era Japanese American internment camp. I recognized the cries when I was taken to the site of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.<\/p>\n
For me, coming to the Sand Creek Massacre site is not part of the dark tourism movement \u2013 visiting places connected to human tragedy just for the thrill of it. It\u2019s part of what some scholars call \u201cmemory work,\u201d where one engages with the past to revise accounts of history.<\/p>\n
The raw wind whiffed as I stood alone on Sand Creek Massacre\u2019s Monument Hill. I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the words that history hasn\u2019t said.<\/p>\n
Yet.<\/p>\n
Russell Contreras is a member of The Associated Press\u2019 race and ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter at: http:\/\/twitter.com\/russcontreras<\/em><\/p>\n The Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site is located east of Eads, Colorado, about an hour\u2019s drive north of Lamar in southeastern Colorado. To visit the site, follow Colorado State Highway 96 east off Highway 287 near Eads, or west off Highway 385 at Sheridan Lake. Near Chivington, turn north onto County Road 54\/Chief White Antelope Way or at Brandon, turn north onto County Road 59. when you arrive at the Sand Creek Massacre site, you\u2019ll find open plains and a few markers. The rest is up to you. This quiet piece of land tucked away in rural southeastern Colorado seeks to honor the 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho tribe members who were slaughtered by the U.S. Army. It was one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":75045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-75044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75044"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=75044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}If You Go<\/h4>\n
\n Hours: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday to Friday.
\n Cost: Free.
\n For more information, visit
\n www.nps.gov\/sand\/index.htm<\/a>
\n .<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"