A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

Home > Nonfiction > A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek > Page 32
A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek Page 32

by Ari Kelman


  At the meeting, it became clear that representatives from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes were in a position similar to that of the Kiowa County commissioners. As the site became less of an abstraction, they faced difficult choices. Laird Cometsevah, for example, had to decide whether to convey hard-won property to federal authorities—which is why Cometsevah kept returning to the idea of a lease. A lease, he reasoned, would allow the descendants to forge a management agreement with the NPS while keeping control of the former Dawson ranch. Cometsevah said that he “didn’t want to give away tribal land.” He asked, given the difficulty of acquiring “the traditional site,” how he could “tell [his] people” that they should “now hand it over to the government.” Jim Druck then stepped in. He explained that this would be a different trust arrangement than the tribes were used to. Instead of federal authorities managing the land for the tribes’ economic benefit, they would protect the tribes’ history. He summed up the options for Cometsevah: “You own the land. It’s yours. You can choose to convey it. Or you don’t have to. If you think doing so will allow you to preserve your heritage, then go ahead. If you don’t, then keep it yourself.” Roberts reassured the descendants that their concerns could be addressed in the park’s general management plan, a document that would take years to produce after the site opened. But in the interim, she said, they could draw up a binding memorandum of understanding that would protect the descendants’ interests.62

  In the days after the meeting, Alexa Roberts took stock of the situation. The descendants at last seemed to agree that there could be no lease. Most of their remaining worries focused on questions of access to the site and the importance of including a tribal cemetery where repatriated human remains could be buried. Although Laird Cometsevah had at one point during the meeting suggested that the secretary of the interior would need to create a list of descendants for the purposes of allotting Article 6 reparations, Roberts had steered clear of the topic. She was confident that constructing a memorandum of understanding would not be difficult. But she still worried about political uncertainty within the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. More and more, Roberts found herself discussing the situation with her confused neighbors. “People come around and ask, ‘When’s it going to be open?’ ” She typically responded with a shrug, explaining, “there are some technicalities to take care of first,” before admitting, “everything’s in limbo at the moment.”63

  It remained that way for more than another year. For every step forward in the memorialization process, either the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes or the NPS took a step back. In September 2005, Bill Blind decided that despite the politics hobbling the tribes’ business committee he would seek a resolution conveying the former Dawson property into trust. On October 1 of that same year, though, the eligible tribal electorate rejected a referendum on continuing to work with Steve Hillard’s Council Tree Communications. Blind had thrown the full weight of his office behind that measure, seeing in it hope for economic development for the tribes. He resolved after the vote to avoid more controversy, including issues surrounding Sand Creek. Then, in mid-December, Alexa Roberts’s superiors warned her that fiscal woes throughout the federal apparatus and growing concerns in the NPS about the viability of the historic site threatened her budget for the coming year. When Roberts replied that ample funding from Congress seemed to be available for new memorials to the victims of the September 11 attacks, her bosses noted archly that compared to the divided Sand Creek descendants, the 9/11 widows “always speak with one voice.”64

  After hearing from her superiors, Roberts addressed the Cheyenne descendants. During negotiations over a memorandum of understanding, Laird Cometsevah signaled that he remained uncertain about the land transfer by again raising the possibility of a lease agreement between the tribes and federal authorities. Roberts, who sympathized with Cometsevah’s misgivings about turning tribal property over to the U.S. government, remembered that meeting as “a low point. Years of work for the descendants, for Kiowa County, for the NPS, all that work and all that time seemed like it would be wasted.” Finally, at yet another consultation meeting, this one held in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on June 28, 2006, Roberts told the group, “With wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, every part of the federal budget is being mined. Washington knows that this park, which still doesn’t really exist except on paper, has been funded for six years. They aren’t willing to do that any more.” Pointing to Senator Campbell’s retirement and the replacement of Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, a Coloradan and proponent of the Sand Creek project, who had recently resigned amid allegations that her department had mishandled the government’s Native American trust funds, Roberts warned: “Our support has eroded.” She believed a moment of truth had arrived; the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes would place the former Dawson ranch into trust with the NPS or accept that there would be no historic site.65

  As though on cue, the situation improved. In a flurry of activity in spring 2006, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes addressed their internal political conflicts. On April 4, the tribes promulgated a new constitution. They would replace their business committee and chairman with a legislature and governor. The first person to occupy the governor’s office would be Darrell Flyingman. Although legal challenges immediately swirled around his administration, Flyingman assured Alexa Roberts that he “would convey the tribes’ portion of the Sand Creek site into trust as quickly as possible.” On August 23, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes’ legislature held hearings on Flyingman’s trust resolution. Despite tension between the governor and the legislature, Flyingman announced, “I fully support this bill. The day you hand it to me, I will sign it.” After a constitutionally mandated thirty-day waiting period, Flyingman would then transfer the tribes’ title to the former Dawson ranch to the federal government. Roberts left Oklahoma hopeful that the secretary of the interior might be able to publish a Federal Register notice marking formal establishment of the historic site, possibly even in time for the anniversary of the massacre in late November.66

  On September 9, 2006, the Cheyenne and Arapaho legislature opened its session by asking Laird Cometsevah to offer a prayer. As Cometsevah spoke in the Cheyenne language, a mural covered the wall behind him: images of tribal people wearing regalia, a drum circle, the flags of the United States and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, mounted chiefs, bison grazing on the prairie, and in the background, looming over everything else, diaphanous elders, the omnipresent memory of the tribes’ past. After Cometsevah finished, Darrell Flyingman rose. Exhibiting the bonhomie of a small-town mayor, Flyingman joked, “watching legislative proceedings is like driving through Kansas at night: dull and hard to see what’s really happening.” He then entertained a motion to bring Tribal Bill 01-08-02 to a final vote. “A bill to authorize the governor to sign the conveyance of the former Dawson ranch to the United States to hold in trust for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes,” the legislation noted that “the Sand Creek Massacre and its related history is central to the identity and sovereignty of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.” After receiving a quick second from another representative, Flyingman related that there had not been “a word of opposition” to the measure. He hailed this moment of comity, so unusual for tribes often plagued by factionalism.67

  Alexa Roberts walked to the microphone. Fighting back tears, she thanked the Cheyennes and Arapahos for their faith in the NPS and asked for their support in clearing any final hurdles on the road to creating the historic site. Joe Big Medicine next recounted the long struggle to memorialize the massacre. Without further ado, the legislature unanimously voted through the bill. As quickly as that, it was over. The tribal officials returned to more prosaic business: establishing a position of legislative clerk and poring over the details of a budget bill. Roberts later joked that she had half expected Steve Hillard to burst through the doors and object. Instead, as people filed out of the legislative chambers at the end of the session, they walked past a bronze bust guarding the entrance: “The Gre
at Cheyenne Peacemaker, Chief Black Kettle, Died November 27 1868, Massacred at the Battle of Washita.” Joe Big Medicine nodded at the memorial. On the way to his car, he remarked, “Well, we got that done.” And in the depths of the building, Darrell Flyingman signed the title to the Dawson ranch and handed it to Roberts. It was a beautiful day: sunny and breezy, uncommonly cool for late summer in central Oklahoma. Blue skies stretched to the horizon. Events accelerated from there toward the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site’s opening ceremony.68

  At a consultation meeting held in Eads on September 12, less than a week after the deed transfer, the Sand Creek stakeholders gathered again. The Cheyenne descendants remained uneasy about having given up control of their land, and they struggled to gain purchase in the new landscape of memorialization they had created. Eager to leave some imprint on the historic site, some emblem of tribal sovereignty on a federally sponsored public space, Laird Cometsevah insisted that the “Sand Creek Battle Ground” marker that still sat atop the monument overlook should remain in place, but a new edifice, with George Bent’s map depicting the geography of the massacre engraved upon it, should be erected nearby. Cometsevah mused that still another plaque might include the names of the “real descendants, the people who actually came from Sand Creek.” That nobody else at the meeting engaged with this notion, seemingly an effort to revive dormant animosities with the Northern Arapahos, suggested that the group had grown weary of fighting. The next day, as the descendants walked the site with representatives from the NPS and Kiowa County, Cometsevah seemed to sense that times had changed. He stated that he still did not “trust the Park Service” before acknowledging, “Ben Campbell went with them. That’s how he chose to do it. And that’s why we’re here.” Gazing around the South Bend, Cometsevah proclaimed, with posterity on his mind, “Sand Creek is about our Indianness, about our tribal ways.” Revisiting the idea of creating a monument to the Bent map, he added: “People always say you can’t carve things in stone, but we have to. We have to be sure nobody forgets.”69

  For his part, Joe Big Medicine focused on land-use issues, bemoaning the fact that in the future the NPS would determine who could use the site and for what purposes. For years, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes had enjoyed their status as proprietors, exercising occasional veto power over visitation requests. Big Medicine chuckled: “We’ve been able to keep white people away from here. For the first time in American history, we’ve been able to keep white people where we’ve wanted them.” Equally important, the Cheyenne descendants had been able to give orders to federal employees, instructing the NPS about how the site could be used. The previous year, for instance, Alexa Roberts had dealt with Kiowa County officials who viewed ungrazed land as a potential fire hazard. Roberts had asked the Southern Cheyenne descendants for permission to run cattle on the tribes’ property. Cometsevah, speaking for the descendants, had agreed to limited grazing in areas far from the creek bed but balked when Roberts broached the topic of killing feral pigs running wild on the site. “No. No more guns,” Cometsevah answered. “There’s been enough shooting, enough killing there already.” If neighboring landowners were frustrated about that, Cometsevah explained, Roberts would just have to explain the significance of the sacred site.70

  Now the descendants’ ability to regulate hunting, grazing, and public access had disappeared. The NPS, balancing its mandated responsibilities to the American people and its role as trustee to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, would determine who would enter the memorial and what they could do once on site. Considering the case of the Bowens, Joe Big Medicine shook his head at the thought of the upcoming transition. A few months earlier, Chuck and Sheri Bowen had suggested that the opening of the historic site might endanger their family’s cattle operation. In a story reported in the Denver Post, Chuck Bowen recounted the mysterious demise of two cows recently discovered dead with the skin peeled from their faces. Asked if perhaps aliens had been involved in the strange dissections, Bowen answered in good humor: “You would think they would have something more important to do.” Still, some of the descendants remained concerned that the Bowens might sabotage the site in the future. Big Medicine, gazing at the monument overlook, cleared his throat and changed the subject. Addressing the best location for a tribal cemetery, he suggested that a graveyard would provide the descendants with some comfort, perhaps even offering them a modicum of healing. He concluded, “At least that will be ours alone. And that’s where our ancestors will finally be able to rest.”71

  From Janet Frederick’s perspective, cattle mutilations and the repatriation of human remains seemed somewhat less pressing in that moment than preparing her hometown for the anticipated arrival of tens of thousands of visitors annually once the site opened its doors. The memorialization process had dragged on for so long, with so many twists and turns along the way, that Frederick suspected her neighbors did not fully understand that the milestone of the park’s opening might actually be imminent. “We just have to convince the community that this is really happening,” she said, as the initial day of the consultation neared its conclusion. With Frederick wringing her hands, Alexa Roberts looked on, bemused at the thought of welcoming an untold number of dignitaries to a ribbon cutting. Over the next several months, Roberts and Frederick, along with scores of NPS staffers and local volunteers, would transform themselves into event planners, poring over details of the ceremony. The descendants, meanwhile, would consider their accomplishments and what to do next.72

  With the Sand Creek site finally protected, the Ridgely brothers, Ben and Gail, returned to their life’s work: educating young people on the Northern Arapahos’ Wind River Reservation. As for their Southern Arapaho kin associated with the memorialization effort, both Lee Pedro and Alonzo Sankey had recently passed away. Pedro, not long after igniting controversy in Kiowa County over his alleged remarks about the 9/11 attacks, had died in a car accident. Sankey, for his part, had lost a long battle with cancer. They were among the many descendants who would not live to see the historic site’s opening, including Luke Brady, Eugene Ridgely Sr., and Colleen Cometsevah, Laird Cometsevah’s wife, who had succumbed to Parkinson’s disease a year earlier. Throughout the Sand Creek project, people had grown used to seeing Laird Cometsevah gently towering over Colleen Cometsevah in her wheelchair: handing her documents, bringing her food before eating himself, and bending his long frame into an L to drape a blanket on her legs or whisper in her ear. Without his wife by his side, and with the site under federal protection, Cometsevah, though still impressive, seemed somehow diminished. It was not clear which project, if any, the chief would take on in the coming years, though he insisted, “the United States government owes the Sand Creek descendants the reparations laid out in Article 6 of the Little Arkansas treaty.” Cometsevah promised that so long as that guarantee remained unfulfilled, he would not rest.73

  The two men known affectionately as the Brady boys, Otto Braided Hair and Steve Brady, appeared to be tireless. Braided Hair continued overseeing the Northern Cheyenne Sand Creek Office as well as planning the tribe’s annual Healing Run, which coincided each year with the anniversary of the massacre. He also worked with his older brother, Brady, who devoted himself to the repatriation of human remains, the protection of sacred sites, teaching Cheyenne culture at the reservation high school, and serving, in his position as headman of the Crazy Dogs Society, as a leading traditionalist in the tribe. In that role, Brady found himself in legal trouble around the time that the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes deeded the Dawson property to the federal government. A year earlier, in summer 2005, Brady had accused a non-Indian doctor, Steven Sonntag of the Indian Health Service, of creating a prayer circle on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and thus “desecrating sacred tribal symbols.” Guarding the Northern Cheyennes’ cultural patrimony, Brady asked the tribal council to banish Sonntag from the reservation. When the council failed to act, Brady and several other society men reportedly scooped the doctor into a van, whisked him
off Northern Cheyenne land, and informed him that he was not welcome back. Sonntag ignored the warning and pressed charges against Brady. As the historic site readied to open, a judge in Montana considered the case.74

  Almost three years before that, at one of the Sand Creek consultation meetings held on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Brady had seemed to anticipate his future run-in with the law. He offered to take people involved in the memorialization effort on a tour of Lame Deer and the surrounding area, treating the trip as a lesson in Northern Cheyenne history. After climbing to the top of one of the pine-covered mountains that sits between Lame Deer and the neighboring town of Ashland, Brady gestured widely at the open vista spread out before him. He appeared to embrace his tribe’s homeland as he spoke of the Cheyennes’ fate after Sand Creek, about how the massacre had split the tribe again and again. Some Cheyennes, Brady stated, had traveled to the Powder River country, where they had joined the Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud in his fight against U.S. cavalry charged with clearing the way for Anglo expansion into the West after the Civil War. Others, including Black Kettle’s followers, had headed further south, where, despite lessons learned at Sand Creek, they still hoped to live in peace with whites. But Brady spat that in 1868 “[George Armstrong] Custer’s men attacked the Cheyennes camped at the Washita, killing Black Kettle.” After that, many remaining Southern Cheyennes were forced to live on a reservation in Indian Territory.75

  Brady then turned his attention back to the Powder River country. He explained that the Northern Cheyennes, fresh from victories in Red Cloud’s war, continued skirmishing with federal troops for years afterward: notably at Summit Springs in 1869 and the Rosebud Battle in 1876, just prior to Custer’s undoing at the Little Bighorn. Custer’s defeat, Brady suggested, provided the federal government with a pretext to seize more land in the region and visit additional indignities on its indigenous peoples. Still, he noted, the Northern Cheyennes had kept struggling, including Chief Dull Knife’s and Chief Little Wolf’s epic efforts to keep their people safe and free. In 1877, white authorities insisted that the Northern Cheyennes had to live with their southern relatives on their reservation in Indian Territory. Upon arriving there, Dull Knife and Little Wolf found conditions impossibly bleak and chose to run rather than allow their people to starve on the Southern Plains. Brady recalled that “on the way back home” the Northern Cheyennes had “fought on.” For example, Dull Knife’s people had broken out of prison at Fort Robinson in northern Nebraska and, in Brady’s estimation, left exhausted federal authorities little choice but to provide the Northern Cheyennes with a reservation exactly where they wanted to live: on the Tongue River. “We are the only Indian people who got the land that we demanded,” Brady concluded. The subtext was clear: Brady’s vision of Northern Cheyenne history suggested that only through fierce vigilance could lasting victory against the federal government finally be secured. Three years later, Brady maintained his militant stance. The presiding judge in his case nevertheless ruled that a tribal court had jurisdiction and thus dismissed the suit. A relieved Brady did not skip a beat; he refocused his energies on a repatriation request already underway at the time.76

 

‹ Prev