Read an Excerpt
Massacre at Sand Creek
How Methodists were Involved in an American Tragedy
By Gary L. Roberts Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2016 General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5018-2586-6
CHAPTER 1
WHICH WAY? WHOSE WAY?
For the vast majority of Methodists, and of all who share the Euro-American tradition, the Sand Creek Massacre is a historical tragedy from the distant past, an unfortunate reminder of a dark side of American history best forgotten or acknowledged as an embarrassing example of past error in dealing with Native Americans. Even those who recognize its significance and its injustice see it in historical terms, perhaps important, but like Andersonville or the Homestead Strike or the Haymarket Riots or Ludlow or Selma, something to learn from and move on in the pursuit of the Great Values that are supposed to define the United States as a nation. The important thing is to acknowledge past error in the hope that it may inform the future and prevent such things from happening again.
Historians are concerned with what happened, why it happened, who was responsible, what can be learned from its study, and what it tells us about the past and about ways of looking at the past. Over time, Sand Creek has been justified and condemned with legalistic precision, based upon the written records that survived from that time, supplemented by archaeological findings and oral recollections. Historians explore conditions, chronology, motives, character, political and economic interests, and values. The need for historians, especially the best of them, is to learn and to explain, not caring what the truth is, but "concerned only with finding it," as Father Francis Paul Prucha expressed it. Significantly, Prucha did not claim truth is easy to find or that new tools and perspectives will not throw new light on it. "Finding it," after all, is a quest subject to fresh insights and new evidence. The Sand Creek Massacre is a "historical problem" to be solved and learned from.
Living the Story
For Cheyennes and Arapahos, on the other hand, the Sand Creek Massacre is an enduring trauma, not history, not even past, certainly not something that can be forgotten with an embarrassed apology. To the Cheyennes and Arapahos in Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Montana, Sand Creek is profoundly personal. It is not an event they read about in books. They know the names of those who died there and of those who survived because they are family members. They grew up hearing the stories of what happened at Sand Creek from elders and relatives and pass them on after the manner in which they were told to them.
Sand Creek is also linked to enduring grievances, to promises made but never kept, to apologies offered that proved hollow and gratuitous. For Cheyennes and Arapahos, the site of the Sand Creek Massacre is a holy place, made holy by the blood of their ancestors. The betrayal that occurred there is different. It was there that trust was finally broken. In every negotiation between the Cheyennes and Arapahos and the federal government since 1864, the Sand Creek Massacre has been an ongoing presence, always there as an obstacle to trust even on issues seemingly distant — to whites, at least — from that long ago moment in time.
The Cheyenne and Arapaho search for meaning is pursued in other ways. They listen to the old ones, remembering the stories in the ways they first heard them. They walk the ground at Sand Creek. They believe that the souls of the dead often remained in the places where they died. They hear the cries of women and children, the thunder of horses, the din of battle. They pray that they will be led to the places and to remnants that may survive of what happened there. They look for sacred signs. They take these things and use them in their quest to understand what happened. In these ways and others they gain insights.
Traditional Historical Method
Many historians have difficulty with this approach because it does not conform to the norms of traditional historical method. William T. Hagan wrote in his review of Father Peter John Powell's People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830-1879, that Powell's narrative "presents without question a succession of miracles and other evidences of divine intervention as determining the course of Cheyenne history" that academic historians would discount or view with suspicion. While raising questions about Powell's methodology, John Moore, an anthropologist who studied the Cheyennes extensively, wrote of Powell's book in yet another review, "One looks in vain ... for a more common-sense evaluation of military tactics." In other words, though not "academically sound," the Cheyennes and Arapahos contribute a vital perspective on what happened.
The problem is that many of those trained as historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists find that Indian explanations of what happened are often based upon supernatural causes and oral traditions that are unacceptable as explanations within the rational formats of Western thought. The most common response has been to dismiss Native understandings entirely. They appear to the Western mind to be superstition or myth, and, thus, not entitled to consideration as history. At the very least, such accounts are viewed as "unreliable" or "ahistorical." In 1865, the Minneconjou Sioux chief, Lone Horn, who warned U.S. government treaty commissioners of the dangers of building a road into Sioux country, told them: "if you white people go through our country, I fear as to those young men among us who have no father and mother to restrain them; I fear they will have trouble with your white people back here, who have no ears." In the recorded exchanges between whites and Plains Indians, the reference to whites "having no ears" is a theme repeated over and over again. At the simplest level, this expression conveyed the idea that whites would not listen. Quick to judge and certain of superior understanding of what happened, settlers, soldiers, policy makers, missionaries, and historians have routinely discounted Indian accounts as having little or no value.
But this poses a problem. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. argues that the task of the historian is not to judge according to one's own understanding of what is right and wrong or by one's own conclusions about past mistakes. He says, rather, that anyone who wishes to learn what happened must seek "to understand the past in terms of the actors' conceptions of their situations." In other words, to leave out any side's view of what happened is certain to distort or corrupt conclusions. Differing value systems and ways of seeing must be taken into account. This is a challenging proposition because it requires becoming comfortable with mind-sets different from one's own. It is not an invitation to be uncritical but, rather, to expand the critical search into areas or points of view that may have been neglected or misunderstood. John C. Ewers insisted that it was not the purpose of the historian of Indian-white relations to be "kind to either party in this historic confrontation." Rather, he said, "I do think he should study this very complex theme in both breadth and depth, consulting and weighing all the sources he can find, so that he can be fair to both sides."
Sand Creek: Massacre or Not?
In practice, most authors and readers prefer simple answers. Much of the literature on Sand Creek focuses on whether Sand Creek was a massacre or not. Far too many accounts amount to briefs for one side or the other. Authors set out to prove that Sand Creek was a massacre or that it was not. Unfortunately, either can be done simply by excluding the testimony that does not support the point of view being offered. Another approach, used most often by activists and reformers, complicates the "good guys"/"bad guys" approach through the use of presentism. Presentism involves making judgments about past events based upon present-day standards, in effect blaming those in the past for not anticipating all of the moral and political changes since the time of the event. Frequently, presentism serves a political agenda, although in some cases it merely involves naïve assumptions that values are constant.
For a long time historians took what might be called an "end justifies the means" approach that argued that the conquest of Native America was not only inevitable but beneficial. The advancing American frontier opened the way for civilization and for the American values of democracy, economic opportunity, and human rights. Even before Frederick Jackson Turner drafted the model of this view, it was expressed in many works of history and in commentaries by government officials and religious leaders. A more complex, yet often misleading development began in the twentieth century, with what has been called by some the "victim ideology." This view depicts the relationship between European colonizers and indigenous populations as "one long undifferentiated tragedy inflicted on innocent — and passive — victims."
Debates over the latter view have spawned "Native American studies," "American genocide studies," and "settler colonialism studies," all of which have added new perspectives and have value as much in the questions they raise as in the conclusions they reach. They have served well to raise awareness of the mistreatment of American Indians over the centuries, but some of them have ill-served Indians by portraying them as helpless victims. Such a view demeans the power of various Native cultures by distorting their adaptability, their capacity to resist, their values, their diplomatic and military skills, and the genius of many of their leaders. A case can be made that Anglo-Americans were unable to defeat Native Americans without adopting their tactics because their own tactics were "inadequate to the task." It is true that Indians were frequently shocked by the ferocity of white warfare, but many tribes were able to hold the invaders at bay for far longer than the chroniclers of one massacre after another allow.
As Jared Diamond notes, "The reason not to mistreat indigenous people ... is that it is unjust to mistreat them." It is not necessary to build a false narrative to make the case. "The rights of indigenous people should be asserted on moral grounds," Diamond adds, "not by making untrue claims susceptible to refutation." To argue that Native tribes effectively resisted white intrusion into the trans-Appalachian region for more than half a century through a remarkable combination of adjustments, adaptations, negotiations, intertribal alliances, and open warfare, does not justify the slaughter of the Conestogas or the Massacre at Gnadenhutten or Bad Axe. Nor, for that matter, does acknowledging intertribal warfare, the use of torture, or practices like scalping and mutilation of the dead by some tribes justify or ameliorate the mistreatment of Native Americans. It is hardly fair to warrior peoples, whose descendants still take pride in their military traditions, to portray them as passive.
What is most notable, in spite of the invasion of America, the subjugation of Indian peoples, and the abuse that accompanied and followed the conquest, was the survival of Native peoples in all of their diversity. Indigenous tribes were, indeed victims of forces beyond their control including Eurocentric ideas, attitudes, cultural forms, and technologies that influenced policy and conflict in ways that eventually overwhelmed them, but they were neither helpless nor guiltless in response. Some of the cultural changes were unintentional, but not all of them were unwelcome. Indians accepted, even welcomed, white technology, learned from white ways and ideas, and some, at least, saw the Europeans as benefactors and allies.
In the long run, what made the difference was not strategy and tactics, technology, will, or race. To think otherwise is to underestimate Native intelligence and Native capacity to adapt. Ultimately, the real issue was power. White America was able to work its will over time by sheer numbers and literally steam-driven organization that overwhelmed the independence and rate of response of traditional societies. Land, attitude, world view, and technology were all less important than population growth and political and economic organization. It was not the superiority of "civilization" over "savagery" nor racism over inclusion that ultimately determined the outcome, but the power to conquer over the power to resist.
Made in One Image
Something more must be understood. The misunderstanding and disrespect that lay at the heart of the process was more than a simple division into good and evil. Something more complicated, and yet simpler, was involved, something central to the shared humanity of victims and victimizers. Herman Melville wrote in a review of Francis Parkman's The California and Oregon Trail, "We are all of us — Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks, and Indians — sprung from one head, and made in one image. And if we regret this brotherhood now, we shall be forced to join hands hereafter. A misfortune is not a fault; and good luck is not meritorious. The savage is born a savage; and the civilized being but inherits his civilization, nothing more."
A common core of beliefs and values, a shared humanity, things which all people regardless of culture hold dear are part of the human condition as well as cultural differences. What, then, kept good men, white and red, from opening these resources? The easy answers are words like greed and prejudice and hatred, but beyond those flaws, something more subtle was always at work, fostering misunderstanding and abuse, suspicion and distrust, something that is fundamental to understanding tragedies like the Sand Creek Massacre. Not every culture sees the world in the same way.
Every people in the human family have thought itself special. The Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, the Spanish, the British, the French, the Maya, the Aztecs, and all of the builders of empires across the centuries on every continent have proclaimed it so. The indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific were no less certain of it. The etymology of Native American tribal names reveals a remarkable consistency of using terms such as "the People," "Human Beings," "Called Out People," "the Chosen Ones," and similar expressions to identify particular groups as special and set apart from others. Cheyennes and Arapahos were not exceptions to the general premise.
This should not be surprising. Human beings judge themselves and others by what they know. They view their own ways as the standard against which outsiders are measured. They assume a superiority of their groups based upon a collection of habits, customs, and beliefs and on their relationships with nature and with God. All manner of things may change around them from the way they live their lives to the places where they live, but most cling to a belief that theirs is the better way. This has been true of conquerors and conquered, of rulers and slaves, of nation states and tribes.
The myths and histories of the human experience are also replete with prophecies and admonitions that each people should remain separate and honor the ways of their fathers. Warnings abound of the consequences of forgetting the past. The near universality of such traditional stories is more than a historical relic. Over time these views have been changed and modified in response to contact with different parts of the human family, new experiences, and different ways of relating to others. Historical events, environmental changes, spiritual understandings, and cultural myths have altered group perceptions and led, at least in theory, to notions of mutual respect and universal human rights. But such understandings, when they have come, have been the result of slow, and often painful, processes, in which misunderstandings and lack of mutual respect have sustained conflict and lingering distrust, even after the desire for harmony has been accepted in principle.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Massacre at Sand Creek by Gary L. Roberts. Copyright © 2016 General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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