Stanley Heller: Don't forget the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado

At the start of December I came late to a Ferguson protest being held in New Haven and started video recording. Happily I got a good chunk of the remarks of an American Indian student at Yale, Sebastian Medina-Tayac. It’s here entitled “We Are Your Allies.” After his remarks we got to talking and he told me that there was going to be a memorial to the Sand Creek Massacre that night outside a Yale building. So I brought the camcorder over to what proved to be the rear of the Yale Native American Cultural Center and recorded a lot of the memorial. It was impressive. Seven or eight people led the program with 30 or so looking on or taking part despite the drizzle. It was probably the only memorial to the massacre east of the Mississippi. There were prayers, drums, singing, poems and a talk by Ned Blackhawk. Ned Blackhawk! I had just read his piece about the massacre in The New York Times a few days earlier.

There has been an impressive amount of attention paid to the massacre around its 150th anniversary. Smithsonian Magazine had a major article by Tony Horwitz.

He quotes Colorado resident Joyce Mayo, who visited the remote Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, which opened some six years ago. She said, “Something happened here that nobody should have ever did. Which makes me wonder what else happened in our history that we weren’t told about.” All too true.