Ken Burns: The Sand Creek Massacre: "Confronting America's shameful, violent history makes us stronger as a nation"

With implications for current battles over Critical Race Theory and the teaching of U.S. history in our schools, do listen to this Nov. 23, 2021 interview on Morning Joe of filmmaker, Ken Burns, who comments both on the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and on the meaning of patriotism. This interview takes place in the context of a November 22, 2021 Opinion piece in the Washington Post titled, "Confronting America's shameful, violent history makes us stronger as a nation, that I post after the interview below.

I remember first learning about the Sand Creek Massacre in Dee Brown's classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It was required reading in my Race and Ethnic Relations sociology class that I used to teach. I remember feeling particularly impacted by this horrific story despite an entire volume fraught with despicable enmity and terror against Native Americans.   

Counter to existing lore, Sand Creek was not at all a battle, but a massacre. In fact, a Burns notes, the National Historic Site designation by the National Park Service—for which U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell fought hard—registers Sand Creek as the only one with the word, "massacre," in its title.

Former U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell fought many years for Sand Creek Massacre to get federally acknowledged on April 28, 2007.

Here is what happened on that horrific day of Tuesday, November 29, 1864.

Around 650 U.S. volunteer soldiers and their leader, Methodist minister and Colonel, John M. Chivington, attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians who were camped along the Sand Creek dry river bed in what is today known as southeastern Colorado. The troops killed 230 people, most of whom where defenseless women, children, and the elderly. This heinous action resulted in a sharp rebuke by Congress' Joint Committee on the Conduct of War as follows:

"As to Colonel Chivington, your committee can hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct. Wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be the emblem of justice and humanity; holding the important position of commander of a military district, and therefore having the honor of the government to that extent in his keeping, he deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty. Having full knowledge of their friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security, he took advantage of their inapprehension and defenceless condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man. It is thought by some that desire for political preferment prompted him to this cowardly act; that he supposed that by pandering to the inflamed passions of an excited population he could recommend himself to their regard and consideration."

Despite this rebuke, justice was never served, with Chivington and his men getting away with this atrocity. As for Chivington, his term of office expired and he left for the Midwest. He later returned to live in Denver until his passing in 1894. 

Ken Burns' point is that "Nobody's diminished by having a complicated past. People are enriched. A great country is in fact greater for acknowledging the things that it has gotten wrong, as well as celebrating the things that it has gotten right." He goes on to say that "curating the facts of our past" is how to not be a good country.

Do listen to his interview with Morning Joe, and read, as well, his timely opinion editorial in the Washington Post that I also post below. As Burns wisely expresses and captures through this corrective reading and exposure of subjugated historical knowledge, how we remember history is also part of the historical record itself.

Let's all of us people of good conscience commit, or re-commit, to greater openness to the truth so that we might not only correct the record but also do our part, individually and collectively, to perfect the nation.

-Angela Valenzuela

 

In 2007, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site became the only National Park Service unit to use 'massacre' in its name. Director Ken Burns 

Opinion: Ken Burns: Being American means reckoning with our violent history

Ken Burns is a filmmaker whose digital history project UNUM connects scenes from his documentaries to current events.

I’ve been making films about American history for more than 40 years. In all of those years, there’s something central that I’ve learned about being an American: Veneration and shame often go hand-in-hand.

Today, however, I fear patriotism is presented as a false choice. It seems that for many, to be patriotic is to remember and celebrate only our nation’s triumphs. To choose otherwise, to choose to remember our failings, is thus somehow anti-American.

But it is not so simple.

When the National Park Service opened its 391st unit — the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site — the site became the first and only to include the word “massacre” in the title, a reminder of the Nov. 29, 1864, attack on Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people that was misrepresented as a “battle” for nearly a century. In the video above, I reflect on the legacy and contemporary resonance of this massacre.

Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.

As some question how to teach American history to our children — and even question the history itself — I urge us to confront the hard truth, and to trust our children with it. Because a truly great nation is one that can acknowledge its failures.