Spurred by the violence in Charlottesville, Va., the nation is once again in the middle of a heated disagreement over our past — or, more accurately, how the nation should remember its past.
Communities across the country are having difficult conversations as Confederate monuments are toppled by local governments and protesters worried that statues in the public square are venerating figures linked to painful chapters in our shared history.
People in Colorado have already been forced into this conversation. But when it happened here in the 1990s, the problematic Civil War figures commemorated in bronze were Union fighters and their crimes were against American Indians.
“For native people, this is a really interesting conversation about the Confederate monuments,” American Indian Movement activist Glenn Morris said. “All over the country, there’s tens of thousands of monuments to Indian killers and there’s names of towns, there’s names of mountains, there’s names of rivers.”
Colorado has a long, well-documented history of violence rooted in racism. The Ku Klux Klan was active in the state, having many powerful members in government and protesting the Martin Luther King Jr. parades in the 1990s. The state has at least six monuments to Confederates, most in cemeteries. And many of the state’s forefathers are people Morris would describe as “Indian killers.”
Colorado sent 4,903 soldiers to fight for the Union during the Civil War. The soldiers are commemorated with a prominent statue, west of the Capitol building, that depicts a dismounted soldier holding a gun. It does not depict Col. John Chivington, as some believe, including those who recently signed a Change.Org petition calling for the statue to be removed.
The memorial includes the Colorado Volunteers’ 22 battles and the names of the 279 who died. But only 18 of those battles were against Confederates. The last four were against American Indians. And the last battle, listed on the bottom-right corner of the memorial, wasn’t a battle at all, but rather the Sand Creek Massacre led by Chivington.
“I’ve been looking at that monument for years and thinking somebody ought to do something about it,” Colorado Sen. Bob Martinez, a Democrat from Commerce City, told the Rocky Mountain News in 1998.
The monument was put up in 1909, when many still considered Sand Creek a battle, although it is referred to as a massacre in some news clippings from the time. Martinez offered legislation that passed unanimously to remove Sand Creek from the list of battles on the monument.
But Sand Creek was never scrubbed off.
Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal representatives gave what was described as a “moving testimony,” saying it is better to recognize what actually happened than erase the past. Lawmakers decided to keep Sand Creek on the monument and add a plaque — about the size of a sheet of paper — at the foot of the statue that described what really happened when Chivington and his Colorado Volunteers attacked largely unarmed Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment, killing more than 200 people, mostly women and children.
Some view Colorado’s response as the proper way to handle these types of situations. But others disagree.
Tom Noel and Glenn Morris, who are friends and colleagues at the University of Colorado Denver, have vastly different views on the matter.
Noel, an American historian known as Dr. Colorado, argues that Colorado’s Civil War monument and Confederate monuments across the nation should remain in place. Morris, a professor of political science and indigenous studies who was a leader in the American Indian movement, thinks otherwise.
Static over statues
“I think (adding the plaque) was an ideal situation instead of erasing history or forgetting something that we need to remember so it won’t happen again,” Noel said.
Noel said dueling interpretations of monuments — such as the situation with Colorado’s Civil War monument — are a way to educate people on the past. He understands why there have been calls to move Confederate statues to museums from public spaces. But keeping them in the open, he said, is a way to remember that the country once revered these people. He said statues of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein should have also stayed up for this reason.
“To try to forget we had racism. We had a Klan here. You want to deny that it happened?” he said. “It makes it more likely that it’ll happen again.”
But Morris pointed out that the plaque explaining Sand Creek is tiny, weathered and barely legible at this point. By honoring people who have committed atrocities, society is normalizing those behaviors, he said.
The country has tens of thousands of statues for people who killed Native people. Additionally, the racially motivated actions of people such as territorial governor John Evans, Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton and frontiersman Kit Carson are not exposed when their names are attached to monuments, landmarks, streets, towns and mountains.
“If we’re going to start looking at the designation of racist memorials for people — that’s a good exercise for the society to have, I believe,” Morris said. “But let’s get serious about it then because it’s endemic to the fabric of the country.”
Other achievements?
Noel acknowledges that these figures did heinous things. But he said they have performed good deeds, too. Yes, Chivington did awful things, but he also stopped the Texans from invading Colorado, founded churches and the state’s first Sunday school, and did a lot of good work as a minister. Tossing out the heroism with the bad acts — think Christopher Columbus — is shortsighted, he said.
But Morris argued that “if you engage in genocide, you forfeit historical honors.” Each generation has the right to decide how it wants to remember history, he said. That doesn’t mean revising history, but rather acknowledging other perspectives and not letting history go unchallenged. One of the ways to do that is to stop honoring people who supported slavery or genocide against Native people, he said.
“When (President Donald) Trump says …, ‘Taking down these monuments, you want to rewrite history’ — no, we want to tell history,” Morris said. “We don’t want fantasy or fallacy masquerading as history to go unchallenged.”
Standards to be held to?
It’s not fair to hold people from the past to modern standards, Noel said. Should Washington, D.C., be renamed because the first president owned slaves? Slave-holding was a universal practice, he said. It was not just whites who held slaves, but also blacks and American Indians.
“History is often more complicated than people who want to tear down statues realize,” he said.
Morris, though, argued that in most cases, there were contemporaries who spoke out against the actions of these problematic figures. Returning to Chivington, Morris pointed out that there were soldiers who choose not to shoot their weapons at Sand Creek.
Can we reconcile?
The first public apology by a Colorado governor for Sand Creek was in 2014 by John Hickenlooper. Now his administration is leading a campaign with the Arapaho and northern and southern Cheyenne tribes and One Earth Future foundation to design a larger Sand Creek memorial on the Capitol grounds. This one will honor the victims, said Ernest House Jr., executive director of the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs.
The monument will be presented to the Capitol Building Advisory Committee on Nov. 17.
UPDATED: This story was updated to give the precise date that the proposed Sand Creek Massacre memorial plan will be presented to the Capitol Building Advisory Committee.