Since February, the Sand Creek Massacre exhibit at the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver has been educating a new generation about the power of historical trauma and healing.
The exhibit features art made by the direct descendants from the victims of one of the greatest tragedies in American history, and has stirred critical dialogue and intense emotion. The exhibit has been visited by people from local churches, retirement communities, and even from Salem and Southern Oregon. Students and faculty at Washington State University have also participated, with studies including everything from art, history and sociology to the neuroscience of intergenerational trauma.
The exhibit has now been extended until June 18, and continues to pull back the veil from a dark period in Oregon’s history.
It features artwork by Brent Learned, George Curtis Levi and B.J. Stepp, and pays respects to the victims and survivors of a peace camp who were attacked by the U.S. military at Sand Creek, Color., on Nov. 29, 1864.
“As art it grabs you, and it tells the story. We made a conscious decision not to do a lot of interpretation – we basically had one panel to introduce the topic of Sand Creek, and one panel to explain how the tribes continue their work to heal from this… but other than that we let the art speak for itself,” said museum director Katie Anderson.
FURTHER READING: Native American art gives voice back to massacre victims
One group that’s paying particular attention to its meaning is the Methodist Church. That’s because both Col. J.M. Chivington and Colorado Gov. John Evans, the two people most responsible for the massacre, were both prominent Methodist ministers at the time, and neither were ever disciplined or criticized by the Methodist church for their actions. Now the Methodists are creating sustained effort to grapple with the complicity of the church in the massacre and in the broader religious ideas that supported the American Indian genocide.
In 2008, Methodists donated $50,000 to the Park Service to build a Sand Creek education center. In 2012, they held “An Act of Repentance Toward Healing Relationships with Indigenous People.”
On May 18, the United Methodist Church held its General Conference at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, honoring the descendants of the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre, reflecting on the responsibility of Methodists, and sharing the findings of historian Gary L. Roberts, who was commissioned to investigate the Church’s involvement.
Roberts spoke at length to an audience of several thousand Methodists from around the world. There he made his conclusion unequivocal: The church was heavily responsible for the political environment that led up to Sand Creek and was responsible for failing to speak out. In addition to his presentation, Roberts has also produced a thorough history of the massacre and the church that runs 173 pages long and is available online. The report was published in book form this past May.
“Methodists,” he wrote, “celebrated the settlers’ use of violence against American Indians as necessary and heroic.” And Chivington was an ordained minister who had been preaching in Methodist churches for 20 years, using the nickname “the fighting parson.” After the massacre, his self-aggrandizing accounts described Sand Creek as “the most bloody and hard-fought Indian battle that has ever occurred on these plains.” One soldier later said he was surprised Chivington wasn’t killed by his own men, given the height of his brutality and the number who refused to join the slaughter. After leaving Sand Creek, Chivington turned away from the known locations of Cheyenne and Arapahoes, proudly rode his company away from Native warriors, and after five days of riding, rode back to Denver, where he expected to land himself a promotion. Instead he was forced to quit the army before he received a court-marshal. He would be plagued by insults, personal failure and scandal for the rest of his life, but he would never apologize for what happened at Sand Creek.
Roberts also explained how Methodism employed the fear of God to maintain social control across North America, frightening the newly mobile population against social experimentation, or the even greater sin of “going Native.”
“There was… a great fear that grew over time and helped to spark the Second Great Awakening. It was the danger of primitivism — a fear that westering settlers might sink into barbarism, that the wilderness would drag them down into the savagery they despised in the Indians.”
For preacher Horace Bushnell the answer was Methodism – a church “admirably adapted, as regards their mode of action, to the new West – a kind of light artillery that God has organized, to pursue and overtake the fugitives that flee into the wilderness from his presence.”
We get a hint of such wilderness and “savagery” from tales of wanderers in the East – in New York state, the Iroquois Confederacy was proving to women like Matilda Joselyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton that there were societies already in existence where women could walk alone in safety, where sexual violence was nearly unheard of and where women could both control their own personal property and choose their own leaders – the very antithesis of the patriarchy sanctioned by both the church and the colonial masters. “To Stanton, Gage, Mott, and their feminist contemporaries,” wrote Sally Roesch Wagner, “the Native American principles of everyday decency, nonviolence, and gender justice must have seemed the Promised Land.” Such examples of the promised land must have been a tremendous inspiration to people escaping oppression, and a constant headache to those pursuing them with heavenly artillery.
The violence unleashed at Sand Creek was also deployed by Christian artillery, and was emblematic of the church-sanctioned policy of extermination. In Hidden History of Portland, Historian J.D. Chandler wrote, “The (Methodist) missions were notably unsuccessful at converting Indians to Christianity or ‘saving’ them in any other way, but they were successful at two things: popularizing the idea that the Indians would soon be extinct and creating huge interest in Oregon back in the States.” The belief that all Indians would disappear was the reigning ideology of expansion. When smallpox first broke out in native communities surrounding New England’s Plymouth colony, King James declared it was evidence of God’s “great goodness and bounty toward us.” When a measles outbreak killed huge numbers of the Cayuse in Eastern Oregon, many believed (and still insist) that the missionary Marcus Whitman, who opened the Oregon Trail to settlers, had been spreading the disease intentionally. He was killed for such crimes in 1847, in accordance with Cayuse law, and in response the Oregon militia embarked on a “scorched earth” campaign that burned Cayuse and Umatilla villages, forcing them to flee into the mountains.
According to Roberts, it was at the Methodist Church’s Quarterly Meeting on Oct. 7, 1855, that Oregon settlers came together “to plan the extermination of the Indians in the Rogue valley.” There was only one lone voice who tried to stop the killing, and who tried to appeal to their higher moral conscience as Christians – an abolitionist Englishman named John Beeson. Beeson was later told by one man that it was the Methodist preachers themselves who had convinced him to go out and kill Indians. For continuing to defend Native Americans and criticize the hypocrisies of the church, his home was later burned down, and he was forced to flee Oregon to protect himself.
Later that year, on December 5, 1855, Chief Yellowbird of the Walla Walla approached the camp of Lt. Colonel James. K. Kelly under a flag of truce, offering peace and restitution for goods that had been stolen from Fort Walla Walla. The theft had occurred in the midst of conflict between Kamiakin on one side and the U.S. Army, with four companies of militiamen from Multnomah County on the other. Kelly had the chief and his men arrested, and the next day, the Oregon militia killed him and mutilated his body, putting his corpse on display.
Carl Sampson, a descendant of Yellowbird who holds the same title as head chief (Peopeo Moxmox, or Yellowbird), said he sees a direct parallel from the actions at Sand Creek to the killing of his great-grandfather.
“They cut off both of his hands, they cut off both of his feet, they cut off his ears, and they put his ears in something to preserve them, and those ears went to the state capitol in Salem, and they were on display for I don’t know how long. A friend of mine, a relative, went to school down there, and she used to see them all time when she was down there in Salem.”
Chief Sampson says the Oregon militiamen also cut strips of flesh off his great grand-father’s back to make souvenir razor straps, and cut out chunks of skull to make buttons, then paraded his body down the main street of town. “And they called us ‘savages’ and ‘heathens,’ and these are some of the worst things I’ve ever heard!”
As chairman of the Umatilla’s Cultural Resource Commission, Sampson once traveled to the state Capitol to claim the remains of his great-grandfather. Sampson was told they had none of his remains – before inexplicably being given a lock of his hair. Sampson and his family quickly re-buried the lock in their local cemetery. “We can never find the rest of his remains,” he explained. “In our belief, in our way, when something like this happens to our people, and he is killed the way he was, his spirit wanders forever until he’s all put back into the ground.”
On Dec. 3, 2014, Gov. Hickenlooper of Colorado made a public apology to the descendants of the Sand Creek massacre. For Cathy Sampson-Kruse, the daughter of Chief Yellowbird, “It may be time to bring that official apology forward, from the state of Oregon to the people.
“Everyone had told Peopeo Moxmox: you raise the white flag of truce, and they won’t harm you. And that wasn’t the case, because he did raise the white flag, and they still murdered him,” explained Sampson.
Carol Barton, executive for Community Action of the United Methodist Women, said the work of the United Methodist Church in response to Sand Creek and the ideology of genocide has gone beyond study and formal apologies. In 2014, Bishop Elaine Stanovsky of the Rocky Mountain Conference in Colorado led 650 United Methodists on a Pilgrimage to the site of the Sand Creek Massacre. United Methodist Women in the Yellowstone Conference (Montana/Wyoming) have also been in conversation with a group of Western Cheyenne for many years so that they could listen, learn, and begin a process of healing. United Methodist Women also sponsored a study called “Giving Our Hearts Away: Native American Survival,” that was written and led by Native American United Methodists to address the complicity of the church in native genocide and displacement, and laid out a plan for a long-term Church response.
“For four years our board has been led by Native American sisters in learning and acting,” Barton said. “Response comes through our direct efforts to affirm native theology and culture; to walk with native groups fighting extractivism, poisoning of water, and land loss; supporting Native United Methodists’ work with the UN Permanent Forum in Indigenous peoples; and challenging the ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’ which continues to legally legitimate land theft. Native survival continues to be an urgent concern, and our active accompaniment in current struggles is an essential part of re-building relationship and healing.”
“This is about trauma,” said Katie Anderson of the Historical Museum. “It’s a relatable exhibit because of the humanity of it. And the pain that all of us feel – having something horrible happen to us, that we had no control over.”
“There are so many people out there who haven’t made the connection. They either don’t use the word ‘genocide’ when they talk about Native Americans, or they don’t make the connection that what happened in Germany, in the '40s, is not so different. That we did that here too.”
Many people have left notes at the Clark County Historical Museum exhibit to share their feelings. Anderson shared a few:
“Powerful! Thank you.”
“Everyone should know this.”
“Deeply impacted. My heart weeps.”