This week, the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Wash., unveiled an exhibit of Native American artwork commemorating an American massacre.
The exhibit, “One November Morning,” features work by Cheyenne – Arapaho artists Brent Learned, George Curtis Levi and BJ Stepp, who are descended from survivors of the Nov. 29, 1864, massacre at Sand Creek, Colo.
Levi, a Cheyenne ledger artist and an illustrator of children’s books, says that telling the story is part of a healing process that gives a voice back to the people who died at Sand Creek. Levi said he’s already seen the powerful effect that the art has on his audience at viewings in Colorado.
“This is a traditional art form amongst us,” he said. “And it is just a beautiful way of letting people know about our history, who we are.”
For the opening reception, Learned and Levi will host a screening of a PBS documentary on Sand Creek before introducing their art. The two artists will also engage the audience in a discussion about how the massacre at Sand Creek informs and resonates with contemporary issues.
The artists will conduct programs Feb. 14-21, including a mural painting by Learned and Levi on Feb. 17 and a workshop with the artists Feb. 20 that is free with admission.
Although the works will be displayed only at the Clark County Historical Museum, related programming will take place at Washington State University Vancouver and Fort Vancouver. The Portland Art Museum will host a related panel discussion from 10 a.m. to noon April 24 titled “Who controls the Narrative: Visual Representations of Native Histories,” moderated by Roben White.
“One November Morning” has been featured in the Denver Art Museum, Denver University and Northwestern University. John Evans, the governor of Colorado Territory during the massacre, later founded both Denver University and Northwestern – a major reason those venues were selected. Saturday’s show will be the first time “One November Morning” is shown on the West Coast, where similar historical legacies will be examined. According to the National Park Service, one of the original goals of Fort Vancouver, Wash., was “to provide for peaceful American settlement of the Oregon Country, by battling and dispossessing the Native American Indian inhabitants.”
Levi says ledger art was one evolution of the traditional pictographic art common to all Native American cultures.
As buffalo hides became scarce because of the settlers’ eradication program, which was designed to starve Indians, the traditional pictographic art form became transferred to paper acquired from traders – common accounting paper from ledger books. Ledger art became emblematic of the changes in Plains Indian culture that resulted from forced relocation to reservations. No matter what happened, the people kept creating.
The first known book of ledger art arrived in Denver (then Denver City) on Sept. 28, 1864. It was carried by a 7-year-old captive named Ambrose Asher. No one knows who made the book. It was given to Asher in the village of Cheyenne leader Black Kettle, who was returning Asher as part of a diplomatic mission to make peace with the settlers of the Colorado Territory.
Not long later, on the morning of Nov. 29, more than 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, including many women and children, were brutally killed by more than 700 soldiers commanded by Col. John Chivington.
In a speech delivered in Denver shortly before the massacre, Chivington had publicly advocated for the killing and scalping of all Indian people, including children, declaring, “Nits make lice.”
Arriving at Fort Lyon a day before the massacre, Chivington talked to fellow officers about “collecting scalps” and “wading in gore.” When other officers protested against attacking a camp that had been promised safety in exchange for peace, Chivington became violent and, according to sources at the time, said: “I have come to kill Indians. And believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.”
The majority of those killed by Chivington that day were women and children – 105 in all. Chivington and his men then decorated their weapons and hats with their body parts, including fetuses, penises, breasts and vulvas, and put them on public display before crowds in Denver, according to reports. Although the event was well-documented, none of the men responsible was prosecuted. The only repercussion for Chivington was a formal rebuke from Congress – an effective block on his future political career.
Black Kettle had attempted to stop the attack by flying a white flag, as he was told this would always guarantee safety. But no one stopped the attack. Black Kettle managed to escape. Later, after finding out that George Armstrong Custer was planning to lead an attack on unarmed civilians at the Southern Cheyenne Reservation at Washita Creek, Black Kettle and his wife decided to reason with Custer and approached him unarmed with a raised white flag on Nov. 27, 1868. Custer ordered his soldiers to fire on them — the same order he would later give for over a hundred Cheyenne women and children killed later that day.
After the later massacre at Wounded Knee, Congress bestowed Medals of Honor upon the soldiers responsible.
“What were actually massacres, they were glorified as battles, as heroic deeds,” Levi said.
“The people believe what they want to believe, but the press, the press back in the day, they had so much control, and they re-wrote their own history at times.
“What’s the better news: you heroically killed off 300 warriors, or you killed off 300 women and children?”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who was interviewed by Street Roots last February, has written extensively on the connection between the historic genocide of Native Americans and future atrocities carried out by the U.S. military. To this day, Dunbar-Ortiz wrote, the U.S. military refers to enemy territory as “Indian Country.”
“The continuity between invading and occupying sovereign indigenous nations in order to achieve continental control in North America and employing the same tactics overseas to achieve global control is key to understanding the future of the United States in the world. The military provided that continuity,” Dunbar-Ortiz said.
Levi said he hopes “One November Morning” succeeds in telling the story of Sand Creek so that other massacres do not happen. Levi compared events like Sand Creek and contemporary colonial warfare, saying of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, “They were shot down just like the way our people were – same way.”
“In a sense, these massacres that happened, they were unprovoked. … The people didn’t know they were gonna get hit, but they did, and the people that did it were jealous people, like Chivington – he wanted to be a U.S. senator … and he was using the blood of our people as a way to bolster himself, but it backfired on him.”
By killing off many of the Cheyenne chiefs, the massacre at Sand Creek created a legacy of immense distrust and intensified the resistance of Plains Indians, who could no longer be persuaded by any leaders who wanted to make peace with Europeans.
In the 1865 Treaty of the Little Arkansas, the Cheyenne and Arapahos agreed to relinquish all rights to the Colorado territory, highly coveted by whites as a source of gold. This, historian Dee Brown said, was the real meaning of the massacre at Sand Creek – the seizure of land.
Descendants of the Sand Creek survivors filed a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. government in 2013. In the Treaty of Little Arkansas, the federal government acknowledged the wrongness of the massacre and promised land and money to relatives of victims and to the survivors. Sand Creek defendants say that compensation never arrived and that decades of research have identified more than 15,000 descendants who deserve compensation. Bills were introduced in Congress to grant reparations to victims and their families in 1949, 1953, 1957 and 1965, but none of them passed.
Although some recent legal settlements with tribal nations have involved large sums of money, there are many cases where monetary compensation is refused in favor of land and cultural rights.
In Canada, a class-action lawsuit originally seeking compensation for residential school atrocities turned into a five-year national process of Truth and Reconciliation – an alternative justice model once used in South Africa to address crimes committed under apartheid.
Levi said his art is intended to produce the same kind of healing and hopes to begin a process that will address the impact the massacre had, and still has, on the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. This year, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal members visited Sand Creek to pay respects and ran through the snow from Sand Creek to Denver to honor their ancestors. November marked the 151st anniversary of the massacre.
‘One November Morning’ What: Art exhibit commemorating the survivors of the Sand Creek MassacreWhen: Opens 4 p.m. Feb. 13; runs through May 28Where: Clark County Historical Museum, 1511 Main St., Vancouver, WAInformation: www.cchmuseum.org/one-november-morning/
How the oppressed became the oppressors
The extraordinary violence exhibited at Sand Creek, and the widespread ignorance of that violence among non-natives, is a reminder that both U.S. identity and standard U.S. history is premised on white supremacy.
The violent seizing of Native American land was the American counterpart to the earlier process of European “enclosure,” which privatized lands worked and lived on collectively by farmers, shepherds, hunters and gatherers. Such movements produced a mass of desperate, uprooted people at the mercy of urban industry. In Europe, these people were offered the newly plundered lands overseas as a substitute for their historic common lands. The newly imagined category of “whiteness,” shorn of any particular place or family ties, encouraged lower-class Europeans to imagine themselves as being part of a grand military project, together with the elites who controlled them. The elite campaign against backwards peasants whose land had to be taken for “improvement” could now be transferred onto foreign “savages” whose land had to be taken to satisfy the “land hunger” of impoverished whites, who at any rate would soon “improve” the land and replicate Europe’s urban industrial nightmare.
One of George Curtis Levi’s mixed-media pieces calls directly to this, and features a flyer posted Aug. 13, 1864, that begins “ATTENTION! INDIAN FIGHTERS” and promises that militia volunteers “will also be entitled to all horses and other plunder taken from the Indians.”
In effect, medieval despotism and its reactionaries were dumped out onto the new world – and the doctrine of white supremacy melded them all together. Colonial violence elevated lower-class whites to higher positions of power.
This path was not inevitable. Throughout this period, many tribes maintained friendly relations with white settlers and inter-married with them, producing fascinating counterpoints to the cultural underpinnings of U.S. empire. In places like New York, early settlers were strongly influenced by the egalitarian social structure of the Iroquois Confederacy – including early feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the framers of the Constitution. They also inspired Friedrich Engels through anthropological accounts of modern-day matriarchy – accounts that he used to support a theory of revolution in “The Origin of Family, Private Property, and The State.”
Summarizing the actual failure to learn from Native Americans and enter into respectful relationships with them, the historian Lewis Mumford once said, “In the long run, it was the cultural interchanges that would prove important, and it was Western man’s unreadiness for cooperative two-way intercourse – his egoism, his vanity, his reluctance to learn from those he conquered, and not least his calculated ferocity – that actually wiped out many of the potential advantages of the New Exploration.”
Ortiz writes: “Indigenous peoples offer possibilities for life after empire.” And in getting past empire-building, “the continent will be radically reconfigured, physically and psychologically. For the future to be realized, it will require extensive educational programs and the full support and active participation of the descendants of settlers, enslaved Africans, and colonized Mexicans, as well as immigrant populations.”
