XPost: can.politics, alt.politics.democrat, alt.guns   
   XPost: soc.culture.usa   
   From: serial-killers@liberal-democrats.com   
      
   NEW HAVEN — MANY people think of the Civil War and America’s   
   Indian wars as distinct subjects, one following the other. But   
   those who study the Sand Creek Massacre know different.   
      
   On Nov. 29, 1864, as Union armies fought through Virginia and   
   Georgia, Col. John Chivington led some 700 cavalry troops in an   
   unprovoked attack on peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers at   
   Sand Creek in Colorado. They murdered nearly 200 women, children   
   and older men.   
      
   Sand Creek was one of many assaults on American Indians during   
   the war, from Patrick Edward Connor’s massacre of Shoshone   
   villagers along the Idaho-Utah border at Bear River on Jan. 29,   
   1863, to the forced removal and incarceration of thousands of   
   Navajo people in 1864 known as the Long Walk.   
      
   In terms of sheer horror, few events matched Sand Creek.   
   Pregnant women were murdered and scalped, genitalia were paraded   
   as trophies, and scores of wanton acts of violence characterize   
   the accounts of the few Army officers who dared to report them.   
   Among them was Capt. Silas Soule, who had been with Black Kettle   
   and Cheyenne leaders at the September peace negotiations with   
   Gov. John Evans of Colorado, the region’s superintendent of   
   Indians affairs (as well as a founder of both the University of   
   Denver and Northwestern University). Soule publicly exposed   
   Chivington’s actions and, in retribution, was later murdered in   
   Denver.   
      
   After news of the massacre spread, Evans and Chivington were   
   forced to resign from their appointments. But neither faced   
   criminal charges, and the government refused to compensate the   
   victims or their families in any way. Indeed, Sand Creek was   
   just one part of a campaign to take the Cheyenne’s once vast   
   land holdings across the region. A territory that had hardly any   
   white communities in 1850 had, by 1870, lost many Indians, who   
   were pushed violently off the Great Plains by white settlers and   
   the federal government.   
      
   These and other campaigns amounted to what is today called   
   ethnic cleansing: an attempted eradication and dispossession of   
   an entire indigenous population. Many scholars suggest that such   
   violence conforms to other 20th-century categories of analysis,   
   like settler colonial genocide and crimes against humanity.   
      
   Sand Creek, Bear River and the Long Walk remain important parts   
   of the Civil War and of American history. But in our popular   
   narrative, the Civil War obscures such campaigns against   
   American Indians. In fact, the war made such violence possible:   
   The paltry Union Army of 1858, before its wartime expansion,   
   could not have attacked, let alone removed, the fortified Navajo   
   communities in the Four Corners, while Southern secession gave a   
   powerful impetus to expand American territory westward.   
   Territorial leaders like Evans were given more resources and   
   power to negotiate with, and fight against, powerful Western   
   tribes like the Shoshone, Cheyenne, Lakota and Comanche. The   
   violence of this time was fueled partly by the lust for power by   
   civilian and military leaders desperate to obtain glory and   
   wartime recognition.   
      
   Expansion continued after the war, powered by a revived American   
   economy but also by a new spirit of national purpose, a sense   
   that America, having suffered in the war, now had the right to   
   conquer more peoples and territories.   
      
   The United States has yet to fully recognize the violent   
   destruction wrought against indigenous peoples by the Civil War   
   and the Union Army. Connor and Evans have cities, monuments and   
   plaques in their honor, as well as two universities and even   
   Colorado’s Mount Evans, home to the highest paved road in North   
   America.   
      
   Saturday’s 150th anniversary will be commemorated many ways: The   
   National Park Service’s Sand Creek Massacre Historic Site, the   
   descendant Cheyenne and Arapaho communities, other Native   
   American community members and their non-Native supporters will   
   commemorate the massacre. An annual memorial run will trace the   
   route of Chivington’s troops from Sand Creek to Denver, where an   
   evening vigil will be held Dec. 2.   
      
   The University of Denver and Northwestern are also reckoning   
   with this legacy, creating committees that have recognized   
   Evans’s culpability. Like many academic institutions, both are   
   deliberating how to expand Native American studies and student   
   service programs. Yet the near-absence of Native American   
   faculty members, administrators and courses reflects their   
   continued failure to take more than partial steps.   
      
   While the government has made efforts to recognize individual   
   atrocities, it has a long way to go toward recognizing how   
   deeply the decades-long campaign of eradication ran, let alone   
   recognizing how, in the face of such violence, Native American   
   nations and their cultures have survived. Few Americans know of   
   the violence of this time, let alone the subsequent violation of   
   Indian treaties, of reservation boundaries and of Indian   
   families by government actions, including the half-century of   
   forced removal of Indian children to boarding schools.   
      
   One symbolic but necessary first step would be a National Day of   
   Indigenous Remembrance and Survival, perhaps on Nov. 29, the   
   anniversary of Sand Creek. Another would be commemorative   
   memorials, not only in Denver and Evanston but in Washington,   
   too. We commemorate “discovery” and “expansion” with Columbus   
   Day and the Gateway arch, but nowhere is there national   
   recognition of the people who suffered from those “achievements”   
   — and have survived amid continuing cycles of colonialism.   
      
   Correction: November 27, 2014   
   An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the   
   American Indian leader Black Kettle was killed in the Sand Creek   
   Massacre. He died at the Battle of Washita in Oklahoma in 1868.   
      
   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/28/opinion/remember-the-sand-   
   creek-massacre.html?_r=0   
      
       
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)