When a handful of University of Denver faculty and students met in early 2013 to begin researching the role of our founder, John Evans, in the Sand Creek Massacre, we had only an inkling of the cultural thicket we were approaching. A few months earlier, Northwestern University, also founded by Evans, had appointed a faculty committee to investigate how the massacre and the events succeeding it, including the removal of Indian people from what was then Colorado Territory, related to Evans’ career and Northwestern’s fortunes.
In Denver, the massacre and its legacies cut closer to home. We’d seen how other institutions had misstepped when confronting traumatic events burned into the cultural memory of surviving peoples. But as 2014 marked the sesquicentennial anniversary of both the Sand Creek Massacre and DU’s founding, and given that John Evans has long enjoyed a prominent place in our institutional identity, it seemed past time to better understand the three-year span of his otherwise distinguished career — the part that contained the massacre.
The reports of the NU and DU committees are available online. They converge on many points. However, the DU report asserts a more pointed case for Evans’ culpability for Sand Creek, one different in character but comparable in degree to Col. John Chivington, who led the attack. We focus on Evans’ role not just as governor, the top civilian authority in the territory, but also as the ex-officio superintendent of Indian Affairs. In that capacity, Evans’ central charge was to broker treaties with the Cheyenne and Arapaho, so as to make settlement possible with a minimum of violence. Evans’ actions in 1864 set a course for just the opposite.
On Nov. 29, as the annual Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run brought Arapaho and Cheyenne people back to Denver, the heart of their ancestral homeland, we reflected on three things we have learned over the past 18 months.
1. Historical events that bear on living communities must be investigated in consultation with representatives of those communities. The four separate Cheyenne and Arapaho nations, based today on reservations in Montana, Wyoming and Oklahoma, assign members to represent the descendants of Sand Creek Massacre survivors in collaborative commemoration and education efforts. While massacre descendants did not help write the DU report, their quarterly attendance at our full committee meetings was invaluable. At one meeting, six descendants told the stories of their ancestors who died or survived at Sand Creek, and also shared memories of their parents’ experiences under relocation policies and in forced boarding schools, and discussed life on the reservations today. They expressed deep gratitude for institutions in Colorado and around the country acknowledging their peoples’ history and requested, above all, that we cultivate long-term, healing-oriented relationships as an outcome of our work.
Over the past year, other descendants, relatives of John Evans, have come forth to join the healing process. One turns out to be a graduate student at DU, who with nine other direct Evans descendants met recently with Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders for a powerful, private conversation. Such encounters bear deep historical significance, given the old wounds settlement has inflicted across generations.
2. These dialogues are critical because we are always prone to fall back into historical amnesia. During DU’s fall quarter, every first-year student attends a formal dinner with the chancellor, selected alumni, and faculty. For years those dinners included a story about the role of DU in the taming of the Wild West, a romantic tale that painted the Front Range as an all-but empty place, “discovered” by an odd mix of rascals and gold-diggers — as if Colorado were not already inhabited by native people when white settlers arrived. But a few years back former Chancellor Bob Coombe, having learned more about the Sand Creek Massacre, added a new paragraph to that story that included the tribes and the event. These “little” adjustments to the way we acknowledge a fraught history can engender significant shifts in our ability to grapple honestly with the complex legacies we inherit, rather than burying them.
3. When we are in the grip of strong beliefs about who other people are, we — any of us — can engage in extremely harmful decisions and actions. In many ways, John Evans, with his love of medicine and his belief in the benefits of Christianity, education, material prosperity and technology, was considered a great humanitarian in his time. But, like many in an expansionist settler society, he could not recognize native people as fully human; moreover, he saw them as an obstacle to progress. These views did not set Evans apart, but in his dual political roles they led him to decisions and actions that permanently changed the life prospects for native people in Colorado. What remains is a legacy with which we still must grapple.
Nancy D. Wadsworth is chair of the University of Denver John Evans Study Committee and an associate professor of political science.
