The Sand Creek Massacre

The Equal Justice Initiative reminded me that today is the 159th anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre. I've mentioned it a few times before (most prominently here), but I think I haven't made it clear that I never heard of it before summer 2023.

This is an indictment of our school system (at least from the years I went through it) and a statement about the regionalism of our country. I know about Minnesota's Dakota War, but I've only recently learned about some of the slaughters that happened in different parts of the present-day U.S., like Sand Creek. 

In Colorado, Sand Creek stands out the way the Dakota War does in Minnesota, and they occurred within a few years of each other, also during the Civil War. Gold had recently been discovered in the Colorado Rockies, and the land that had been promised by treaty was suddenly too valuable to leave in Indigenous hands. 

Colorado is in the midst of renaming a mountain named for its first governor because he was involved in allowing the massacre. There doesn't appear to be any controversy about the need to rename, only about what to rename it.

I don't know for sure how widespread knowledge of the massacre is in the state, but I heard a lot about it in just a few days in the Denver area. Colorado seems to own its bad history a bit more than Minnesota does.