Columbia University
announced this week that Ari Kelman’s A
Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over The Memory of Sand Creek is a winner of
the 2014 Bancroft Prize. The award is one of the most prestigious prizes for
historical works, and it is exciting indeed that a work about the
trans-Mississippi has been selected.
The Bancroft Prize website
states that “A Misplaced Massacre grapples with the politics of historical memory
and memorializing in Sand Creek, Colorado, the site of an 1864 massacre of
Cheyennes and Arapahos. Kelman deals evenhandedly with the fraught
politics of inconclusive and contradictory archival records, the goals of
National Park memorialists, the claims of property owners, and Native American
efforts to have a historic injustice marked and recalled without perpetrating
further violation of the spirits of murdered ancestors.” Yesterday, I
downloaded the book onto my iPad, and it is a fascinating look at how history
intersects with the present.
Dr. Ari Kelman is a
Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and is currently
working on a book titled Liberty and
Empire: How the Civil War Bled Into The Indian Wars. Scholars increasingly
are recognizing the connections between the Civil War and the Indian Wars; as
Kelman states in his preface, “...for Native people gazing east from the banks of Sand
Creek, the Civil War, looked like a war of empire, a contest to control the
expansion into the West, rather than a war of liberation.”
