“When Col. John M. Chivington and his
drunken troops killed Cheyenne Indians in the infamous dawn
massacre at Sand Creek, Colo.,” writes Andrew Gulliford in
Sacred Objects and Sacred Places, “the troops
also cut off their victims’ heads for shipment to Washington, D.C.”
There, the severed heads were used in attempts to establish a
racial hierarchy based on skull capacity.
Last
November, President Clinton established a national historic site at
Sand Creek, formally commemorating the 1864 massacre’s sad place in
American history. But a much more difficult job awaits Indians
trying to reassemble the pieces of their tribes’ shattered
histories.
Gulliford’s book explores “the ways in
which Native Americans seek to preserve tribal traditions and a
sense of Indian identity after decades of misguided federal
attempts to force them into the cultural mainstream.” Gulliford
investigates the efforts Indians are making to memorialize sites
like Sand Creek, repatriate their ancestors’ remains from museums
for reburial, return artifacts to Indian museums, and preserve
sacred places and landscapes like the New Mexico pueblos and the
famous Bighorn Medicine Wheel.
Gulliford points
out that the effort to preserve traditional cultures isn’t as
simple as returning pots to the reservations. He describes how
attempts to rekindle living Indian traditions, like the gray whale
hunt by the Makah tribe in Washington, have met with fierce
opposition from some environmental groups. He also says that a far
more daunting challenge awaits. “Indian culture has traditionally
been passed down orally,” he reminds us, “with language serving as
a storehouse of craft, culture, and religion.” For many of the
tribes, only a handful of whose members still speak their native
dialects, there is precious little time left to preserve the
original languages.
Sacred Objects and
Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions, by Andrew
Gulliford, University Press of Colorado, 2000. Paperback: $29.95,
204 pages plus bibliography and appendix; numerous black-and-white
photographs.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Sacred Objects and Sacred Places.
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