In the days after Thanksgiving, we should remember that 161 years ago – on Nov. 29, 1864 – Colorado experienced the deadliest day in its history. On that day, more than 230 women, children, and elders of the peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho people were brutally murdered by U.S. troops at Sand Creek, their mutilated bodies later paraded through the streets of Denver. The horror was acknowledged in its day, but over time, the truth has been distorted and forgotten.
In recognition, as History Colorado President and CEO Dawn DiPrince put it, “We all share a human obligation to know, remember and reckon with the Sand Creek Massacre … It is not just Arapaho history or Cheyenne history. It is also Colorado history and American history.”
It is our duty to remember our full history, one that stands in stark contrast to this administration’s systematic assault on the past. This authoritarian project is intent on sanitizing and censoring history. Critics claim teaching children hard truths about the basest of human behavior – slavery, Indigenous displacement, the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans – is simply “woke” or designed to make children feel guilty.
This is a profound misconception – and dangerously untrue. Teaching history is not about inducing guilt in children today; it is about cultivating morality and responsibility for the future. We teach the best and the worst of Colorado’s history: the Sand Creek Massacre, the Ludlow Massacre (where 13 people, including women and children, were killed during the 1914 Colorado Coalfield War), and the injustice of Amache (where U.S. citizens of Japanese descent were unjustly incarcerated during World War II) because these are case studies in unchecked power, fear-mongering, and cruelty. Power we have seen our current government wield – whether through unlawful arrests and the targeting and mistreatment of immigrants or the outright killing of people on suspected drug-boats in the Caribbean.
These painful events continue. We must not forget the trauma inflicted by the Indian Boarding School system, which sought “assimilation” by ripping children from their families and stripping them of their culture – harm carried out on Colorado soil and in our own backyard at the Old Fort Lewis campus in Hesperus. These histories show what humans are capable of when institutional power is fueled by fear, racism, and greed. We study this history so that we recognize the warning signs today.
Authoritarian regimes know that to control the present, they must first control the past. This systematic effort is visible in the administration’s brazen contempt for the rule of law, seen in its willingness to ignore court orders from judges across the political spectrum and circumvent the Constitution. When museums are instructed to offer only “uplifting” history, when references to slavery disappear from exhibits, and when journalists face retaliation for reporting uncomfortable truths, the nation’s covenant – the First Amendment – is actively being undermined.
This historical amnesia allows present-day abuses to flourish. When federal agents engage in unlawful arrests, as a federal judge recently ruled happened in Colorado (Herald, Nov. 26), and when political figures seek to demonize immigrants and minority groups, including families living in Colorado today, we are witnessing the revival of familiar patterns of systemic violence and disregard for due process. Every time we insist on teaching the full, unvarnished story – that Americans enslaved people, massacred a peaceful village, and unjustly detained their own citizens at places like Amache – we take a step toward ensuring those harms are not repeated.
Colorado history shows us that we have a choice. The violence that took place on our soil does not have to happen again. We can choose to be the state that hides from its past, or we can choose to be the state that carries that history, insists on accountability, and grounds its decisions in an honest reckoning with the past. Choosing the latter is how we safeguard our institutions, protect one another, and ensure that the freedoms we rely on today endure for generations to come.
