On archiving difference

Image of Boulder in 1859, from the Boulder History Museum.

In my day-job role as a middle school social studies teacher, I'm currently planning a week-long study of the Sand Creek Massacre (November 29, 1864), which will include visits to the Carnegie Archives, the Boulder History Museum, Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site and the Sand Creek Massacre Site way out in eastern Colorado.  I've spent all night tonight searching the online archives Carnegie holds for Boulder County, deciding which documents and maps and photographs would best help my 7th and 8th graders understand the tensions between miners/settlers and the Cheyenne and Arapaho in this area.

When I emailed the librarian at Carnegie, she replied kindly that the archives don't hold many specific resources on Sand Creek, since the event happened far from Boulder County.  I asked her for any newspapers, photographs, reports she could dig up for us from the years building up to the massacre. How could there be no records?  Boulder became an incorporated town in 1859.  According to an 1851 treaty with the U.S. government, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were entitled to a protected tract of land that included most of Colorado east of the Rockies, the southeastern corner of Wyoming, the southwestern corner of Nebraska, and the northwestern corner of Kansas.  This included Boulder County.  Where are the photographs, documents, artifacts that record the presence of those tribes, recognized by that 1851 treaty as the people who rightfully called this area home?

The answer is complicated, I think.  Racist attitudes, differing goals for the keeping of those early records, the 1861 treaty that reduced the Cheyenne and Arapaho land to a small tract out in eastern Colorado, just north of the Arkansas River, by today's towns of Eads and Lamar.  But the silence of the archives disturbs me.  I find an 1820 account of a surveyor who was attacked by a band of Mohave.  I find the original document of a court case the Arapaho and Cheyenne brought against the U.S. government in a Boulder court.  Otherwise, the documentation is elsewhere -- in other museums, at the national historic sites, lost.  That's what the librarian told me, anyway.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the silence of archives about certain populations -- and certain people.  All summer, I read Lillian Faderman's books -- especially To Believe In Women:  Lesbians Who Changed America and Surpassing the Love of Men:  Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present.  All summer, I felt amazed that, at 37, I knew so little about the lesbian archives.  That the archives are so hidden one has to wear the right glasses to see what's there.  That Susan B. Anthony was a great suffragette and a renowned lesbian.  That both pieces of information matter, but only the former has been well archived.

To even mention the lesbian archives alongside what happened to the Cheyenne and Arapaho in Boulder County seems wrong, and yet the realities and risks of erasure and silence are not so different.  I keep thinking of what Adrienne Rich said, about how being lesbian puts us outside the norm -- into the different --  that it helps us see everything differently.  That's what I can do as a teacher, then, since I have that altered vision.  I can help my students see the gaps, the silences, the biases, the empty space where once there was something.

For what?  A student asked me today, "Why look at these old treaties, when we can't even change what happened?"  I didn't respond adequately because other students were trying to hand me permission slips, and one of them had started vacuuming, and two boys were arm wrestling in the back of the room.  But I wish I had said:  we have to be the ones who help the archives speak.  We have to create space for the silences to become loud.

That's what I'm thinking about tonight.