Sometimes, knowledge is power. And sometimes, knowledge can be overpowering.
In good ways. Like when Cinnamon Kills First , a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe , points out a truth to 20 of us adventurous souls that no matter where we came from. Whether we are animal or human. Whatever our color or species. Regardless of continent: We are all related. Because every living creature’s first home is water. As in: We all began in the womb of a mother.
Knowledge also can be overpowering in more unsettling ways.
Last week, I agreed to go along on an educational and emotional adventure called “Breathing Healing Into the Banks of Sand Creek.” It’s a singular live immersive experience by a fearless Denver theater company called Control Group Productions that is known for taking audiences on wild rides into the unknown. In this case, a wild ride on a retrofitted (and surely not code-approved) past-life school bus. While mystery surrounds every aspect of the events to come, you know the moral of the story before you even board, for it is painted in huge capital letters along the side of the bus:
“Denial Feeds Genocide.”
By getting on that bus, I confronted both my deeply ingrained fear of group intimacy as well as my own obliviously underexplored lifetime that I’ve whiled away on ground that I consider to be my own. In a home that I consider to be my own. But it is on undeniably stolen ground stained with blood, tears and life-killing concrete.
“Breathing Healing” is the culmination of a three-year collaboration between Control Group and Kills First that is rooted in the deadliest day in Colorado history: Nov. 29, 1864, when roughly 700 U.S. Army troops attacked a non-combatant village of 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho along the Big Sandy Creek about 100 miles southeast of Denver. About 230 men, women and children were killed and savagely mutilated in the unprovoked assault, forever to be known by history (that is if schools still bother to teach it) as The Sand Creek Massacre .
When I was a kid, the Catholic nuns taught it to me straight. But that was another time. This week, I asked three teenagers if they know the story, and I went 0 for 3. But even though I know the basic facts, I’ve never heard them from descendants of the victims. And that is just one of the many transformative joys of going on this horrific ride: It gives a long overdue voice to the dead.
Kills First’s point here is not to make the almost entirely White audience feel shamed. Or responsible. Or guilty. Simply more aware.
This is a challenging but healing journey over about 6 square miles. And one so fluidly devised that, depending on which of the three weeks you attend, you are taken to three entirely different corridors of metro Denver. This coming final weekend, for example, passengers will board up at Fort Chambers in northeast Boulder. That’s an unremarkable field today. But in 1863, it was a camp built to train volunteers for the 3rd Colorado Cavalry.
Our journey last week started in Commerce City not far from Riverside Cemetery – Denver’s oldest graveyard. That’s the eternal resting place of my own great, great grandfather and namesake, John Lindsay Moore . Our actual meet-up spot is outside an active Army National Guard Station just a mile away from a 550-acre contaminated EPA Superfund site that – swear to God – goes by the name “ Sand Creek Industrial .”
We begin our transport inside a metaphorical womb – the soothing voice of our safe and gentle guide. Cinnamon Kills First is a direct descendant of Sand Creek survivors. We will make four consequential stops where a band of actors have the worst assignment in the history of acting – playing various abhorrent White colonizers. They play out scenes or lead us in group activities that bring the racist realities of the period directly home. We are also joined by Bill Tall Bull, a management analyst with the Department of the Interior who asks us to consider the ongoing moral and environmental consequences of our collective conquest of this once healthy, thriving ecosystem.
On the banks of Confluence Park, the sacred place where Cherry Creek joins with the South Platte River, a Cheyenne man explains to us why his makeshift teepee – and historically all teepees – faces east: So that the tent’s opening always greets the rising sun.
Much of this experience challenges our deeply embedded and inherently flawed notions of land ownership. And yet, as we repeatedly board and unboard the rickety old bus that’s never met a shock absorber, I can’t help but notice that every single audience member returns to their exact same seat, every time, as if we are subconsciously carving out and claiming our own (somewhat) cushioned chunk of land.
At one point, we stop to play a children’s word game called “The Treaty Breaking Playbook” – a stark lesson in how the conquerors systematically deceived and decimated the native population in the name of God, gold and guns.
Another scene takes us under a viaduct that was once Camp Weld, located just east of the Platte River in what is now the La Alma-Lincoln Park neighborhood of Denver. This is where Col. John M. Chivington finalized plans for the ruthless attack on Chief Black Kettle’s Big Sandy Creek encampment , where troops opened fire despite the presence of an American flag and white flag of truce. Soldiers hunted down those who tried to flee along the creek bed and set the village ablaze.
This exercise is not a blanket condemnation of those who are born from those who conquered the land and made it Denver. And Colorado. And every city in the western United States. It is simply an opportunity to reckon with our shared past. It is uncomfortable from start to finish – as it should be – but it never feels unsafe.
“Knowing the truth and feeling the truth is the start of healing,” Kills First gently tells us.
For our last stop, we park at 15th and Larimer streets, where we are told that in 1864, Denverites greeted the returning soldiers as war heroes in a massive celebration that broke out downtown.
It’s one thing to be told that this party happened. It’s another to walk that same area now known as Larimer Square with your fellow travelers in a mobile moment of quiet contemplation and reverence, trying to physically shake the ickiness of it all out of your body.
This brief pilgrimage leads us to a nondescript plaque along Skyline Park at 16th and Arapahoe streets, where we can take some comfort in learning that at least one hero emerged from the Sand Creek Massacre. Colorado Cavalry Capt. Silas S. Soule disobeyed orders by holding his men back and refusing to fire on the peaceful villagers. Soule reportedly told other officers that “any man who would take part in such murders was a low-lived, cowardly son of a bitch.”
Later, Soule detailed the atrocities carried out by Chivington and his troops. His testimony led to Chivington's resignation and Colorado Territorial Gov. John Evans’ ouster. Eighty days later, Soule was assassinated at the very spot of that Skyline Park plaque. Many believed the assassination was ordered by Chivington himself. Soule is now buried, we were told, at Riverside Cemetery – a factoid that embedded itself in my head.
Back at our starting place, Kills First leads us in a final cleansing exercise, although this has not been the kind of experience that will leave anyone feeling clean. I keep thinking that the beginning of my Denver lineage can be directly traced to the same nearby resting place as this Sand Creek hero whose life was cut so venally short.
The next day, I feel compelled to revisit Riverside Cemetery, where I discover that my GGGF lies just four lots away from Soule. By now I know a lot about Soule – like that he was a Union soldier, an abolitionist and a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Which only makes me realize how little I actually know about my namesake – a man I have always conferred an assumed but untested pride. I know he was a soldier, like Soule – a corporal who joined the 73rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment in 1862 and just two months later lost his eye fighting in the Battle of Perryville (also known as the "Battle for Kentucky"). That was one of the bloodiest and most consequential battles of the Civil War, one that left one in every five men dead.
According to legend, when Moore’s wife Mary Shelley (no, not the woman who imagined “Frankenstein” !) heard about John’s eye injury, this mother of four young children (of eventually eight) traveled from Illinois to Kentucky and broke through the line to be at his side. GGGF recovered and served with one eye for the next three years, until the end of the war.
By the time GGGF died in 1902, he and Mary were living in Denver's Elyria neighborhood. He was considered a war hero who gave his eye for the cause of freedom for all men.
And yet knowing all that, I now can’t help but wonder the unknowable: Was he the kind of man who would have said no to Col. John M. Chivington? Or was he among those who danced on Larimer Street? Needing to believe what is true is not the same as knowing what is true.
Ultimately, Kills First told me, “Our goal is to create a ramp that invites White audience members who inherited racism and bias as a disease into awareness and accountability, while offering pathways forward to support change."
But along that way, she really only asked one thing of us: Simply commit to remembering the name of one massacre victim as a kind of way of making that wronged person immortal.
I write this in honor and memory of Wolf That Hears. And Captain Silas S. Soule. And, I can only hope: Corporal John Lindsay Moore.
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