Church Restarts Response to Sand Creek Massacre

Oct. 18, 2024 | DENVER (UM News)

Key points:

  • Church leaders and Sand Creek representatives from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes gathered at Iliff School of Theology Sept. 20-21 to identify concrete ways the denomination can continue to work toward repentance.
  • That group, known as the United Methodist Responses to the Sand Creek Massacre Team, will continue to meet mostly virtually throughout the 2024-2028 quadrennium.
  • The denomination has made a number of efforts over the past three decades to atone for its role in the massacre, but progress had stalled in recent years.

For 160 years, Methodists have been grappling with their role in the Sand Creek Massacre — the gruesome murders of more than 230 members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Colorado on Nov. 29, 1864.

The United Methodist Church has made a number of efforts over the past three decades to atone for the tragedy, but progress had stalled in recent years. Now, leaders of the denomination are once more making plans to work toward repentance.

Bishops, general agency staff members and Sand Creek representatives from the two tribes gathered at Iliff School of Theology Sept. 20-21 to identify concrete ways the denomination can continue on a path to healing.

That group, known as the United Methodist Responses to the Sand Creek Massacre Team, will meet mostly virtually throughout the 2024-2028 quadrennium. Among the team’s stated goals are a commitment to learn how the church was involved in the massacre, nurture a healing coalition of United Methodists and Sand Creek tribes, develop a coordinated response and commit denominational resources to enact it.

The Sand Creek Massacre was a low point for the United States and the Methodist Episcopal Church, a forerunner of the United Methodist denomination.

Two prominent Methodists, Col. John Chivington and Colorado Territorial Gov. John Evans, were largely responsible for the violent deaths and subsequent mutilation of bodies. Most of the victims were women, children and older adults.

Making it worse is that in addition to his cavalry duties, Chivington was a well-known Methodist preacher.

In the book “Massacre at Sand Creek: How Methodists Were Involved in an American Tragedy,” historian Gary L. Roberts said the slaughter, first proclaimed a great victory over estimable foes, by 1865 had “come to symbolize the worst instincts of humanity.”

Despite becoming a “social pariah,” Roberts writes, Chivington “wore Sand Creek like a badge of honor, never seeming to comprehend why he had been condemned and determined to justify his actions.”

Likewise, Evans went on to succeed in business, but “he never escaped the shadow of the Sand Creek Massacre or the fact that he was responsible for the policies that led to it,” Roberts writes.

The legacy of The Methodist Church also took a beating. It never took a strong stand against the massacre and, in fact, defended both Chivington and Evans.

“The Methodist Episcopal Church never confronted John M. Chivington’s role in the Sand Creek Massacre in any formal way,” Roberts writes. “What stands out most strikingly in the Methodist response to Sand Creek, however, is indifference. Sand Creek was simply not important enough to the church to matter.”

That changed in more recent years.

In 1996, the General Conference in Denver adopted a formal apology. However, the apology was criticized for factual errors and lacked any actions to show remorse.

To compound the issue, a planned healing service of reconciliation during the legislative assembly was cut for time, offending tribal leaders present in traditional regalia who had been invited to participate.

In 2012, General Conference delegates engaged in an “Act of Repentance toward Healing Relationships with Indigenous Peoples” worship service, and approved a petition calling for full disclosure of the Methodist role in the Sand Creek Massacre.

The 2016 General Conference heard the report delivered by Roberts and welcomed descendants of the survivors of the attack. Delegates passed a resolution, “United Methodist Responses to The Sand Creek Massacre,” which included a commitment “to learning and teaching its own history and entering into a journey of healing in relationship with the descendants of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864.”  They also stipulated that Roberts’ report — a version of which was later published as a book — would be used as a resource going forward.

After that, efforts came to a halt.

“What have we done in the last eight years? We should’ve been following up,” said Bishop David Wilson of the Great Plains Conference, the first Native American United Methodist elected to the episcopacy and a member of the Response Team. 

Otto Braided Hair Jr., a Sand Creek representative of the Northern Cheyenne tribe in Montana and descendant of survivors of the massacre, agreed with Wilson.

“When the first resolution passed in 2016, I thought it would raise awareness, but then nothing happened,” he said. “An apology is just words. What matters is action.”

Retired Bishop Elaine JW Stanovsky, who formerly led the Mountain Sky Episcopal Area, where the Sand Creek site is located, said a number of factors following the 2016 resolution halted the work.

“Unfortunately, there were deaths of key figures, particularly among tribal leaders. Then the 2019 General Conference (debate over church separation) took the focus away from regular church work, and then COVID put a stop to everything,” she said.

When she retired at the end of 2022, she said, “it was on my heart and mind to restart the work.

“Sand Creek is one of the most well-documented massacres in U.S. history and committed by Methodists. We are heirs to the atrocity.”

Though following up on the 2016 resolution was initially tasked only to the Council of Bishops, Stanovsky said the idea formed to identify general agencies that could take on action items from the 2016 resolution that fit the scope of their work.

An updated version of the 2016 resolution adopted by the 2024 General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, laid out specific actions the church could undertake to work toward a true reconciliation. Those include:

  • Starting negotiations with tribal representatives to produce a document establishing an “ongoing healing relationship” between the affected tribes and the denomination;
  • Assisting with the creation of public memorials for the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre;
  • Encouraging the return of Native American artifacts and remains related to the massacre; and
  • Supporting acquisition of property and establishing tribal landholdings in ancestral lands.  

The Response Team is tasked with developing and implementing projects that support the commitments in the updated resolution. Brainstorming discussion groups were organized between agency staff and tribal representatives.

At the table discussing creation of public memorials, Ashley Boggan D., top executive of the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History, suggested that the memorials did not need to be physical statues in a single location. She suggested a fundraising tie-in with the annual Sand Creek Healing Run, a 180-mile relay from the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site to the Colorado State Capitol run by descendants of tribes impacted by the massacre. Supporting the Healing Run, which occurs Oct. 17-20 this year, is also part of the 2024 resolution.

“How does The United Methodist Church take the task of a few days’ education on the Healing Run, then run a certain distance or at the same time, and send the money raised?” she asked. “We could get the annual conferences involved, the entire United Methodist community — not just Denver.”

Tara Barnes, director of denominational relations for United Women in Faith, said that “our unique contribution is to help tell the women's stories, in the right way,” in collaboration with women from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

Participants at another table considered ways the agencies could support tribal work to strengthen the Cheyenne and Arapaho way of life, including respecting traditional religious practices and developing renewable energy projects for a healthier environment.

The Rev. Bryan Tener, Discipleship Ministries’ director of contextual evangelism, community engagement and church planting through Path 1, expressed a need to educate “from seminary all the way down to confirmation students.”

Tener, who is Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho, said, “We should look at what it means to be connected to land and sacred space and how important that is in order to live out the ways that we do. What it means to have food sovereignty and return to our traditional foods and what that would do for physical and spiritual health of the people.”

Participants also worked to identify various sources of funds the agencies or conferences could tap to support these ideas.

Lloyd Marsden, a member of First United Methodist Church in Sheridan, Wyoming, held up that congregation’s outreach with the Cheyenne and Arapaho as “the type of effort and relationship and love that it takes to truly change,” he said.

The church began engaging with the tribes 20 years ago. Marsden brought with him 40 double-sided pages of notes listing their activities with the tribes. First United Methodist Sheridan is a small church with maybe 40 members in worship, but Marsden said their tribal outreach is the largest line item in the budget other than building expenses and the pastor’s salary.

If a small church could accomplish so much, Marsden expressed hope that general agencies and conferences could achieve more ambitious goals.

“I feel there has been a big change with this conference, and now a big responsibility is to sustain that and do the work that we promise to do,” Marsden said.

Part of the meeting included a visit to the Sand Creek Massacre exhibit at the History Colorado Center in Denver.

Open since November 2022, the exhibit tells the story from the perspective of Cheyenne and Arapaho Sand Creek representatives, who helped shape the presentation.

Lead exhibit developer Sam Bock said the historical society felt it was time to confront this moment in Colorado’s history, which has often been minimized or ignored.

“We just really wanted to make sure that, for the first time, the way that the tribes understand this event … was represented honestly, because that’s not something that’s ever really been done in our state,” he said.

Bock said the tribal representatives have remarked on the continued popularity of the exhibit, since for so long the massacre was not discussed.

Eugene Ridgely Jr., a Northern Arapaho Sand Creek representative from Wyoming, said, “History books don’t tell all the truth, and many don’t want to know the truth. The majority don’t care. They say it happened, to just get over it, but you don’t. It’s in our mothers’ genes, the trauma.”

As a Native American, Wilson acknowledged the potential challenge that Indigenous United Methodists may face by practicing their faith within a denomination whose history has many instances of harm toward Native people. He lifted up two Cheyenne United Methodist congregations in the Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference, and a long line of Cheyenne Methodist pastors, both men and women.

“When I was at that conference, we did disaster relief and other outreach and made some good friends,” Wilson said. “I hope they see us by what we do, not by our past.”

Members of the Response Team felt optimistic that their work would be a starting point for the long journey toward healing.

“My hope going forward is there is a strong partnership between tribes and agencies that’s life-giving for each,” Tener said.

Stanovsky noted that although a lot of work lies ahead, “we have a foundation of people who came away from the meeting open to look for ways the church can provide pathways of healing to tribal people and their cultures.”

Wilson offered encouragement to the tribal representatives that a good team had been assembled for the work.

“Otto keeps reminding us, making sure we carry on this work, and I told him these are movers and shakers in this room and they’re going to get it done,” Wilson said. “It’s been fun to see our Cheyenne and Arapaho representatives excited about being here. On their faces, I see some hope, and that makes me feel so good.”

Chris Tall Bear, a Sand Creek representative of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes from Oklahoma, acknowledged the large scope of the work proposed at the meeting.

“It’s a big thing that needs to happen, and it’s not going to be easy, but nothing worthwhile is easy,” he said. “The seed is planted. We need to give it sunlight, and when it starts to grow, we need to nurture it.”

Braided Hair expressed hope that after so many years, words may finally become action.

“I’m so glad we’re to this point, talking about the nuts and bolts. It’s the first time we’re at this point, and it’s taken from the 2016 resolution to get to this point,” he said to the United Methodist representatives. “I encourage you to stay at it — that’s what’s going to make a difference.”

Joey Butler is a multimedia producer/editor for UM News. Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee.