Memorializing shame
New site at Bosque Redondo lets present and future generations never forget the inhumanity that took place against American Indians
By Jose Cisneros
June 7, 2005
TODAY'S BYLINE: Cisneros is director of New Mexico Monuments. Previously, he served as superintendent of several historic areas, including at Gettysburg National Military Park, in Pennsylvania, and San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in Texas.
The internment didn't get the attention it deserved when it happened. Nor, until recently, has it been much noted beyond the Southwest.
But a five-year-long nightmare endured by the Navajo and Mescalero Apache people almost a century-and-a-half ago is now officially memorialized at the place where it happened, Bosque Redondo, near Fort Sumner.
Funded by both the federal government and New Mexico, it officially opened Saturday.
It is the newest "site of shame or conscience," a class of historic sites that memorialize inhumane or intolerant acts or events.
Beginning in 1863, the U.S. Army relocated thousands of Navajo men, women, and children from their homeland in the Four Corners area of Arizona and New Mexico to a new Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation, some 450 miles to the southeast. This arduous trek became known as the Long Walk of the Navajos.
The Mescalero Apache, who lived in the vicinity of Bosque Redondo and Fort Sumner, a heavily fortified military post, were also forced onto the reservation, established only a year earlier. At one point, more than 9,000 Navajo and Mescalero Apache were held at Bosque Redondo. More than 3,000 died of starvation, exposure, disease, and heartbreak.
The inhumane treatment received by the Navajo on those bitter winter treks of 1863-64, and during their captivity, and by the Mescalero Apache, today ranks among the most tragic of human behavior.
Among American Indians, it stands with the Cherokee Trail of Tears, 1838-39, in the southeastern United States, and the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Oklahoma as a low point in U.S.-Native American relations.
Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site was authorized as a unit of the National Park System on Nov. 7, 2000. The Trail of Tears was designated as a unit of the National Trails System on Dec. 16, 1987. Both are examples of a need to recognize dark chapters of mankind's history as well as its finest moments.
To historians and other scholars, such areas are being recognized as "sites of shame" or "sites of conscience," terms of fairly recent origin used to describe and officially recognize notorious conduct worldwide, or the emergence from such conduct, as with Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site or Women's Rights National Historical Park.
The late Yale University historian Robin Winks is credited with first using the term "site of shame" to describe a place where human abuses occur which are later formally recognized by society in the hope that present and future generations learn never to repeat them.
Winks was speaking specifically about Manzanar National Historic Site, established by Congress on March 3, 1992, to recognize the internment of Japanese Americans in relocation camps during World War II.
The term "sites of conscience," used by the New York-based International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, is defined by that organization as "a historic site (that has) unique power to inspire social consciousness and action . . . whether it interprets great good or great evil. By opening new conversations about contemporary issues in historical perspective, historic sites can become new town halls, central to civic life and democracy."
Winks also notes the "great good" of recognition. "Manzanar is as much a site of pride as it is a site of shame: all Americans should take pride in what those who lived there endured, for their courage is our courage. Further, it ought to be a distinct source of pride that we have, as a people, reached a level of maturity to recognize our mistakes, to create a visible symbol of the invisible past to teach future generations of the great fear and irrationality that at times descend upon a people in time of war."
Certainly, the New Mexico State Monuments and the Museum of New Mexico plan to recognize both the shame and the pride associated with Bosque Redondo and the Long Walk in the oral interpretation and exhibitry at the Memorial.
The sudden Nov. 3, 1865 departure of the Mescalero to freedom, and their great strides since, is one element of pride. So is the long, brave trek home over many routes by the depleted Navajo and the reestablishment of their lifestyle in their homeland despite damage to their cultural memory bank.
In a larger context, the difficulty of the United States in managing its far-flung armies during the Civil War can't be overlooked as a mitigating circumstance, given the nation's ongoing tragedy - a brother versus brother war that resulted in the deaths of almost 700,000 people.
It is the well documented misery suffered by the Mescalero Apache and the Navajo people, however, that gives the memorial its historical significance and a place alongside other sites of conscience worldwide, such as Terezin Memorial in Czechoslovakia, Mem?ria Abierta in Argentina, and Maison des Esclavos in Africa.
Incidentally, the National Park Service is currently studying a separate Long Walk National Historic Trail for inclusion in the National Trails System.
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Special thanks to Bea Woodward for the lead!
June Reports
Last updated on June 07, 2005