Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History - Paperback

by Chip Colwell (Author)

Winner of a National Council on Public History Book Award

On April 30, 1871, an unlikely group of Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and Tohono O'odham Indians massacred more than a hundred Apache men, women, and children who had surrendered to the U.S. Army at Camp Grant, near Tucson, Arizona. Thirty or more Apache children were stolen and either kept in Tucson homes or sold into slavery in Mexico. Planned and perpetrated by some of the most prominent men in Arizona's territorial era, this organized slaughter has become a kind of "phantom history" lurking beneath the Southwest's official history, strangely present and absent at the same time.

Seeking to uncover the mislaid past, this powerful book begins by listening to those voices in the historical record that have long been silenced and disregarded. Massacre at Camp Grant fashions a multivocal narrative, interweaving the documentary record, Apache narratives, historical texts, and ethnographic research to provide new insights into the atrocity. Thus drawing from a range of sources, it demonstrates the ways in which painful histories continue to live on in the collective memories of the communities in which they occurred.

Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh begins with the premise that every account of the past is suffused with cultural, historical, and political characteristics. By paying attention to all of these aspects of a contested event, he provides a nuanced interpretation of the cultural forces behind the massacre, illuminates how history becomes an instrument of politics, and contemplates why we must study events we might prefer to forget.

Author Biography

Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, received his BA in anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1996 and his doctorate in anthropology from Indiana University in 2004. He is the author of History is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona's San Pedro Valley (with T. J. Ferguson) and co-editor of Archaeological Ethics (with Karen D. Vitelli). He has also published in numerous journals, including American Anthropologist, American Indian Quarterly, History and Anthropology, Journal of Social Archaeology, Kiva, and Journal of the Southwest. Dr. Colwell-Chanthaphonh wrote this book as a Fellow at the Center for Desert Archaeology in Tucson and later as a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is now the Project Director at Anthropological Research, LLC.