November 11, 1868

At dawn on the morning of November 27, 1868, the 7th U.S. Cavalry attacked the sleeping Cheyenne village of Chief Black Kettle. It is estimated that dozens of Cheyenne were murdered, and more than 50 women and children were taken as prisoners under the leadership of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer. Following the orders of Maj. General Philip H. Sheridan, Custer ordered the soldiers to kill all of the Cheyenne's horses and burn their village with their winter supply of food and clothing.

A battlefield is how the site at Washita River is commemorated, rather than a massacre on a village led by a chief who just days prior met with U.S. Army officials to plead for peace and protection from American soldiers. Contemporary reports claim that what took place upon the Cheyenne village that day was punishment for crimes committed by a band of young men who did not want to abandon their traditional way of life to settle on reservation lands as had been agreed to in the Treaty of Little Arkansas and the Treaty of Medicine Lodge.

Descendants of the survivors and historians have in recent years worked to combat the narrative of Custer that was widely distributed immediately after the attack. For decades it was seen as a victorious battle, a trope of American innocence and retaliation for the violence of others, connected to the broader idea of Manifest Destiny. The Cheyenne and Arapaho perspective always has seen it as a massacre of their kin, forgotten after the opening of allotments for white settlers and land runs in the 1880s and 1890s. How society refers to and teaches about traumatic history has a significant impact. To romanticize the past serves to negate the experience of those lives lost and invalidates the reality of the descendants of those who survived.

The location of Chief Black Kettle's village is a site of trauma. The agony and fear inflicted on their ancestors is baked into the land, and is not forgotten by the Cheyenne and Arapaho.