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.
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Massacre at Camp Grant
Forgetting and Remembering
Apache History
by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh
University
of Arizona Press, 2007.
Order
a copy
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