'For the healing of our people': A Sand Creek Massacre ceremonial run returns from pandemic hiatus
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EADS, Colo. — Jason Beaver drove 5 hours from his hometown in Oklahoma in October, through the vast, scrubby grasslands of Southeast Colorado, to reach a quiet cluster of cottonwood trees rising from the plains outside the town of Eads.
That cottonwood grove near a zig-zagging bend in Big Sandy Creek marks the spot where, on November 29, 1864, U.S. Army soldiers killed hundreds of civilian Native Americans — many of them women, children and the elderly — breaking a promise made to the village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people that they would be left in peace. The Sand Creek Massacre was one of the darkest moments in Colorado history.
Now preserved as a National Historic Site, the place where the massacre occurred is also sacred ground — a gathering spot — for the descendants of the people who once lived and died there.
Twenty-three-year-old Beaver had been there before.
He slipped on his sneakers, gave his legs a quick stretch and zipped up a bright yellow reflective safety vest before converging with the dozens of similarly outfitted young people practicing their war cries.
Beaver is Cheyenne. Others in the group were from the Arapaho tribe. Most of them descended from the victims of the 1864 attack. They all traveled to the site — some from as far away as Wyoming, Montana and Oklahoma — for the Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run, a 200-mile ceremonial route through the wind and dust of eastern Colorado.
“We’re all going to do one mile and then we’re going to trade off with the next group,” Beaver explained shortly before the start of the run, which was set to last several days. “It’s like a relay race. We’re all collectively putting together the 20 miles a day.”
He took a deep breath, contemplating the exertions to come.
“I can definitely feel the difference in elevation,” he said. “There's going to be a difference when I run. But I'm sure I'll be alright.”
Otto Braided Hair, of the Northern Cheyenne, addressed the crowd of young runners and their supporters and chaperones, telling the story of the massacre.
“November 29, 1864, this was a chief’s camp,” he said. “The chiefs of the Cheyenne have a responsibility to take care of the orphans. If somehow a child or even a widow, an elder, doesn't have any place to go, they go to the chief. That's why there were so many females and children and elders here.”
Instead of a starting pistol, the run began with the death song of White Antelope, a Cheyenne chief who was gunned down during the massacre. Tribal elders circled around a large drum, beating a steady pulse and chanting in unison.
“Only the rocks last forever,” Braided Hair said, translating the words of the song that followed the pack of runners taking off down the dusty road. “That’s what White Antelope sang. We use it when people are making their journey back to the other side. Back to the happy hunting grounds.”
“For the healing of our people”
For the Cheyenne and Arapaho, the massacre was a major trauma that changed their people’s history. Entire populations were separated from their homeland and scattered.
“After the massacre, it destroyed negotiations (between white and Native Americans),” Braided Hair said. “Now Northern Cheyenne are in Montana, Northern Arapaho in Wyoming, and the other half, Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho are in Oklahoma. And we have just now started gathering back together, coming back. Coming to know one another.”
Many tribal members say they still feel the pain as an open wound.
“The way I was raised, my grandmother would tell the stories at our dinner table, tell us the stories before we went to bed and you could see the tears,” said Cheyenne historian Greg Lamebull. “The emotions are still there. My grandmother's mother slept with her clothes on. She slept with her moccasins next to her bed. My grandfather and my grandmother slept with his boots and her shoes next to the bed in case we were ever attacked again. They didn't want to be caught like they did at Sand Creek with no clothes on. That's how deep the trauma went. And even today I sleep with my boots next to my bed.”
The tribes got together to start the run soon after efforts to secure National Historic Site status started picking up steam in 1998.
“It's for the healing of our people, which is far from complete,” Lamebull explained.
But 2020 marked another rupture. The Healing Run was called off that year, another casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its funding was cut from tribal budgets and never restored. For years, it seemed like the Healing Run would become yet another tradition lost to history.
“When we stopped in 2020, there were over 700 people here,” Lamebull said.
People came from all over the world to run in solidarity with the tribes.
“The Cheyenne and Arapaho brought nearly 200 runners and chaperones and participants and elders to the run,” Lamebull said. “And that was the last time we ran together.”
But this year, the urge to run was rekindled. Private donations came into the Sand Creek Massacre Foundation to fund the event. Even the Amache Alliance, a historical preservation and culture society for the nearby World War II-era Japanese internment camp, stepped up with financial support and sent runners from their own community to participate.
“This run means a lot because it's the first one we've had since it was discontinued,” Lamebull said.
Cleansing the path
During his second mile of the day, Joshua Beaver showed up like a leader. Holding his pace with the weakest runners, he assumed the voice of encouragement.
“Expand your chest. Open up your lungs, let yourself breathe,” he coached a younger runner struggling to catch her breath. “We’ll be alright, we can make it.”
Their long route was designed to retrace the path of the U.S. Army soldiers retreating after the ambush.
“They butchered our people,” Lamebull said. “They cut the fetuses from the stomachs of the mothers, and they cut the body parts up and they tied them to their horses and to their uniforms.”
The cavalry paraded those gruesome war trophies all the way from the killing fields back to the seat of government in Denver.
“The spirits that came from those people were left on that trail. That’s the trail that we’re going to be running,” Lamebull said. “Along the path (the runners are) going to pray and they’re going to run and they’re going to cleanse the blood and the memories from the people that were taken back.”
That cleansing is something 20-year-old Alliana Brady, also there to run, experienced the last time she participated, before the pandemic.
“Physical exercise helps heal whatever mental stuff we have going on,” she said. “It helps us get those positive brain chemicals going. And that mixed with all the spiritual stuff that we do, it just makes it a really powerful experience.”
She also described a strong connection to the past.
“One of the first years I ran, I was nervous because I'm not really a running type,” she said. “I just kept praying and it made the run easier. I felt energized by my ancestors. I felt them, felt them through me as I took each step.”
Making his way along that same path, Joshua Beaver also took strength from the ancestors’ stories.
“Whenever you’re starting to feel those pains and those, struggles during the mid-run, you just got to think about what our ancestors went through,” he said. “I can’t be tired now, I can’t be hurting like this because they didn’t get a choice to stop. “They didn’t get a choice to breathe.”