Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site Administrative History Update
Organization of American Historians
In 2022, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) partnered with Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site and the National Park Service (NPS) on task agreement P22AC00810. The project had two main goals: to revise an existing draft of an administrative history covering years 2007 to 2017 prepared by the NPS Denver Service Center and to provide an introductory essay contextualizing the park’s brief history within the much longer history of NPS-tribal relationships.
Working on behalf of the OAH, Dr. Laura Miller served as the Principal Investigator on the project and the report was presented to Sand Creek Massacre NHS and the NPS in July 2024. In her contextual essay, Miller describes how this relatively new NPS site “centers the experiences of tribal communities in the past and present in its interpretation of the US Army’s 1864 massacre of a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho people in southeast Colorado Territory.”
Miller goes on to describe how the “long history of NPS-tribal relationships shaped the establishment and early management of” Sand Creek Massacre NHS. The aim of this administrative history, as with all such reports, is to ensure that current and future NPS managers and staff are equipped with detailed information about why and how certain management decisions were made at parks.
The full administrative history is available on the OAH website.