Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History

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.

Dr. Colwell-Chanthaphonh received his PhD from Indiana University and his BA from the University of Arizona. Before coming to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, he held fellowships with the Center for Desert Archaeology and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Focusing principally on Native American communities in the American Southwest, Dr. Colwell-Chanthaphonh has undertaken a range of studies to examine the role of history—and objects that embody history—in politics, science, landscapes, museums, and heritage sites. He has published more than two dozen articles and book chapters, and has authored and edited five books including History is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley which received Honorable Mention in the 2007 Victor Turner Prize juried book competition, and Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History which received a 2008 Arizona Book Award in the Political/History category. in anthropology from Indiana University and is now a Project Director at Anthropological Research, LLC.