Ask A Genius 1548: Custer, Sand Creek, and Residential Schools: Colonial Memory
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/16
How do Custer, Sand Creek, and residential schools reveal colonial violence—and why does it still feel so near?
Rick Rosner watches Antiques Roadshow and encounters a letter from the widow of General George Armstrong Custer. Rick Rosner recounts Custer’s role in the Indian Wars and the 1876 Little Bighorn defeat by Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho. He corrects a Boulder myth: Sand Creek’s massacre occurred near Eads, led by John Chivington, killing 150–230 women and children, after Fort Laramie and Fort Wise treaty betrayals. He links atrocities to Canada’s residential schools affecting 150,000 Indigenous children, recalls Phoenix Indian School, and notes the still close WWII memory. Future harms may be economic, political, or technological.
Rick Rosner: Carole and I were watching Antiques Roadshow before she fell asleep, and someone had an antique letter from the widow of General George Armstrong Custer.
Carole often complains that she had a terrible history teacher and doesn’t know any history. I explained to her who General Custer was—an American cavalry officer during the 19th century who became famous for his role in the Indian Wars—and she had no idea. I told her about how, during that period, Native American nations were continually pushed off their lands and massacred by U.S. forces.
In Custer’s case, the most famous event was the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho defeated his 7th Cavalry Regiment—a rare victory for Indigenous forces, though temporary.
Boulder, where we met and where I grew up, was sometimes said to be connected to the Sand Creek Massacre. When I looked it up, I realized that’s a common misconception. The massacre didn’t happen in Boulder—it occurred about 170 miles southeast, near present-day Eads, Colorado. Boulder is just where some of the archival material is stored. In November 1864, a force of about 675 volunteer cavalrymen under Colonel John Chivington attacked a peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho people. Between 150 and 230 were killed, about two-thirds of them women and children.
The background was that an 1851 treaty at Fort Laramie had granted the Cheyenne and Arapaho extensive territory across what is now eastern Colorado. That arrangement unraveled after the 1858 Pike’s Peak Gold Rush brought thousands of settlers into the region. In 1861, a new treaty—known as the Treaty of Fort Wise—reduced their land by about 90 percent. Many tribal leaders refused to recognize it, arguing that those who signed were not authorized and had been bribed. Tensions and raids escalated until the Sand Creek Massacre, which horrified much of the country when the news spread and led to several official investigations condemning Chivington’s actions.
The history of the United States, while built on noble ideals, is also filled with atrocities. Canada’s history has its own version of this. From the late 19th century to the late 20th, about 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were forced to attend residential schools. Many suffered physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, and thousands died from neglect, disease, or mistreatment.
That’s the most widely accepted estimate today—about 150,000 children attended, and while not every experience was abusive, the system as a whole was coercive and destructive.
That’s part of our shared colonial history. I lived in Boulder eleven months of the year, and for one month I stayed with my dad and stepmother. The nearest main street to us was Indian School Road, named after the Phoenix Indian School in Arizona, one of the largest federal off-reservation boarding schools for Native Americans. It had a mixed legacy: some education and skills training, but also forced assimilation and punishment for speaking Indigenous languages.
It’s remarkable how close in time all of that is to us—the great slaughters of history. Many of them are almost within living memory. I was born only fifteen years after World War II.
The Civil War and the campaign to push Native Americans off their lands and kill them were both within reach of living memory in my family. My grandfather was born in 1905, which means that all of that had taken place only a few decades before he was born.
So that violence was still close in time—only about twenty or thirty years earlier.
And now we have the great slaughters of the future coming, probably within fifty years. I’m hoping they won’t be literal mass killings but rather people being pushed around in other ways—economically, politically, maybe technologically.
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