The historic site is now named the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Indian oral tradition has become official. Author
We have a tough time accurately remembering what happened to us, and a worse time remembering something when misinformation is inserted into the narrative. Experiments have shown that misinformation has the most impact on test subjects when they read it (43%). The second most impactful way to receive misinformation is when test subjects recall something but cannot give a specific source (17%). The third is when we see something (15%). These results highlight the role that the written word plays in spreading misinformation. If inaccurate information is spread in large part by reading it, will telling something, such as in verbal testimony, be more accurate?1
Oral history, based upon eyewitnesses and participants, remains as storytelling. Some cultures place a premium on recording those experiences in books, while others, in what an anthropologist might label as “preliterate,” transmit their cultural knowledge and lore orally from one generation to another. Messages or stories or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song in the form of folk tales, sayings, ballads, or chants. It is tough enough to achieve accuracy in writing, but it is even harder to attain and then maintain it through storytelling.
Take, for example, the 1950 film Rashomon, a classic story of four eyewitnesses to the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband. The witnesses tell mutually contradictory stories of what they saw, all of them heavily influenced by their biases and egos, and all of them convinced in the validity of their version of events. The film highlights what recent memory studies have proven: There are multiple realities, memory output differs substantially from input, and “truth” can subjectively relative. If these Japanese witnesses had lives in a preliterate society, which tale would have eventually displaced the others to be then passed down to later generations as “truth”?2
In 1932, Sir Frederic Bartlett wrote a book entitled Remembering. In it, he explained how he conducted his now-classic test of exposing his subjects to an old Indian legend called “The War of the Ghosts” in an effort to see how accurately they repeated the story in later sessions. Not surprisingly, the study participants rarely recalled all of the events accurately. In some cases the story was dramatically shortened, and many times the participants recalled a generalized tale of events that fit their expectations of what should have happened, even when these events were not part of the original story.
Bartlett also discovered that recollections changed dramatically across several retellings. He concluded that memories are imaginative reconstructions, heavily influenced by preexisting knowledge, and that remembering is fundamentally a social activity distorted by one’s attitudes and needs. How one remembers reflects the nature of the person doing the remembering.3
There is an obvious danger in relying on word of mouth to pass on traditions. Eyewitnesses are challenged to accurately reconstruct what they recently experienced, and it gets harder when they try to write it on paper or try to remember it later. Numerous studies reveal what most of us would acknowledge as a priori truth: The incidence of false memories increases dramatically with the passage of time. It is therefore important to use caution in accepting as accurate letters, diaries, or memoirs written months or years after the fact, and even more caution should be exercised with oral traditions passed down one generation to the next.4
There are additional caveats when using Indian testimony about Sand Creek. The language barrier led to inevitable errors as the story was told by an Indian participant to an interpreter, and then passed along again in another language to the person who recorded it. It is a more complicated process than most people imagine. The Indian witness may not have told the truth, or may have misremembered the event under discussion. The translator may not have been fully proficient in the native language, or may not have been objective, or may have replaced or reordered words to match patterns familiar with his world view. All of this is also true for the recorder, who preserved the testimony for later use.
Some historians of the Indian wars do not use Indian testimony because they believe it is irreconcilable with what they deem “facts,” and so rely solely on white accounts. For example, Fred Dustin (1866-1957) cherished white officers’ recollections about the Battle of the Little Bighorn because of “the traditional truthfulness of their class.” General George Crook, on the other hand, believed that “if you make it to the Indian’s interest to tell the truth, you get correct information; a white man will lie intentionally, and mislead you unintentionally.”5
An additional caution to consider when relying upon Indian testimony was the possibility that participants in a recent battle may have felt intimidated when facing white interrogators. As Indian wars historian Jerome Greene explained it, “Fearing retribution, they either subordinated their personal roles or told what they believed their questioners wanted to hear.” Therefore, a later recollection, “by its distance from an event, was often more bias-free for both giver and receiver than testimony delivered soon afterwards.”6
This conclusion seems to be an attempt to make problematic eyewitness testimony more palatable for the consumer/reader, as well as for the historian. When studies definitely show that recollections only gets worse with the passage of time, how can we lend credence to eyewitness remembrances given years later, especially when much of memory is distorted by subsequent input? And how much worse will it be when the storyteller has been purposely lying for many years, but now decides he wants to tell you the “truth”?
A recent assessment of oral history suggests even more cautions are in order. Linda Shopes, a historian at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, has been studying oral history for 25 years. She explains it as a self-conscious dialogue between two or more people in which the interviewer and responder have possibly contesting frames of reference. The questions and answers play off each other as both sides try to cater to the others’ sensibilities in an effort to establish rapport. The narrators are a self-selected group, usually more articulate and self-assured than those who chose not to participate. They are predisposed to want to interview, creating an implicit bias.
According to Shopes, oral history, by its immediacy and emotional resonance, “seduces us into taking it literally, an approach … criticized as ‘Anti-History.’” Oral history takes on the glow of something beyond historicity, interpretation, and accountability and it must be used with prudence. “Just because someone says something is true, however colorfully or convincingly they say it, doesn’t mean it is true. Just because someone ‘was there’ doesn’t mean they fully understand ‘what happened.’”
According to Shopes, we must consider the reliability of the narrator and the verifiability of the account. What is the narrator’s relationship to the events, his or her personal stake or physical and mental states? It may help if we check the story with related documentary evidence, but we have to remember that documentary evidence can be as tainted with memory imperfections as the verbal tale. Oral history is not just another source to be evaluated as simply more raw data, but an interpretation, an expression of identity, consciousness, and culture.7
This does not mean that oral history should be ignored or has no value. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “There was a Little Girl,” we learn: “When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.” Or, put another way we can apply to history in general, and Sand Creek in particular, “When she was bad she was extremely effective.”
Oral history can be inspiring when told with verve, but it is always more impactful and “better” when the tale is a heartrending story filled with pathos. The “gut,” explained author Daniel Gardner, “is a sucker for a good story.” We have an instinct for storytelling stretching back from our earliest ancestors and we love the stories most when they are about conflict. Homer’s Iliad leaps readily to mind. We have all heard the clichéd but true phrase “If it bleeds, it leads” regarding news coverage. People in the media have even developed a “death-per-news-story” ratio that “measures the number of people who have to die from a given condition to merit a story in the news.”8
Storytelling frequently beats statistics, and anecdotes frequently conquer evidence. People are much more easily convinced by personal stories than numbers, and that is why companies trying to sell us a product use testimonials instead of statistics. According to Joseph Hallinan, “the power of anecdotes to lead us astray is so strong that an influential CIA study advises intelligence analysts to avoid them. Analysts, it concluded, ‘should give little weight to anecdotal and personal case histories,’” and it might be best to give them no weight at all if valid statistics can be found. “So ask for averages, not testimonials.”9
How does all of this fit into our study of Sand Creek? It might be put like this: Seventy-six dead white soldiers is just a statistic, but the mutilated, pregnant Indian woman is the headline—our anecdote. That is human nature, or as Daniel Gardner might put it, “our gut talking.”
The Cheyenne and Arapaho who passed down stories of what their ancestors experienced at Sand Creek were subject to all the foibles of relating oral history. They may have, as author Ari Kelman stated, “Unwritten rules about truthfulness in storytelling.” But as we have seen, far more prevalent than purposeful lies are the unconscious distortions and false memories that are accepted as the truth by the speaker. The more invested in the outcomes of the memories, the more distorted they will be in favor of self-esteem.
This can be even more widespread when the storyteller sees himself as a victim, for instance, an Indian at Sand Creek who felt unjustly attacked, or a soldier who was later pilloried in the press for participating in a massacre. As Daniel Schacter has shown, traumatic memories can be partially accurate, false implants, or completely confabulated. Socio-cultural factors influence and distort recollections, and the culture of victimization enhances one’s tendency to believe in repressed traumatic memories. Distorted memory passed down through oral history can be as prevalent for a culture as for an individual. Once the myth becomes embedded in the cognitive fabric of the society, it is virtually impossible to determine its origin or to correct it.10
The historic site is now named the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Indian oral tradition has become official. Author
White Americans take pride in their history and, as Professor Patricia N. Limerick explained, now the Indians have put forth a counterclaim: They also want a history that belongs to them “in which the owners should take pride and which should make them feel better about their inherited identity.” That idea might make some historians uncomfortable, possibly because they sense they are guilty of the same desires. Corporations, bureaucracies, religions, politicians, interest groups and many others have always written affirmative justifications as history.11
But is this history or heritage? History or cultural celebration? According to author Michael Kammen, the “heritage” trend in history is troubling because it is selective in memory and anti-intellectual. In his view, it recalls the good, suppresses the unpleasant, and denigrates the written.12
Nevertheless, one might accede to the inevitable and admit what is good for the goose is good for the gander. The whites have dominated the stage for so long that it is time for the others to stand up. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that this will produce accurate history.
1 Elizabeth Loftus, “The Reality of Illusory Memories,” in Daniel L. Schacter, ed., Memory Distortion How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge, MS, 1995), 58–60.
2 Daniel L. Schacter, “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status,” in Schacter, ed., Memory Distortion, 1.
3 Schacter, “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status,” 8–9; Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes, 125–27.
4 Schacter, “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status,” 26.
5 Richard G. Hardorff, ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight New Sources of Indian-Military History (Spokane, WA, 1991), 17; Michno, Mystery of E Troop, 63.
6 Jerome Greene, ed., Lakota and Cheyenne Indian Views of the Great Sioux War, 1876–1877 (Norman, OK, 1994), xxiii.
7 Shopes, “Making Sense of Oral History.”
8 Gardner, Science of Fear, 44, 169.
9 Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes, 215.
10 Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MS, 2013), 117; Schacter, “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status,” 27, 29–30.
11 Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987), 48, 219–20.
12 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1993), 625.