Colorado lawmakers on Monday gave unanimous approval to a resolution on the design and location for a memorial to honor the victims of the Sand Creek massacre.

The project has been decades in the making.

Meanwhile, representatives of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma said they were not included in the discussions and did not even know about the resolution approved by the state House and Senate on Monday.

As envisioned, the memorial sculpture will be placed on the west side of the state Capitol on the site of a 1909 statue of a Union soldier, which topped a base with plaques listing Civil War battles. In 1999, one of the plaques mistakenly listed Sand Creek as a Civil War battle. It was corrected to note that Sand Creek was a massacre. In 2020, during the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests, the soldier statue was toppled and later removed by History Colorado.

According to Colorado Legisource, the monument will depict three Native American figures — an Arapaho chief, a Cheyenne chief, and a Native American woman holding a child — standing before a tepee without any walls, only poles. The figures will be larger than life, at about seven feet tall, and the poles of the skeletal tepee will be approximately 23 feet high.

When the tribes hold the annual Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run in November, “tribal runners will approach the west steps of the Capitol and lay a ceremonial lodge pole on the tepee. The lodge pole will display a United States flag and a white flag of peace, which were the flags that Chief Black Kettle of the Southern Cheyenne had displayed on his tent on the day of the Massacre,” according to Legisource.

Wyoming artist Gerald Anthony Shippen will cast the statue in bronze, using a design approved by the Sand Creek Massacre Memorial Committee, part of a foundation established in in 2020. The committee consists of representatives from the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana, the Northern Arapaho Tribe of Wyoming, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, artists, a historian, an architectural advisor, a sculptor, and a project manager.

According to Elleni Sclavenitis, the project manager, members of the committee, who are tribal appointees, were appointed to work directly with the state through the Colorado Commission on Indian Affairs in the Office of the Lt. Governor.

The Capitol Building Advisory Committee approved the design last November.

But Fred Mosqueda, whose great-great-grandfather, Mixed Hair, was a toddler when he was saved from the Sand Creek Massacre by his sister, said his tribe was left out of critical meetings.

“They left the Southern Arapaho completely out of the Sand Creek monument conversation,” he said. “We have no say. I guess we are not that important.”

Mosqueda and Southern Arapaho Sand Creek descendant Chester Whiteman spoke to Colorado Politics from the massacre site, where meetings with the National Parks Service are underway. The tribes are together to discuss a property the National Park Service bought, separate from the monument talks. Mosqueda and Whiteman were there to represent their tribes.

Mosqueda and Whiteman said they have been working on the proposed monument for eight or nine years and have not seen the design.

“It ain’t over until the fat lady sings,” said Whiteman.

Mosqueda has previously represented the tribes on matters related to Sand Creek, including as the tribes’ historian. In 2022, Mosqueda played a significant role in shaping History Colorado’s exhibit on the Sand Creek massacre.

Sclavenitis said Tall Bear was appointed by a letter from the tribal government to the CCIA. 

The House resolution on Monday said the former location of the ‘Union Soldier’ is an “appropriate location for a memorial of the Sand Creek Massacre to respect and memorialize the Cheyenne and Arapaho people and their ancestors, promote cross-cultural understanding, and educate the public about the massacre and the events surrounding it to foster healing.”

Sens. Rod Pelton, R-Cheyenne Wells, and Kyle Mullica, D-Thornton, with Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho tribal representatives present, sponsored the resolution in the Senate. In the House, Assistant House Minority Leader Ty Winter, R-Trinidad, and Rep. Tammy Store, D-Evergreen, sponsored the resolution.

“This resolution is more than symbolic,” Mullica said. “It is a recognition that truth matters, that the foundations of justice require honesty, even and especially when the truth is hard. We cannot undo what happened at Sand Creek, but we can choose to not look away. This resolution and memorial ensures we do just that.”

The Sand Creek Massacre occurred on Big Sandy Creek’s banks, near modern-day Eads in Kiowa County on the state’s Eastern Plains.

More than 230 Cheyenne and Arapahoe, primarily women, elderly and children, were slaughtered on Nov. 29, 1864, when volunteers from the First and Third Colorado Cavalry regiments ambushed them at sun-up. The 700 Cheyenne and Arapaho who gathered there had been promised a peaceful existence by the government. The massacre poisoned relationships and was a catalyst for wars between the U.S. Army and Native Americans for years.

Soldiers testified in government-held trials months later that an American flag and a white flag of surrender flew over the tepees. Those messages were ignored by Col. John Chivington’s troops that early morning as their horses thundered over a ridge in a surprise ambush.

Chivington was never held to account for the massacre. Capt. Silas Soule, who refused to allow his troops to participate, blew the whistle on the killings, and the investigation that followed resulted in the resignation of Colorado Territorial Gov. John Evans. Then-U.S. President Andrew Johnson demanded the resignation.

In 2023, Evans’ name was stripped from the iconic mountain, recently named Mount Blue Sky, which bore his name for more than 120 years, in acknowledgment of his role in authorizing Chivington to attack Native tribes.

A group of Sand Creek tribal representatives, many of whom are descendants of survivors and of those who died, are visiting the Sand Creek National Massacre site this week to meet with the National Park Service, as they do routinely, to discuss issues unrelated to the memorial. 

Chris Tall Bear, who is Cheyenne, regarded the decision not as a celebration but with “cautious optimism” for the future of tribal relations. Andrew Masich, a Cheyenne tribal consultant, noted the significance of the unanimous decision.

“It’s a rare thing to see total unanimity to not only accept this monument but to put it in the most prominent place at the Capitol,” Masich said.

The group would like to see the statue ready by 2026, which coincides with Colorado’s 150th and the United States’ 250th anniversary.

The effort to produce the memorial has been going on for decades, started by the descendants of the victims and survivors of the massacre.

At the state level, the project grew out of an effort by the state to right the wrongs of the past, which began with an apology from then-Gov. John Hickenlooper in 2014, 150 years after the massacre.

In 2017, the project won approval from the General Assembly and Hickenlooper, but the issue of where to place the statue was not resolved.

The issue was a lack of agreement between the state and among the Native American tribes — the Northern Cheyenne, Northern Arapaho, and the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho — about where the statue should go. One proposal would place it on the southeastern corner of the Capitol grounds, near the intersection of 14th Avenue and Grant Street, and another offered a site near the other Native American statue known as “Closing Era.” Still, another proposed location was on the Capitol’s west side, near the Union soldier statue, an area that the state didn’t approve.

Artist Harvey Pratt was supposed to create a design of a kneeling Native American woman in a Cheyenne dress. However, he withdrew from the project in 2022 after being asked to modify it because the modifications sought no longer reflected his artistic vision.

Otto Braided Hair of the Northern Cheyenne did not respond to calls for comment.