Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History

Massacre at Camp Grant
Forgetting and Remembering Apache History
Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh
176 pp. / 6.0 x 9.0 / 2007
Cloth (978-0-8165-2584-3) [s]
Paper (978-0-8165-2585-0)

Related Interest
- American Indian Studies
- Anthropology
- Western 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.

This volume reaffirms Colwell-
Chanthaphonh’s reputation as a voice
to be heard. His way of interweaving
the differing perspectives of the Camp
Grant Massacre not only serves to
place the specific event within a local
context but also invokes larger
questions on how events are recorded,
selectively remembered, and easily
forgotten as part of history. The book is
written in a style that will be readily
consumed by the serious researcher
and the interested reader alike.

—Joe Watkins, University of New Mexico

This book is a little gem, a passionate
and informed narrative about a
shockingly invisible chapter of western
American history.

—David Hurst Thomas, American Museum of Natural History

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.

Top of Page