MAKING HISTORY
CSU alumni earn national attention for expanding historical narratives
By Coleman Cornelius | Sept. 23, 2024
For a solid seven decades, the display stood in the former commandant’s quarters at Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado. With dusty mannequins, it portrayed treaty negotiations between the military fort’s one-time commander, Brig. Gen. Christopher “Kit” Carson, and prominent Ute leader Chief Ouray.
In 2017, when he joined museum leadership, Eric Carpio took a second look.
By any measure, the exhibit was tired. So old that the bearskin laid out on museum floorboards was filled with dead bugs. But there was more: The display perpetuated a simplistic view of frontiersman Kit Carson as a consummate peacekeeper and friend to Native people. This was the same man who, beginning in 1863, led a scorched-earth campaign that forced the relocation of Navajo people through the brutal Long Walk across New Mexico; hundreds perished of starvation and disease. Yet, a museum brochure said of Carson’s later role at Fort Garland: “His understanding of Indian psychology averted open war and saved the settlements.”
Carson did negotiate with the Utes during his years commanding Fort Garland, from 1866 to 1868. In fact, he had a key role in the Ute Treaty of 1868, which the U.S. government characterized as the beginning of a lengthy period of peace in the San Luis Valley and surrounding mountains.
“Peace for whom?” Carpio wondered, as he considered the old display depicting Carson and Ouray. Maybe for many white settlers and miners flooding to the region during Western Expansion. But for the Utes? The 1868 treaty was a step toward forced expulsion from most of their ancestral homelands, sacred sites, and hunting grounds. That year, Ouray delivered a speech in Washington, D.C., saying in part, “The agreement an Indian makes to a United States treaty is like the agreement a buffalo makes with his hunter when pierced with arrows. All he can do is lie down and give in.”
Eric Carpio, a CSU alumnus, is chief community museum officer for History Colorado and is director of the Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center. Photo: Mary Neiberg.
THE FORT GARLAND museum, Carpio realized, had largely ignored the complexities, contradictions, nuances, and strife woven through the region’s history. When he became museum director in 2019, he sought to change that.
“There was this narrative at the museum that the fort was established to deal with the Utes and to protect people coming into the San Luis Valley, and Kit Carson was presented as the hero of the story. My response was, ‘There’s more to the story,’” Carpio said. “The stories told at Fort Garland hadn’t fully reflected local stories and, in fact, largely erased them.”
Carpio, an alumnus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, has quietly led a nationwide movement among community museums that seeks to elevate a greater variety of perspectives and more complex, even disturbing, truths. His goal, Carpio said, is to better reflect the local community by telling a more honest and inclusive history.
His work at a remote outpost in Southern Colorado has garnered national acclaim: Last year, the Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center was among just 15 museum finalists for the National Medal for Museum and Library Service. The medal is the nation’s highest honor for museums and libraries that demonstrate significant impact in their communities. Becoming a finalist placed the Fort Garland museum among the most innovative cultural centers in the nation, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which confers the honor. The Fort Garland museum was the only Colorado institution selected as a finalist for the 2023 award.
Left: An 1865 census of enslaved Native Americans in Southern Colorado is reproduced on gauzy curtains. Right: In one part of the Buffalo Soldiers exhibit, Dr. Chip Thomas, lead artist, explores issues that may have motivated formerly enslaved Black men to join the U.S. Army during Westward Expansion. Photography: Mary Neiberg.
Top: An 1865 census of enslaved Native Americans in Southern Colorado is reproduced on gauzy curtains. Bottom: In one part of the Buffalo Soldiers exhibit, Dr. Chip Thomas, lead artist, explores issues that may have motivated formerly enslaved Black men to join the U.S. Army during Westward Expansion. Photography: Mary Neiberg.
DEREK EVERETT, A senior instructor in CSU’s Department of History, has worked with Carpio and his colleagues for seven years and is among the scholars who have encouraged a broader view of local history. Now, the Fort Garland museum is notable for considering the region and its people well beyond the walls of the fort and the years it operated, Everett said. This shift has helped the museum become a community hub, rather than a stopping place for travelers passing through, he said.
“It’s about treating these museums as places people can come together to talk about past, present, and future. I’ve really appreciated being able to help broaden the lens. It has allowed us to realize just how many Colorado stories have been overlooked,” Everett said.
He has advised Carpio and his colleagues during creation of a new framework that guides museum exhibits – a framework that invites complexities and community participation. Everett has also helped provide teacher training to expand the view and the instruction of state history.
“This kind of work is rare at community museums,” said Dr. Chip Thomas, a well-known artist and African American family physician who delivered medical care for nearly four decades on the Navajo Nation. “Eric is informed by the international movement to decolonize views of history and to look at it from different perspectives. He is willing to take chances telling untold narratives.”
Fort Garland, shown in an 1879 illustration from Harper’s Magazine, was an active U.S. Army outpost from 1858 to 1883.
The Fort Garland museum deinstalled the display of Carson and Ouray in 2018 and, in its place, mounted an exhibit, created by Thomas, called Unsilenced: Indigenous Enslavement in Southern Colorado. It was featured in a New York Times story in 2021.
The installation incorporates historic photographs of Indigenous captives and large-scale reproductions of the 1865 census of enslaved Native people in Conejos and Costilla counties in Southern Colorado. The census provides “Lists of Indian captives acquired by purchase and now in the service of the citizens,” according to document headings written in ornate, black-ink script. The tally includes 149 names; the youngest slave listed was 3 years old. The documents, from the U.S. National Archives, are rendered on gauzy curtains – floating specters of Native enslavement in the United States.
Indigenous enslavement is a critical missing piece of continental history, the author Andrés Reséndez writes in his book The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction. “If we were to add up all the Indian slaves taken in the New World from the time of Columbus to the end of the nineteenth century, the figure would run somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million slaves,” Reséndez, a professor and historian at the University of California, Davis, writes.
Dr. Chip Thomas is lead artist of the buffalo soldiers: reVision exhibit and stands before a display of the Bicycle Corps formed by Buffalo Soldiers. Photo: Kim Marquez.
As Carpio noted, the census exhibited at Fort Garland was compiled after Congress passed the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. Yet, Kit Carson had a young Navajo house servant named Juan Carson who lived in the very quarters where the Unsilenced exhibit now stands. Juan is pictured in the installation. The elder Carson described the boy as being adopted; but he purportedly was traded for a horse at age 3 and, as an Indian captive, did not enjoy the privileges afforded Carson’s other children, Carpio said.
“We’re broadening the narrative,” he said of the museum’s work. “We have not done away with Kit Carson, but we like to talk about it as decentering Carson and centering people whose histories are just as critical to the fort and the valley and the West in general.
“We’re not trying to create heroes and bad guys,” he added. “We’re trying to dig into complexities.”
An installation in the buffalo soldiers: reVision exhibit explores the meaning of land for its inhabitants. Photography: Kim Marquez.
THE FORT GARLAND Museum & Cultural Center is among 11 museums and historic sites operated by History Colorado, a division of the Colorado Department of Higher Education. Carpio not only is director of the Fort Garland museum but also serves as chief community museum officer for History Colorado, helping to guide six other sites across the state. In these roles, he has emphasized the “community” in community museums – with the philosophy that these sites should function as local resources, offering programming, exhibits, and gathering spaces of interest to local residents.
“We’re the state historical society, and our obligation is to everyone here – to tell their stories and to be representative of everyone,” said Dawn DiPrince, president and chief executive officer of History Colorado. “We began shifting the model of community museums a decade ago, understanding that a community museum serves community first. We’re first telling these stories for Coloradans.
“People should see themselves in history,” she said, “and there are hard things we should be honest about.”
Parts of the buffalo soldiers: reVision exhibit. A historic photograph (top left) of Dick “Buckskin” Charley, a Southern Ute man, and John Taylor, a Black man who served as a military translator, greets visitors to the exhibit. Photo at bottom right: Mary Neiberg. All other photography: Kim Marquez.
Parts of the buffalo soldiers: reVision exhibit. A historic photograph (top) of Dick “Buckskin” Charley, a Southern Ute man, and John Taylor, a Black man who served as a military translator, greets visitors to the exhibit. Photo at bottom: Mary Neiberg. All other photography: Kim Marquez.
DiPrince and Carpio might be colleagues now, but they met as Colorado State University students living in Newsom Hall. DiPrince, from a family of Italian immigrants in La Junta, Colorado, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1995 and later earned a master’s degree. Carpio, a Chicano and first-generation college student from Greeley, Colorado, graduated in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in business. Their backgrounds have provided the two History Colorado leaders with insights into how history is interpreted.
“Everybody has an inherent human connection to history, and we need to portray history in a way that connects everyone,” said DiPrince, who also holds the title of state historic preservation officer. “People who have lived here for generations want to see themselves and their ancestors reflected in state history.”
Before he joined History Colorado, Carpio worked for 12 years as a leader in admissions and student services at Adams State University in Alamosa, 25 miles west of Fort Garland. His career move seemed natural after years working in higher education and living in the San Luis Valley, Carpio said.
Now, his office is inside a low-slung adobe building constructed in 1858 as part of a military fort that helped establish U.S. authority on the frontier during the Civil War and Western Expansion. The fort was active for 25 years. Decommissioned in 1883, it was later acquired by History Colorado and opened as a museum in 1950. Of 22 original buildings, the organization has restored five adobe structures that enclose large parade grounds – all at the foot of Blanca Peak and circled by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Black soldiers, known as Buffalo Soldiers, were stationed at Fort Garland in Southern Colorado from 1875 to 1879 and are the subject of an exhibit called buffalo soldiers: reVision. Photo courtesy of Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center.
To support its work, the Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center has received more than $330,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities during the past four years. In the same period, it has secured more than $100,000 from state and local foundations – and recently learned it would gain about $165,000 in congressional allocations for building upgrades, allowing the museum to expand year-round exhibits and programming.
Such support helped the Fort Garland museum mount its most recent exhibit, titled buffalo soldiers: reVision. It explores the legacy and experiences of Black soldiers with the segregated 9th Cavalry, who were stationed at the fort from 1875 until 1879. Many of the soldiers who enlisted in all-Black Army regiments were formerly enslaved men who, during the Reconstruction era, sought opportunities outside the South.
Thomas, the artist and physician, was the lead creator among eight artists who contributed to the exhibit. A photographer and public artist, he is best known for murals and large-scale black and white photography reproduced on building exteriors on the Navajo Nation. In the buffalo soldiers: reVision exhibit, one of Thomas’ installations examines a difficult aspect of the Buffalo Soldiers and their assignments in the West.
“There is no denying that as the United States expanded west the Buffalo Soldiers participated in forcing Native people off their land in often violent and deadly battles,” Thomas writes in an exhibit publication. “As an African American man who has spent the last 36 years living and working as a physician on the Navajo Nation, a recurring question for me regarding the Buffalo Soldiers’ involvement in the Indian Wars is, ‘Why?’” During an interview, he elaborated: “I was driven by the question, ‘What led them to inflict on Native people some of the same brutality they had endured?’”
The Colorado Historical Society, now known as History Colorado, acquired and refurbished Fort Garland, transforming it into a museum and cultural center that opened in 1950. Photo: Mary Neiberg.
His installation seeks answers. “Then as now for people from disenfranchised groups who enlist, the military offers a degree of dignity and security,” Thomas writes in the exhibit publication. Underscoring that point, buffalo soldiers: reVision includes 19th-century U.S. Army recruitment posters with messages aimed at Black men. “Men of Color / To Arms! To Arms! / Now or Never,” one proclaims. Other posters offer pay of up to $26 per month, clothing allowances, and aid for families of enlistees.
Thomas, who grew up in North Carolina, traveled to the Southwest from his formerly Confederate home state and was awestruck by a landscape he finds liberating. During work on the Buffalo Soldiers exhibit, he wondered whether the land itself was a draw for Black men – inspiring them to dream of new realities. “I find a sense of unlimited possibility being in the West and the Southwest,” Thomas said. “I tried to imagine a parallel experience for Black men who had escaped chattel slavery.”
The complexity of race relations on the Western frontier is personified in the Buffalo Soldiers exhibit with a historic photograph of Dick “Buckskin” Charley, a Southern Ute man, and John Taylor, a Black man who served as a translator for the U.S. Colored Troops and was the first non-Native settler in La Plata County, in Colorado’s southwest corner. The two were best friends despite racial antagonism during the time of Manifest Destiny, Carpio said.
Left: Visiting the museum during an exhibit opening are Haskell Hooks, left, a Southern Colorado resident who is part of a group that preserves and shares Buffalo Soldiers history, and Gaia, a painter who created the artwork hanging nearby. Right: Artist André Leon Gray stands with two of his contributions to the exhibit. Photography: Kim Marquez.
Top: Visiting the museum during an exhibit opening are Haskell Hooks, left, a Southern Colorado resident who is part of a group that preserves and shares Buffalo Soldiers history, and Gaia, a painter who created the artwork hanging nearby. Bottom: Artist André Leon Gray stands with two of his contributions to the exhibit. Photography: Kim Marquez.
James F. Brooks, a distinguished professor of history at the University of Georgia, has visited the Fort Garland museum and said its exhibits and related programming have the power to relieve personal and community pain by shedding light on difficult issues. Brooks has written about Native enslavement and race relations during Western Expansion; he served for years on the board of directors for the Western National Parks Association.
“These exhibits have deep credibility because they aren’t simple and don’t provide easy answers,” Brooks said. “That’s really special.”
Photo at top: Visitors to Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center view historic photographs of Juan Carson, a Navajo house servant for Brig. Gen. Christopher “Kit” Carson, who was commander of Fort Garland from 1866 to 1868. Carson called the boy his adopted son, but Juan purportedly was traded for a horse at age 3 and was held as an Indian captive. Photography: Kim Marquez.
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