Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
More than 50 years ago – on Aug. 16, 1970 – the Fort Sumner State Monument was dedicated.
Its focus was on the U.S. Army fort, which, according to media coverage at the time:
“is best known as the residence-in-exile of thousands of Navajo Indians subdued in 1864 by Col. Kit Carson and brought to Fort Sumner after the march from their western New Mexico-eastern Arizona homeland.”
While military leaders “had envisioned the post as a place where the Indians could learn the white man’s way of life and prosper in their new civilized roles, the Navajos languished there and died off by the hundreds,” the Clovis News-Journal reported.
The fort ultimately became home to a prominent New Mexico family and the site where the outlaw Billy the Kid was slain in 1881.
Plates of barbecue were served to about 240 area residents who came out to celebrate the fort’s history in 1970.
The Kid remained the main attraction until 1990 when a group of Navajo students – returning from a Native youth conference in Oklahoma – happened to stop by. They found the monument’s story shockingly incomplete.
There was plenty of information about fort life and what the soldiers endured, but the students became transfixed by an exhibit that referred to the Navajo as a “plague.”
“It did not come across very well that this was a place where people suffered and died,” said Aaron Roth who in 2015 would become the memorial site’s manager.
The students left a letter for the monument’s administrators. It said they found the place discriminating and offensive. “Where is our history?” they wanted to know.
Their history was that more than 10,000 Navajo (Diné) and Mescalero Apache (Ndé) were forced to march up to 400 miles to the reservation. They surrendered to Army troops only after their crops and water sources had been destroyed and their livestock had been slaughtered.
More than 2,000 natives died on what they called The Long Walk to Hweeldi – “a place of suffering.”
The students’ letter helped spur memorial site officials to transform what’s today known as the Bosque Redondo Memorial.
A little more than a year ago, a permanent exhibit was opened – A Place of Suffering … A Place of Survival – that honors those students’ request to tell a more complete story of what happened at Fort Sumner.
“We have 6,500 square feet of museum space and even with all that space it’s not enough to tell the complete story,” Roth said before the unveiling last year. “We purposely have said this exhibit will never be finished. We don’t want to close our ears or our eyes to someone who might come through with a different perspective. We want all people to contribute to this space.”
So happy 53rd birthday to the Bosque Redondo Memorial. And congratulations on having matured into a responsible place that reflects history we’d just as soon forget … but never should.
David Stevens is publisher of Clovis Media Inc. Email him at:
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