So this book was a complicated read for me. Normally I post my reviews of books I read for school before class, because I want to get my thoughts out there before we talk about it, but I genuinely couldn't tell how I felt about this book until after we talked about it, and even then, sorting out my feelings was complicated. At first, I couldn't tell if my reservations about the book had to do with the content of the book, or the way it was written, and ultimately it was a little bit of both, though I think really it was more of the former. I will admit that my feelings were clarified mostly because we got to speak with Ari Kelman in class (over Skype) and he explained some of the ways he went about trying to craft the narrative arc of the book, which hit on some of the roots of my problems with it. Kelman explained that he did his best to give every actor in the book the benefit of the doubt, and to portray them in as fair a light as he possible could, which is very reasonable! Except that at least I as a reader, and many, many others, exist in a culture of white supremacy that tells us that certain kinds of knowledges, epistemologies, ontologies etc. are more valid than others, which means that when it came to the debate about the "actual" site of the Sand Creek massacre, it really felt like the knowledges of white history and archeology carried more weight than those of the descendants. I absolutely know that that was not Kelman's intention, but it leads me to thinking about our role as historians and storytellers in keeping "balance" in our work when dominant narratives are present in and around the stories we tell. In short: I think Kelman needed to use a little more multipartiality in telling this story, and that is my biggest problem with it.

That being said: it's a very carefully (and quite well done) intervention into questions of public memory and the crafting of that memory based on certain types of epistemologies, and I would recommend it to people thinking about those types of questions.