Memories and Counter-Memories of Settler Colonial Violence

Jeffrey Shepherd (Professor, University of Texas at El Paso) Racial Violence, Settler Colonial Memory Making, and Indigenous Views on the Washita "Battlefield" National Historic Site As locations of public memory, our national monuments, memorials, and historic sites hold great promise as spaces of reconciliation and healing. Far too often, however, the narratives they foreground privilege settler-colonial visions of the past that justify conquest and Indigenous dispossession from aboriginal homelands. In doing so, these public sites of history perpetuate another form of violence in the present, by silencing the pain and suffering of Indigenous peoples caused by their erasure in dominant national histories. Part of the Reckoning & Reconciliation on the Great Plains summit.