There are many ways of measuring the impact of any given theatrical performance. But they don’t get much more impactful than when a woman approached educator and now theater practitioner Cinnamon Kills First at the end of “Breathing Healing into the Banks of Sand Creek” last May and apologized.
The woman, accompanied by her daughter, told Kills First the two are direct descendants of Colorado Territorial Gov. John Evans, who is credited with bringing railroads to Colorado and starting the University of Denver – but was forced to resign in disgrace in 1865 for his part in instigating the Sand Creek massacre. It was the deadliest day in Colorado history, but only one in a 500-year history of genocide, forced removal and ongoing systemic oppression of Native Americans.
Kills First is herself a direct descendant of survivors from Nov. 29, 1864, when roughly 700 U.S. Army troops attacked a non-combatant village of 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho along the Big Sandy Creek about 100 miles southeast of Denver. About 230 men, women and children were killed and savagely mutilated in the unprovoked assault despite flags of truce. Soldiers hunted down those who tried to flee along the creek bed and set the village ablaze.
“Breathing Healing” was the culmination of a three-year creative collaboration with Patrick Mueller’s Control Group Productions, a fearless Denver experiential company known for taking audiences on wild rides into the unknown. Often, it turns out, on a retrofitted (and surely not road-legal) past-life school bus.
Audience members board the bus for an uncomfortable but safe creative venture that explores the deadliest day in Colorado history in Control Group Productions’ “Breathing Healing Into the Banks of Sand Creek.”
This educational, emotional and interactive experience, with Kills First’s soothing voice serving as our gentle guide, took those willing on a challenging but healing journey over about 6 square miles, stopping at four historically significant locations where actors played out scenes that made plain the racist realities of the day.
One scene took us under a viaduct that was once Camp Weld, located just east of the Platte River in what is now the La Alma-Lincoln Park neighborhood of Denver. That’s where Col. John M. Chivington finalized plans for the attack on Chief Black Kettle’s Big Sandy Creek encampment.
Bill Tall Bull tells audience members about how Col. John Chivington plotted the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre at Camp Weld in what is now Central Denver. The scene is part of Control Group Productions’ “Breathing Healing Into the Banks of Sand Creek.”
We were joined by Bill Tall Bull, a management analyst with the U.S. Department of the Interior, who asked us to consider the ongoing moral and environmental consequences of our collective conquest of this once healthy, thriving ecosystem we call Denver. We walked the length of a festive Larimer Square where, in 1864, Denverites greeted returning Sand Creek soldiers as war heroes as a massive celebration of the massacre broke out.
It’s one thing to be told that this party happened. It’s another to walk those same blocks with your fellow travelers in a moment of quiet contemplation and reverence, trying to physically shake the ickiness of it all out of your body.
That must be what the Evans family members were feeling, too.
“To know that I created this breathing, healing experience, and to know that John Evans’ descendants were a part of it – that kind of elevates it into the spiritual and the cosmic for me,” said Kills First. “I was really so moved by their attendance.”
Laurie Rugenstein, left, and Sid Madrid play denizens of 1864 Colorado around the time of the Sand Creek Massacre as part of Control Group Productions’ “Breathing Healing Into the Banks of Sand Creek.”
On another night, an audience member approached Kills First, knelt before her and asked for her forgiveness. The woman offered a personal token as a concrete commitment to share her newfound awareness. Another audience member has since hired Kills First to produce an informational video telling the actual history of downtown Denver. “She said it would be a missed teaching opportunity if she didn’t educate her team about the history of what had happened right there,” Kills First said.
For all the good it did, Control Group’s “Breathing Healing” is the latest among the Denver Gazette’s 2024 True West Awards, celebrating 30 of the best theater stories from the year.
Cinnamon Kills First describes ‘Breathing Healing into the Banks of Sand Creek’ as, ‘a social engagement and performance project that aims to initiate truth-telling, reckoning, healing and reconciliation.’
Action, not apologies
The last thing Kills First wanted was to make her almost entirely White audience feel shamed. Or responsible. Or guilty. Simply more aware of our shared bloody history.
Ultimately, Kills First told me, “Our goal was to create a ramp that invites White audience members who inherited racism and bias as a disease into awareness and accountability, while offering pathways forward to support change. We really encouraged our participants to make commitments that would help to repair relationships with Indigenous peoples – or help to move those relationships forward.”
Cinnamon Kills First believes art’s purpose ‘is to reflect, comment on and influence societal change.’
Coming from a Denver family that dates back to before Sand Creek, the experience was both mind- and heart-expanding. After all, the journey started not far from Riverside Cemetery – Denver’s oldest graveyard and the eternal resting place of my own great, great grandfather and namesake. We don’t know all that much about John Lindsay Moore, except that he was a corporal who joined the 73rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment in 1862 and just two months later lost his eye fighting in “The Battle for Kentucky,” one of the bloodiest and most consequential battles of the Civil War. He’s certainly a war hero to us.
Two hours later, we were being led to Skyline Park at 16th and Arapahoe streets, where a nondescript plaque honors at least one hero who emerged from the massacre. Colorado Cavalry Capt. Silas S. Soule disobeyed orders by holding his men back and refusing to fire on the peaceful villagers. He reportedly told his fellow officers that “any man who would take part in such murders was a low-lived, cowardly son of a bitch.”
This is the plaque honoring Silas Soule at Skyline Park in downtown Denver.
Soule’s brave testimony led to Chivington’s resignation and Evans’ ouster. And just 80 days later, Soule was gunned down at the very spot of that Skyline Park plaque. Many believed the assassination was ordered by Chivington himself.
When I learned that Soule is now buried just a few hundred feet from my namesake in Riverside Cemetery, I was overtaken with questions about Cpl. Moore. Namely: Was he the kind of man who would have said no to Col. John M. Chivington? Or was he among those who danced on Larimer Street? Needing to believe what is true is not the same as knowing what is true.
These are the questions that still reverberate for me, even seven months after “Breathing Healing” gave its last bus ride.
But while the good of the project is self-evident, it turns out that only 286 curious and open-minded adventurers bought tickets and took the ride. “I mean, three years to reach fewer than 300 people is pretty minute,” said Mueller, who is nevertheless armed with “incredible responses and stories of transformation from the people who rode the bus with us.”
He attributes the low crowd count to several factors, including the industry-wide struggle of performing-arts groups to bring audiences back since the pandemic. But also, the subject. Sand Creek is a tough sell. It’s also denialism. We’re living at a time when we can’t agree on what happened five minutes ago, much less 159 years ago. Just look at varying accounts of the Jan 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
America is badly in need of a quorum right now.
Audience members are asked to guess the order of steps that make up “The Treaty Breaking Playbook” in Control Group Productions’ “Breathing Healing Into the Banks of Sand Creek.”
“I think the war on truth is at work here,” said Mueller. And then there is what he calls terror overload. “It’s hard to invite people into something that feels historical given the death toll in Gaza in any given week,” he said. And, perhaps most consequently: “I think there is a lot of burnout in the social-justice space.” Meaning: It’s becoming more difficult to engage audiences with heavy, thought-provoking content in a world increasingly resistant to social justice narratives.
A scene from Control Group Productions’ interactive bus journey “Breathing Healing Into the Banks of Sand Creek.”
Still, the “Breathing Healing” project made its impact, and the work will go on. Kills First said working with Control Group “was one of the best work experiences I’ve ever had in my entire career. They all came together with a good heart and with the right intention to hopefully breathe change into the world.”
So Mueller and Kills First are now taking that rickety old bus and turning it into an interactive mobile museum that, starting in May, will engage visitors with storytelling and other activities over the next two years.
The idea is to show up at community gatherings, county fairs, college campuses and festivals throughout the state. The goal is to reach 10 times as many people.
Along the way, “Breathing Healing” really only asked one thing of us: Simply commit to remembering the name of one Sand Creek massacre victim as a kind of way of making that wronged person immortal.
Seven months later I still remember Wolf That Heals. And hope like hell that John Lindsay Moore was one of the good guys.
Note: The True West Awards, now in their 24th year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.
Denver Gazette columnist John Moore visits the graveside of his namesake, John Lindsay Moore, at Riverside Cemetery, not far from where Captain Silas Soule rests. Soule stood up to his commander and refused to take part in the Sand Creek Massacre.
Unsung hero of the day
Just as Miners Alley Playhouse opened “A Christmas Carol,” a cast member went down with COVID, and the only available understudies were Director Len Matheo and Assistant Stage Manager Samantha Piel. No problem. Piel expertly took on the role, and didn’t stop doing her other duties while she was off-stage.
“Whenever she wasn’t onstage, she was backstage with her headset on, calling cues,” said Matheo.
That’s just who Sammy Piel is to anyone who knows the Denver School of the Arts grad – who is also head of the company’s properties department. She loves all the jobs, her boss says.
“Samantha always puts the show first,” Matheo said. “She is such a hard worker and has so much emotional grit. If she is ever scared, she will just jump in and be brave.”
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