Haunted Landscapes and Memory in Boulder, Colorado

This paper examines Fort Chambers and Valmont Butte, adjacent sites in Boulder, Colorado, as landscapes that hold layered memories of Arapaho dispossession and settler colonialism. The first, Fort Chambers, is a city-owned plot that was a training ground for militia members who participated in the Sand Creek Massacre, and Valmont Butte is simultaneously a Native sacred place, a settler cemetery, and a site of radioactive industrial waste reclamation. Through these two sites, I argue that landscapes remember. Fort Chambers and Valmont Butte are shaped by Native and settler religious practices, settler colonial mythologies, and modern sites of memory of settler violence. These landscapes hold the memories of what has happened on and to them precisely because people revisit these memories and forge new stories, but also because the land itself, in the form of radioactive soil capped with clean fill, makes forgetting materially impossible.