ERIC DEGGANS, HOST:
President-elect Trump is already working with Texas on setting up a detention facility as part of his campaign promise to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history. Detention camps are not new in the U.S. Native Americans were sent to them in the 19th century. And during World War II, Americans of Japanese, German and Italian descent spent years in camps under armed guard. Descendants of people from both of those eras are now getting together in Colorado to help each other heal. Rae Solomon with member station KUNC has this story. And a warning for listeners, some may find descriptions of violence in this story disturbing.
RAE SOLOMON, BYLINE: In a cluster of cottonwood trees surrounded by vast scrubby grasslands near the town of Eads, Colorado, 21-year-old Joshua Beaver slips on his sneakers. He gives his legs a quick stretch and zips up a reflective vest.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAR CRIES)
SOLOMON: He joins dozens of other young runners practicing their war cries. Some traveled here from Montana and Wyoming. Beaver drove out from Oklahoma.
JOSHUA BEAVER: I can definitely feel the difference in elevation. Like, there's gonna be a difference when I run, but I'm sure I'll be all right.
SOLOMON: Beaver is Cheyenne. Other runners are from the Arapaho tribe. In 1864, U.S. Army soldiers killed more than 200 of their ancestors in southeast Colorado. Many were women and children in a camp the U.S. Army had assured them would not be attacked. The runners all traveled here today for the Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run, a 200-mile ceremonial route through the wind and dust of the plans.
BEAVER: We're going to do 1 mile, and then we're going to trade off with the next group, so it's like a relay race. So we're all collectively putting together the 20 miles a day.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing in non-English language).
SOLOMON: Instead of a starting pistol, the run begins with the death song of White Antelope, a Cheyenne chief who was gunned down that day.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing in non-English language).
SOLOMON: "Only the rocks last forever," they sing as the pack of runners takes off down the dusty road. For these runners, the massacre was a major trauma that changed their people's history. Entire populations were separated from their homeland. Many tribal members say they still feel that pain as an open wound. Cheyenne historian Greg Lamebull says that's why they returned to this site years ago to start this run.
GREG LAMEBULL: This is for the healing of our people, which is far from complete.
SOLOMON: Joining them for the first time this year is another group of people also tending to intergenerational wounds.
AYA SUGIURA: It's my dad's side that was incarcerated at Amache.
SOLOMON: That's 23-year-old Aya Sugiura. Amache is the Japanese internment camp hastily built in southeast Colorado, near the spot where the Sand Creek Massacre unfolded. Sugiura says her grandmother, just a toddler at the time, was imprisoned there from 1942 to 1945.
SUGIURA: I had heard a lot of stories from my grandma. Her whole family, and we - they had a big family. They were, like, an agricultural family in the Central Valley. So my great grandpa was, like, one of 13 kids, and all of them and all their families were in camp.
SOLOMON: Sugiura, along with several other young Japanese Americans with family ties to Amache, trekked here from as far as California and Seattle. They came to run in solidarity with their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies.
SUGIURA: Making connections across Amache and Sand Creek - different stories in our American history where there's just way more connections, like, beyond even the surface level.
SOLOMON: Sugiura and Joshua Beaver are among the first cohort of youth ambassadors, a new collaboration between the Amache Alliance and the Sand Creek Massacre Foundation to educate and connect their youth. Amache Alliance President Mitch Homma says the project was years in the making.
MITCH HOMMA: And as the Nisei generation, our older generation are passing on, they asked us to not forget about the Sand Creek site and the descendants there and for us to reach out. And so we started forging those connections.
SOLOMON: And those connections developed into the youth ambassadors. A grant from the state of Colorado helped pay for this inaugural year, bringing young people from both communities back to Colorado's southeastern plains. They are here to help each other heal from a history of government-imposed trauma.
MARIKO FUJIMOTO ROOKS: Our two communities have so much suffering and also resilience in common, and being able to build solidarity, particularly amongst this next generation of folks, feels very essential.
SOLOMON: Mariko Fujimoto Rooks is another Amache descendant and one of the guides for the youth ambassadors. She points to a throughline in history, the atrocities at Sand Creek leading directly to the injustices at Amache.
ROOKS: It's, you know, so evident in a place like this, where Sand Creek Massacre is so close to Amache. Without the massacre and without the atrocities that happened to remove the Cheyenne from their land, you wouldn't have this land available to put Amache on it in the first place.
SOLOMON: Today, the runners' long route retraces the path of the U.S. Army soldiers who attacked the Arapaho and Cheyenne village in 1864. Here's Greg Lamebull again.
LAMEBULL: They butchered our people, and they cut the fetuses from the stomachs of the mothers, and they cut the body parts and the bodies up, and they tied them to their horses and to their uniforms.
SOLOMON: The cavalry paraded those gruesome war trophies all the way from the killing fields back to the seat of government in Denver.
LAMEBULL: The spirits that came from those people that were left on that trail - that's the trail that we're gonna be running. And along the path, they're going to pray, and they're going to run. They're gonna cleanse the blood and the memories from the people that were taken back.
(SOUNDBITE OF PERSON BREATHING)
SOLOMON: And this year, with the Amache community running alongside their Cheyenne and Arapaho friends, the run takes on another layer of meaning. Fujimoto Rooks again.
ROOKS: This return back to Denver is where so many people at Amache wanted to go, and there are people who are buried at Amache who will never be able to make this trip back. I could sort of feel what it meant to be able to leave when so many people in my family weren't able to. It's a really important way to know the land. Our Cheyenne and Arapaho friends have let us be a part of that. I think it makes the land feel so much less barren to know whose side we're on and where we all come from.
SOLOMON: Making his way along that same path, Joshua Beaver finds strength in his ancestors' stories.
BEAVER: Whenever you're starting to feel those pains or struggles during the mid-run, you just got to think about, you know, what our ancestors went through. I can't be tired now. I can't, you know, be hurting like this because they didn't get a choice to stop. They didn't get a choice to breathe.
SOLOMON: Soon, Beaver, Aya Sugiura and the other youth ambassadors will disperse back to their lives far away, a continuation of their history of displacement. But today, this weekend, they're here together, healing in the landscape of their sorrows. For NPR 暗黑爆料, I'm Rae Solomon in Eads, Colorado. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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