Only a short decade ago, many descendants of the victims of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre despaired that the nation would ever mature enough to properly honor the memories of their murdered relatives. "The whole truth of Sand Creek needs to be fully understood by the non-Cheyenne as well as the Cheyenne," descendant and tribal historian John Snipes, Jr., told Rocky Mountain PBS in 1996 in an interview for the documentary Tears in the Sand. "And that's something that's real hard and I don't see the whole truth coming out."

"But the Cheyenne will never forget," Snipes continued. "But the young people should always remember. That's all I can say on Sand Creek. The door will never close. It's going to be there and it's not going to go away."

Now, thanks largely to those same Cheyenne descendants, all Americans will have the opportunity to better understand the history of one the greatest tragedies to mark relations between Native and Anglo Americans. In a potentially healing last step, President Bush signed legislation Tuesday creating the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.

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