Niwot mural artist Brent Learned depicts the Sand Creek Massacre

This is the third in a series of stories centered on the four artists painting murals as part of the Cottonwood Square Shopping Center-Jerry Sinor Building mural project.

You might feel shocked and outraged. The powerful image of the latest mural in the breezeway of the Cottonwood Square Shopping Center is intended to do just that. The mural might also make you want to learn more and ensure that the level of hate, ignorance, and greed that led to this horror never happens again.

The mural portrays people being shot, trampled, and cut up into pieces, despite gathering around a white flag and an American flag which were intended to signal that the people being attacked were peaceful. Instead, children were taken away and used for target practice. The woman with a torch represents Manifest Destiny, which primarily is the belief that white settlers were entitled to take over North America at any cost.

Brent Learned, the artist of the mural titled "Genocide Sand Creek Massacre," grew up and lives in Oklahoma City. His father was white and his mother was Cheyenne Arapaho. His mother, Juanita (Howling Buffalo) Learned, was the first woman elected to chair the Cheyenne Arapaho tribe. His parents met in the 1950's, before interracial marriage was legal, while they were both serving in the U.S. military. Yet they married and had 10 children, Brent being the eighth.

Learned's father, John Learned, created award-winning Western and indigenous themed bronze sculptures.

"One of the things that I remember doing as a little kid was watch my dad sculpt," Learned said. "He'd sit me down and give me paper and crayons and he'd tell me to draw...draw what he's doing. From there I would just always draw, and from that I grew my love of art."

Following in his father's footsteps, Learned graduated from the University of Kansas (1993) with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. He recalls that when he was nearing graduation, he asked his mother what he could do to make her proud. She responded that she was already very proud of him, but what would make her even more proud is for him to "paint his culture." She wanted him to share his gift of art by telling stories of their ancestors.

"That led me on the track of studying who I was and where I came from," Learned said. "Mom and Dad always instilled in my brothers and sisters and I that you need to know where you came from in life to know where you're going."

Being true to what he knows is of utmost importance to Learned. Early on, he painted an Apache Ghost Dancers series, but when questioned by a potential buyer about the symbols and elements he'd included in the paintings, he was at a loss to explain them. He said this experience taught him a valuable lesson....he should concentrate his painting on what he knew - his tribe. That way, he feels his people's history will be passed on accurately.

Another Niwot mural artist, Danielle SeeWalker, approached Learned to add his work to the Cottonwood Square Shopping Center-Jerry Sinor Building mural project because of his heritage as a descendent of the Sand Creek Massacre. And indeed, he is the right person to tell the story of the event that caused so much sorrow, sadness, and suffering.

Learned's passion for telling the story both visually and orally is appropriately intense. He doesn't want this horrific event or other genocidal massacres committed to be forgotten or repeated. He explained that when Hitler came to power, he dispatched agents to go to the U.S. Library of Congress to study what had been done to American Indians.

"He [Hitler] loved U.S. history so much that he just took the blueprint and copied it over there," Learned said.

Canvases and masonite are Learned's primary mediums, but he's also created some other public murals. The black and white mural in Niwot is a departure from his usual bold, bright, contemporary pieces.

Learned's interpretation of the Sand Creek Massacre is in the cubism style of Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937), a piece portraying the Spanish War. The distortion and grotesqueness of the people and animals illustrated, with severe angles and body parts stacked on top of each other, masterfully conveys the violence that took place at Sand Creek.

The Sand Creek Massacre occurred on November 29, 1864 and was a surprise attack by nearly 700 Colorado militia and volunteers on a peaceful encampment of 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho women, elderly, and children who were left alone while the younger braves were out hunting for desperately needed food.

A long running conflict over the control of Colorado's eastern Great Plains led to treaties that weren't honored, peace talks that went awry, and splintered parties. And then a rogue leader in the U.S. Army, Colonel John Chivington, betrayed an agreement that allowed resettlement in a small territory when he ordered his troops to commit the act of treachery at Sand Creek.

The attack on innocent people was at a level of brutality that should never occur between fellow human beings. Learned's visual rendition rightfully stirs up emotions over the genocidal act.

Sand Creek has a unique tie to Niwot as historians believe that Chief Niwot was wounded at the Sand Creek Massacre and died later of his injuries after escaping to the east with other members of the tribe.

"I feel that when I paint," Learned said, "I'm giving a voice to our ancestors because they didn't really have one."

The night the mural was completed, a small group of people came to see it under a string of overhead lights. What transpired was a spirited discussion about the massacre, how inhumane and vicious the event was, and some uncertainty about facts surrounding the massacre. Had Learned been there, he would have been pleased because he expressed hope that his art will prompt people to want to learn more.

To inform onlookers about the mural and to help facilitate future discussions, a plaque will be mounted next to the mural in the near future.

To follow Brent Learned's art, visit BrentLearned on Instagram.