Here at the History Colorado Center, Colorado attempts to tell itself its own story honestly, including the difficult parts. The History Colorado Center opened in 2012, replacing the older Colorado History Museum, and was designed from the beginning with a different ambition: not just to celebrate Colorado history but to examine it critically. The building, designed by Tryba Architects with a facade referencing agrarian Colorado, houses exhibitions that wrestle with the full complexity of the state's past.
The Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 — in which a Colorado militia killed approximately 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people, most of them women, children, and elderly, under a white flag of truce — is examined alongside the dispossession of the Ute people and the incarceration of Japanese American families at the Amache camp during World War II. These stories sit alongside the Chicano civil rights movement that transformed Denver's politics in the 1960s and 1970s. These difficult histories share the building with celebratory narratives of mountain explorers and mining pioneers — the full complexity of a state built on both remarkable courage and terrible injustice.