By Nick Coleman
CROW AGENCY, Mont. — I first visited the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument 25 years ago, when it was not much more than a shrine to the myth of one man: George Armstrong Custer.
Today, there are still remnants of the Custer “massacre” myth (the gift shop in the visitor center sells prints of the ludicrous 1884 Anheuser-Busch painting of “Custer’s Last Fight”), but the myth has lost control of the rolling bluffs where the troops of the Seventh Cavalry lost their lives in 1876 and where the battle is now called a “hotly contested fight” between cultures, not a massacre.
The monument’s name was changed from Custer Battlefield to Little Bighorn Battlefield in 1991. Recent improvements include a monument to the Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux warriors who died (as many as 100) and red-granite markers that have been placed on the field to show where some are known to have fallen. Gone are most of the Custer hagiographies that once dominated the shelves in the still-too-small visitor center, replaced by books on Plains Indian culture. And in place of the died-with-their-boots-on stereotypes that trivialized the grievances of the Indians whom the Army was under orders to round up and move to reservations by any means necessary, there is a one-size-fits-alls interpretation:
“We commemorate all who fought here,” intones the narrator at the conclusion of the 28-minute video that plays at the battlefield visitor center. “Prisoners of their own times, they fought as they had been taught to fight — to protect their own people and beliefs. All were patriots in their separate worlds of belief and ways of life.”
The current interpretation of the battle and the long war between free-living tribes and a land- and gold-hungry government that wanted to break the Indians’ will is far better than the old one. But it still gives short shrift to many of the more troubling — and still relevant — causes of the conflict: Virulent racism that justified inhuman treatment of native peoples; the pernicious idea of a “Manifest Destiny” that gave white Americans a divine right to expropriate lands, and government-endorsed war-fighting tactics in which women and children were rarely spared.
If it is true that the people of 1876 were prisoners of their time, then we are prisoners of ours, too. And we also have difficulty grappling with difficult truths.
The Little Bighorn fight didn’t happen in a vacuum, and it was not as far from Minnesota as it may seem: Echoes are still to be heard in Minnesota and in the Dakotas, along the trail of a troubled history that began right here. As the 150th anniversary of Minnesota’s 1862 Dakota Conflict approaches, not enough is being planned officially to mark or observe the causes and consequences of that war, which scarred the Minnesota River Valley and led to the Dakota Sioux being banished from their homeland under a state threat of exile or extermination.
The late Gov. Rudy Perpich declared 1987 — the 125th anniversary of the war — to be a Year of Reconciliation between the majority and Indian people. Reconciliation and healing can’t be proclaimed, however; they have to be accomplished by hard work, inquiry, respect and compassion. Today, in Minnesota, it’s still hard to discuss freely the events of the three-decade war that stretched from 1862 to Little Bighorn and on to Wounded Knee, where the Seventh Cavalry brought events to an end in 1890 with the killing of 300 members of Big Foot’s band in the snows of South Dakota.
The single most important state-shaping event that took place at Fort Snelling — the internment of 2,000 Indian prisoners and their subsequent deportation — is almost invisible. So are the punitive military expeditions led by Gen. Alfred Sully and by Henry Sibley — the state’s first governor, who enriched himself during the big swindles that deprived the Dakota of their land — which are almost unknown to Minnesotans. But those scorched-earth campaigns of 1863 and 1864, in which troops attacked and destroyed peaceful Sioux villages that were unconnected to the events of 1862, roiled the frontier all the way to the Missouri; cost the lives of many Indians; imposed hunger and hardship on the survivors, and set the table for the tragedies that followed.
Lakota war chief Sitting Bull, who was caught up in fights during the punitive expeditions and battles in which the soldiers attacked for reasons that were mysterious to the Indians, would later dream of soldiers falling upside down, and dead, into the Indian camp. His apocalyptic vision proved true at Little Bighorn.
Today, North Dakota tribes have asked that the state rename one of the 1863 “battle” sites, Whitestone Hill, to call it a massacre, not a battle. What goes around comes around.
The fight over the meaning of our shared histories continues. It’s not over. It may never be over.
But, thankfully, it has begun.
This story was originally published in the Star Tribune, August 2009