On June 5, 1876, Sioux Natives celebrated a Sun Dance ceremony, a religious ceremony where once a year the community would gather together, pray, and make small, personal sacrifices in the hopes of aiding their families and neighbors. These were key ceremonies for the Plains Indians, as many different bands would participate in order to articulate their primary views about life and the universe. During the ceremony, their religious leader, Sitting Bull, had a vision where he saw “soldiers falling into his camp like grasshoppers from the sky.”
His vision proved true. In 1875, the U.S. government had labeled the Sioux – a term used by whites for Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota Indians, which may have possibly had derogatory origins though now a commonly accepted phrase – as “hostiles,” for refusing to sell the Black Hills to the government. The government had also sent several military units to force indigenous peoples back on to reservations, as many had left those initial designations while protesting the U.S. government’s reservation policies and hoping to reclaim their own lands.
Three weeks after Sitting Bull’s prophecy, the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne tribes would come to defend their homelands against an attack by the U.S. 7th Cavalry. The cavalry, headed by the famous long-haired colonel George Armstrong Custer, turned out to be greatly outmatched by the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne, as many of the Natives leaving their reservations joined the fight. Custer, although often considered a hothead who went into battle impulsively, assumed he’d be facing an army of eight hundred, as this was the information he’d had; he turned out to be facing thousands. He and his men would ride to their deaths at the Battle of Little Bighorn.
The years following, however, the Sioux would come to lose the war. Sitting Bull had fled to Canada. Crazy Horse, the Sioux military leader, was captured and sent to Florida, where he was later killed in an uprising. The decisive victory for the Lakota, Nakota, and Cheyenne reinforced the image of bloodthirsty “savages” to white Americans. In 1881, Sitting Bull had returned to the U.S. where he, oddly enough, toured with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. He was later killed at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in December of 1890. Sitting Bull’s death led to the U.S. government’s massacre of 250 Lakota peoples, including women and children, to end the Ghost Dance Movement, a religious ceremony adopted by many Native communities that believed the Great Spirits would reunite and ultimately return the American homeland to its rightful people. Performing the dance was meant to fight white westward expansion and destruction of Native homelands. Soon, assimilation policies were forced on Native peoples. Native students were sent to boarding schools to unlearn their traditional practices. They were not allowed to speak their own languages. Their cultures were erased.
But Custer had long been deemed the hero who died at his famous “Last Stand.” Custer himself leaves a fiercely divided legacy. After his death, his wife Libbie served as Custer’s fierce advocate, helping to write his legacy in a more favorable light. Custer himself was acutely aware of his public image – controversial in life and death – and knew the value of good P.R.. He often invited journalists along on his campaigns. He was a serial exaggerator and a difficult man who graduated last in his class at West Point in 1861. The urgency demanded by the Civil War allowed him command over a volunteer unit and his gallantry earned him a brevet honor of Brigadier General by the time he was 23; his command at the Battle of Gettysburg was crucial to the Union victory there. He was a passionate man. He was demoted and suspended for his poor treatment of his men in 1868. Like many of his time, he was a complicated man. He was shortly reinstated after his suspension to establish a military post in Oklahoma to fight against Native peoples, where he led the attack at the Battle of Washita River, where Custer and his men killed roughly 103 Cheyenne, including women and children. The Cheyenne accounts also suggest Custer sexually assaulted some of the Cheyenne women, which resulted in an illegitimate child. To be fair, the historical record here is spotty, however Custer was on record many times describing his disdain for Native peoples. It is speculated he enjoyed the slaughter that occurred against them.
Regardless, Custer is no hero to the Lakota and the Cheyenne. Yet six counties in the U.S. bear his name, in most of which he led attacks against Native people: Oklahoma, Idaho, Colorado, South Dakota, Montana, and Nebraska. He is the namesake of a large State Park in South Dakota in the Black Hills, where he again led attacks against the Sioux people.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Crow Agency, Montana. Seeing the site of “Custer’s Last Stand,” was a sobering experience, as is often the case at any battlefield. Now, the National Park Service – responsible for maintaining the Battlefield – does its best to recognize the sins of the past. The site attempts to honor the soldiers who died, both of the seventh cavalry and of the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota who valiantly defended their homeland. One can take a guided bus tour by a Native American Park Ranger. The museum there does its best to illustrate the complexity of the situation and to honor the Sioux and Lakota who died defending their homelands.
The site, too, was once called the Custer National Cemetery – as a National Cemetery sits there where Custer’s tomb once sat, though he was re-interred in the West Point Cemetery in 1877 – though the official name was changed in 1991. At one point, members of the American Indian Movement protested the naming of the monument, and petitioned the name be changed and a new monument be added to celebrate the Native voices involved. Eventually, one was.
One may get a conflicting feeling walking through the Battlefield. The original plaque at the cemetery, which still stands, reads, “To the officers and soldiers killed, or who died of wounds received in action in the Territory of Montana, while clearing the District of the Yellowstone of hostile Indians.” While I certainly believe the historic place should be preserved, it is jarring to see. Now, as our society comes to terms with its past, we know the unfairness, the cruelty even, of seeing such words on the Sioux lands. The Battlefield is now owned and operated by the U.S. government, the very invading power that forced the Sioux and Cheyenne out of their lands to begin with. Think of the cruelty to those people for so long, that the invading power of your territory recognizes its fallen soldiers on the lands it took from you while fighting to take those lands.
Again, the NPS does much today to tell an accurate history of those events. Progress has been made. The current Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland – head of the department that houses the National Parks Service – is of a Laguna Pueblo background. The story is no longer that of Custer’s, but a complex portrait of the people involved. But the problem is not that is no longer one-sided, but that it should have been one-sided all along, but the wrong side was given air time.
Conquest and empire have been a universal aspect of humanity. It has been an inevitable part of human existence. But that is what we wrestle with now – how we manage the reality of living in a world governed by the need to conquer other men, to view our civilization as more perfect or better than others and that a good society will reflect only ours. And most importantly, how we pick up the pieces in the aftermath. The aftershocks of history still ring through Native American communities.
I have deep respect and reverence for Native cultures. As someone who does not come from a Native American background, I always hope that I communicate the history of Native peoples with humility. I am certainly imperfect, but I hope for a better world. Little Bighorn, to me, represents many of those tangled webs of history that face our world today. It represents the great problems we face now with monuments, and how history has often been weaponized to promote an agenda, or to make us feel better about terrible things. It also gives me profound appreciation for all people everywhere who face oppression and yet continue to fight the good fight. I am probably naive to think we’re near the progress we should be. I don’t wish to sound blissfully unaware of the realities and atrocities placed upon Native American people. The monument, then to me, is perhaps a sober reminder of the grave injustices we wrestle with constantly, and a call to the work that must be done.
This post originally appeared as an author's social media post on July 13, 2022.