Battle Still Rages At Little Bighorn Plan To Honor Winners Draws Fire

Under a wide, blue September sky, Joe Medicine Crow invited the crowd to take the spirit of the place into their hearts.

Sometimes his talk of peace and unity was inaudible, drowned out by RVs slowing to take a look at the huge marble pillar at the site of Custer’s Last Stand.

The place cannot help but attract tourists, but maybe it is time to give them something besides a monument to the U.S. cavalry to look at. Something that will remind them that an entire population considers this ground sacred.

“The first time I came here, it upset me,” said Michael Marshall, a Lakota in his second year as a ranger with the National Park Service. “It was ‘Custer this, Custer that.’ It was all military. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s only one perspective.”

In a sense, on this rolling prairie in southeastern Montana, the West’s most infamous battle still is being fought.

On a recent weekend, a trio of Utah students joined about 100 artists, designers, architects and others - some American Indian, some not - for the Little Bighorn Symposium.

The two-day tutorial addressed how to submit designs for a new monument to the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne who annihilated 262 men of Custer’s 7th Cavalry on June 25, 1876.

In attendance were Navajo students from Utah State University and members of the Native American Environmental Design Alliance. Although they had no ancestors at Little Bighorn, they are keenly aware of the unrest that simmers at the battlefield that now only honors the losers.

“Familiarize yourself with the sights, sounds that will allow you to touch the part of your spirit that will allow you to design something meaningful,” said Leonard Bruguier, a Sioux and head of the Little Bighorn Advisory Committee.

Even before they came to Montana, the USU students were ready to do just that. They drove up in a van blessed and cleansed by the smoke of sweet grass and brought three advisers - one spiritual, one educational and one professional - to the battlefield.

Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer lost the battle and his life, but the maverick Civil War veteran who graduated last in his class at West Point has been immortalized nonetheless.

The national cemetery there and a nearby forest carry his name. Among the hundreds of white gravestones dotting the hillside is one with a black placard proclaiming the exact spot where Custer fell.

Until five years ago, the battlefield was named after him, too. Congress changed the name to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in 1991, a victory for a growing movement to help people understand all sides of the battle, not just the part about Custer and his cavalrymen.

The same legislation called for a monument to the Indians who now are mentioned only in passing in a tape recording played at the marble monument.

It has taken five years, but finally a call for entries has gone out for the new memorial, to be called “Peace through Unity.” Like the symposium, the contest is sponsored by the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument Advisory Committee, the National Park Service and the Interior Department.

Much of the delay can be blamed on government red tape, and changes in the leadership of the monument site did not help. But three years ago, Gerard Baker was named park superintendent. He is a Mandan-Hidatsa who wears his chest-length braids as easily as his National Park Service hat.

The battlefield’s first caretaker was a member of the 7th Cavalry.

“Yeah, we’ve covered a lot of ground,” Baker said.

He is not intimidated by Custer enthusiasts who oppose his management style and send threatening mail to him and others organizing the new memorial.

“I take them serious, but I’m not changing the way I do things,” Baker said. “I will deal with them with respect.”

When a group of Indians performed a two-day victory dance at the planned site of the new monument recently, Baker allowed it because they had the proper permits.

His critics objected, claiming the Indians were given preferential treatment when they were allowed on ground that is closed to the public.

Baker shrugged that off.

“My job is to see both sides. I am very happy here, but this is one heck of a challenge. I am very proud of the fact I’m an Indian and I am very proud that I am a park superintendent,” he said.

Baker and a handful of others organized the symposium to offer stories and insights rarely found in history books. The Sioux and Northern Cheyenne accounts of the battle largely have been told by one generation to another.

Joe Medicine Crow gave a presentation on the cultural aspect of the memorial. A Crow, he said his ancestors built a lot of monuments, sometimes with nothing but a pile of rocks, but still full of meaning.

This monument has become a little more complicated.

“Custer fans all over the country are waging war. The weapons are words coming out of typewriters and word processors. They say there are too many Indians up there and they’re taking over,” Medicine Crow said.

“But if Christopher Columbus, Lewis and Clark and George Armstrong Custer had stopped long enough to smoke a peace pipe together, you wouldn’t see these markers desecrating the good land of the Crows,” he said.

Faculty adviser Jerry Fuhriman saw the project as perfect for members of the design alliance he founded at the Logan school. Besides, he said, the first prize of $30,000 would be welcome to his fledgling program.

Fuhriman saw it as a chance to create a connection between Indian reverence for the Earth and occupational training in landscape architecture.

He teamed up with USU graduate David Garce, a Catawba who lives in Santa Clara, Calif., and is president of the American Indian Council of Architects and Engineers. They set out to recruit and train Indian students, but the job has turned out to be difficult.

The two men joked about driving carefully on the road to Montana, since they carried nearly the entire future of American Indians in landscape architecture in the van.

By the end of the journey, Fuhriman nearly had forgotten how few students he has.

“It was a powerhouse up there. We’re flying high. It really brought the team together with some great ideas,” he said when he returned to campus.

Because winners will not be announced until spring, Fuhriman and the students hesitate to discuss the entries. They will, however, freely discuss what it won’t be.

“We wouldn’t have four chiefs smiling from the hill,” said Darrell Tso, a junior landscape architecture and environmental-planning major.

Instead, it will honor the sacredness of the place, just as the students did during their visit.

“That’s what is different about us,” he said. “Maybe we have a different feeling, a spiritual side of the place.”

The following fields overflowed: DATELINE = LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD, MONT.