Looking ahead down the road

History is a complicated business. There are high plateaus and also a good deal of swamp. The Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana was preserved in honor of General Custer who there gave his life along with his men of the Seventh Cavalry, a sacrifice that no longer strikes anybody as noble. What is the good of preserving an enormous site of military stupidity in an unjust cause? The granite monument on Last Stand Hill was put up in 1881, five years after the debacle. In 2003, a monument was erected to the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne who wiped out the arrogant jerk and his poor soldiers. Tourists still come to look at this, but why? It’s a dishonest historical site: the reason for its existence is a piece of trivia, a few hundred white guys on horseback thought they could spook a few thousand Native men and they were dead wrong about that. But the larger context of the story is lost. The real enemy wasn’t the Seventh Cavalry but the smallpox and other diseases that Europeans brought to the Great Plains that decimated the tribes. The whole wretched mess should be torn down and the land set aside for the instruction and practice of Native religion, the sweat lodge, the Sun Dance, the quest for visions and dreams, the worship of the Creator.