Indian Memorial

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana

For 115 years after the battle, there was one monument at the Little Bighorn. It stood on Last Stand Hill and named the officers and soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry who had died there. The warriors who had defeated them had no monument. Their names were not on any stone. The land itself was named for the man they had killed.

In 1991, Congress changed that. The law that authorized the Indian Memorial also changed the name of the site from Custer Battlefield National Monument to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Former President George H. W. Bush signed it on December 10, 1991. A. Gay Kingman, Minniconjou Lakota, had testified before Congress that year: "We have waited too long for a memorial symbolizing our bravery, our personal loss, our victory in battle, and our commitment to protecting the way of life which our people knew."

The design was chosen from more than five hundred entries in a national competition. John R. Collins and Allison J. Towers of Philadelphia won. Their design is a circular earthwork carved gently from the prairie. For many of the tribes who fought here, the circle is sacred -- it is the shape of the lodge, the shape of the camp, the shape of the seasons. A spirit gate in the circular wall faces the Seventh Cavalry Monument, symbolically welcoming the soldiers' spirits into the memorial's circle. A weeping wall represents the grief of the Indian people. The interior walls name the five nations who fought here: Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, and Arikara.

At the center stands the Spirit Warriors sculpture by Oglala Lakota artist Colleen Cutschall -- warriors on horseback, riding into battle, rendered not in bronze but in the suggestion of motion, as if they are still moving.

Austin Two Moons, Northern Cheyenne elder, spoke at a ceremony in November 1993: "We now have to try to forget what happened here 100 years ago; we have to unite together. Peace through unity."

Enos Poor Bear, Sr., Lakota elder, said: "If this memorial is to serve its purpose, it must not only be a tribute to the dead; it must contain a message for the living."

The message is not complicated. The warriors who fought here were defending their families, their land, and a way of life that had sustained their people for generations. They won the battle. They lost the war. Their descendants are still here. The memorial is for all of them -- the ones who fought in 1876, and the ones who are alive today, and the ones who are not yet born.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, then a United States Senator, said at the dedication: "The time has begun to give equal honor to the Indian people who've been denied that for so long."

The memorial was dedicated on June 25, 2003, the 127th anniversary of the battle. Several hundred people attended, including descendants of warriors who had fought here and descendants of soldiers who had died here. The ceremony was conducted in both English and Lakota. The Seventh Cavalry sent a delegation. The Northern Cheyenne sent a delegation. The Crow Nation, whose scouts had ridden with Custer, sent a delegation. The Arikara, whose scouts had also ridden with Custer, sent a delegation.

The Crow and Arikara scouts are a part of the story that the memorial's design acknowledges without resolving. They fought on the Army's side. Their names are not on the Seventh Cavalry monument, because they were not soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry. They are not named on the Indian Memorial either, because the memorial honors the warriors who resisted the Army, not those who aided it. The history of the Little Bighorn is not a simple story of two sides. It is a story of many nations, many loyalties, and many reasons for being on the field that day.

The memorial stands on the same ridge as the Seventh Cavalry monument, within sight of it. The two structures face each other across a hundred and twenty-seven years of history. The spirit gate in the memorial's wall opens toward the older monument, and the older monument stands with its back to the newer one. This is not a design choice. It is simply the way the ridge runs. But it is also, in its way, the truth of the place: two monuments, two histories, facing the same ground from different directions, neither one complete without the other.

The Lakota and Cheyenne people who fought here in 1876 were fighting to remain in the country where they had always lived. The country they were fighting for is still there. The reservation boundaries have changed many times since 1876, and the land within them has been reduced, but the people are still in the country of the Powder River and the Little Bighorn and the Yellowstone. The memorial on the ridge is one way of marking that continuity. The people themselves are another.

See also

• Indian Memorial at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (National Park Service)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument at Crow Agency, Big Horn County
• Peace Through Unity at Crow Agency, Big Horn County