Unknown: The narrative of kind of how the West was won begins
to change over time. And people are just beginning to see that
it isn't just this black and white, you know, cowboys versus
Indians kind of thing. And that's the way that it's been
portrayed in media or popular culture or movies.
Anyone who's ever gone to school in the U.S. probably remembers
these three words from history class, Custer's Last Stand.
The event referred to as Custer's Last Stand was a battle
that took place on the northern plains, where we call Montana
today, in late June of 1876. The story goes that Custer, who was
a civil war hero, very gallant officer in the 7th Cavalry, was
attacked in a sneak attack by a huge group of Native people led
by Sitting Bull, and it was a shocking defeat. He gallantly
fought to the last. There are all these paintings of him
standing next to his fallen horse and comrades with, you
know, a pistol in each hand. And his entire unit was wiped out.
And this sent shockwaves throughout the nation and
spurred the U.S. military to crack down on Native nations and
protect what they termed innocent settlers from Native
warriors who were the villains in this story, who stood in the
way of westward expansion. So that's the story most of us know
and what the textbooks don't necessarily teach students is
the settlers were there illegally, the area where the
battle took place, gold had recently been discovered in the
Black Hills, which under the Treaty of Fort Laramie had been
promised to Lakota Nation for all time. And Lakota Nation
continues to contest this. And so the settlers were there
against U.S. treaty law, and Native people were rightly
defending themselves. And then the military came in and faced
with the choice between upholding treaty law and telling
the settlers, you know, forcibly removing the settlers, they
chose to protect settlers who were breaking the treaty law. In
addition to that, Custer wasn't tricked, he wasn't led into a
trap. He knew very well he sent his scouts out. He knew very
well there was an encampment of men, women and children, the
entire community along a river that Lakota people call the
"Greasy Grass", it's called the "Little Bighorn" in Western
sources. And he had a military success in 1868, called the
Battle of the Washita, which should more properly be termed a
massacre, where he attacked a village of mostly Southern
Cheyenne people under the leadership of a man named Black
Kettle, and open fire, took prisoners, women and children
who specifically targeted. He wrote in his book, "My Life on
the Plains", that was published in 1874, that he intentionally
captured women and children to try to break the spirit of the
warriors he was fighting. And Custer specifically was trying
to recreate that violence. So when we think about Custer's
Last Stand, or the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or whatever we
want to call it, we should think of it as a successful defense by
Native people against an attempted act of genocide.
This is the monument at Last Stand Hill. The Little Bighorn
National Monument, okay, they always had the monument there
for the soldiers. And there was nothing for the victors. No
mention, you know, growing up, we find, you know, in our
American Indian space programs, and most students never got that
part of the history. They—it looks like there's this land to
be taken and had for the just selling that and they didn't,
they don't realize that it was all inhabited. And it was all
occupied by American Indian people who had a different
concept of land ownership was, was sharing among themselves,
sharing the land, and nobody could fence the land, and call
that mine. And this is yours over here.
There's a whole narrative then that emerges about the Wild West
American Indians as savages right then, that justify the
need to conquer them or take their land. There's a whole part
of the, the narrative that feeds that and then, you know, the
fact that they won in this battle. I think that the story
emerges as a Custer as this hero, but over time, I think
historians, you know, uncovered, there are some big flaws that
were made and that whole campaign and we shouldn't hold
them on as high of a pedestal as, as we have.
Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Big Horn but this book
presupposes is, maybe he didn't.
The reason Custer's Last Stand becomes so powerful, I think in
public memory was, first of all because of the reporting
surrounding it. But also newspapers played a huge role in
inflating these conflicts because most Americans were
primed for news about military conflicts. And as soon as the
Civil War is over, they're looking for that sort of news
because of Custer celebrity and how well publicized he was. He
even ghost wrote newspaper dispatches, which he sent to be
published back east, pretending to be a correspondent inflating
his own role. And a couple of them were actually published
posthumously. And the newspaper editors highlighted the fact
that this is actually Custer writing about this. So he was
just a public figure at the point, but really where the
national imagination took hold of this story with the efforts
of his wife, Elizabeth Custer, after she was widowed, she
collaborated with another author and published a series of books
about Custer. Also, the image of Custer became very popular in
Wild West shows. And some early silent films, Errol Flynn
famously played Custer himself in "They Died with their Boots
On". So by the time public schooling is more widespread,
the textbooks are telling the story Custer's already enough of
a legend, that in the 1920s, the American Book Company, which was
the most popular textbook company in the country, tried to
publish a book without Custer because the author of this new
U.S. history textbook said this battle is not important. It
didn't turn any tides, it didn't have a lasting military impact.
It didn't change the course of westward expansion. We just
don't need Custer, the booksellers in the northern
plains states told the company we will not be able to sell this
textbook if Custer is not in it. The thing that's very important
to remember, in thinking about how we think about this period
of history is particularly when we talk about schooling, history
textbooks are not history books. And that's very hard for us to
understand sometimes, because a lot of times the only textbook
history books that we have read, but textbooks are a specific
kind of document designed for a specific purpose. And it's not
simply to tell students what happened in the past but to give
them a particular view, particularly of the American
past. That's why American history textbooks tend to shy
away from the fact that framers of the Constitution, founding
fathers who signed the Declaration, who argued for
liberty, were slaveholders. We mentioned it occasionally. But
we don't really ask students to wrestle with that contradiction.
And the same thing is true, especially with native history.
My grandfather's grandmother was a young girl at the battle, she
was around 16 years old, and there when Custer attacked, so
that history was really passed down to me through—through my
grandfather, I grew up in South Dakota and went to public
school, those histories weren't really brought into the
classroom, necessarily. And I almost in a way that I just
never even like put two and two together, of my own family
history and how it tied into the content or the curriculum that
we were learning in school.
And so the role that a you know, exciting battle like Custer's
Last Stand plays in the textbook is actually remaking American
identity. But that's at the expense of native people on
their sovereignty.