Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument stretches over the full length of the battlefield. There are markers approximating where the dead were found. They are scattered over five miles of land from where Major Reno and Captain Benteen held off one attack, to Last Stand Hill where Custer and the remnants of his 225 men lost their lives. In the 1990's, the site began displaying markers for the sixty-odd Native Americans who also died in the battle, as well as changing the name from Custer to Little Bighorn Battlefield. This added balance to the story, which was as much an Indian victory as it was a military defeat for the United States. It helps impress a vistor today of how complete and overwhelming the victory was. Seeing markers for soldiers and warriors where they fell helps make those events of 150 years ago real, honest and human.
The Trump administration wants to white wash our history, from downplaying slavery to rewriting or ignoring altogether our treatment of Native Americans. Trump lies constantly, but he believes his lies. Somehow he has come to believe that disagreeing with his version of America is treasonous, even when that version denies or ignores the factual truth. The truth is not something we should run from or tuck away out of view. Our ancestors made mistakes, as humans always do. But we learn from those mistakes, and strive to do better. If we lose the record of our past, how can we do better? How can we learn? Donald Trump has his own agenda, to make America over in his image. Now he wants to put his lies all over our national parks and our coastlines, to “edit” informational signage to match his flawed vision of Amerika the Beautiful.
Five of the first seven US Presidents were slave owners. It is fact. Is pointing that out a sin against America? Those men were a product of their times. Most of them hoped for a time when their new country would abandon slavery as an economic tool, human beings as nothing more than machinery. Andrew Jackson, whom Trump called his favorite President, himself owned 200 slaves. Jackson also pushed through Congress the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which codified a policy of relocating native tribes wherever it suited the government. It began with the forceful relocation of the Cherokee, one of the so-called civilized tribes, and the Trail of Tears, and spread westward through the Plains. It was an effort to push Plains Indians back to the reservation that led to Custer's defeat in 1876. But the policy continued.
Donald Trump wants to forget all that.
What's next? Do we pull the markers of the dead native warriors out of Little Bighorn National Monument? Do we start burning every book that reports our true history? Do we arrest anyone with a different view from the administration? Do we white wash history? And does that do anyone service? Remember, history is always written by the victors, but the vanquished always keep a record, even if they have to pass it down generation to generation by word of mouth.
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