Custer’s Lesson

For an event of such magnitude in American history, little is actually known about the Battle of the Little Bighorn. There were no survivors on the U.S. cavalry’s side, and the Indians who defeated the troopers kept no written records. But one thing that everyone agrees on is that Gen. George Armstrong Custer made a terrible mistake that June day in 1876 when he engaged a superior force of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors in southern Montana. The decision cost Custer and 270 of his men their lives and spawned controversies that continue to the present day.

One of those disputes--whether or not to place a memorial to the Indians who died in the fighting--may finally be on the verge of resolution, thanks to some level-headed thinking by officials of the National Park Service. The service’s director, William Penn Mott Jr., announced last week that he had authorized park rangers at the Custer Battlefield National Monument near Billings, Mont., to remove a controversial plaque buried on monument grounds earlier this summer by American Indian activists. The crudely lettered unauthorized plaque praises the “Indian Patriots” who defeated Custer.

At the same time, however, Mott said that he would appoint a committee of Indian spiritual and political leaders and other private citizens to help the Park Service design and install an official memorial to the Indians killed in the battle. Because that process could take several years, the unauthorized plaque will remain on display in the visitors’ center at the national monument in the meantime as an illustration of “the ongoing story” of the historic battle and the emotions that it still stirs generations later.

Given the controversy that erupted when members of the American Indian Movement and other Indian activists installed the unauthorized plaque last June 25, the 112th anniversary of Custer’s defeat, Mott’s decision is as courageous as it is constructive. There are many people who were understandably upset by the plaque’s strong language-it asserts that Custer’s defeat prevented the “mass murder” of Indian women and children--and by the place where it was put. The activists buried it adjacent to a tall marble pillar that marks the mass grave where the bodies of 220 enlisted men who died in the battle are buried. Clearly that was inappropriate.

But just as clearly there is a need for such a his toric place to reflect the fact that men from two sides fought and died there. And we think that modern Americans take a more sympathetic view of the American Indian than people did in Custer’s day. That view is shared by Dennis Ditmanson, the superintendent of Custer Battlefield, who believes that he did the right thing in not stopping the activists when they installed their unauthorized plaque on a busy day when the park’s grounds were filled with tourists. Ditmanson then decided to leave the plaque in place and solicited comments and reactions to it from park visitors. Two-thirds of them believed that there should be an Indian memorial on the grounds, he said, even if they found the unauthorized plaque offensive.

Ditmanson hopes that the committee that Mott appoints will conduct a competition among American Indian artists to come up with a design for an appropriate memorial--a competition similar to that conducted to find a design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. That is a fine idea. Mott wants funds to pay for the Indian memorial to be privately raised, but we think that Congress should donate at least a token sum to the project as a gesture of encouragement and support. It would be further evidence that modern Americans are learning to deal with American Indians more sensitively and constructively than Custer’s generation did.