ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606240152
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CROW AGENCY, MONT.
SOURCE: The New York Times
NOTE: Below
ALTHOUGH INDIAN WARRIORS DEFEATED Gen. Custer's 7th Calvary in that infamous battle, Indians claim the site unjustly honors Custer. Now they want their due.
Ever since George Armstrong Custer led 250 cavalrymen to crushing defeat by thousands of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors, the Battle of the Little Bighorn has resonated as a call of doomed courage to Custer's admirers and a cry of bittersweet victory to Indians.
The defeat of the 7th Cavalry led the government to redouble its force, and within a few years the Indians' nomadic life was brutally ended. The battlefield itself became host to a monument that paid more honor to Custer than to the victors.
Now the superintendent of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument is a Mandan Hidatsa Indian who passionately wants to make it a more welcoming place for Indians. But he is finding that for many on both sides of the fight, the wounds of the battle continue to be tender.
``This represents the end of the way of life for the Indian people,'' the superintendent, Gerard Baker, said as he gestured toward the battlefield in the rolling hills of southern Montana, which was crowded with tourists on a warm afternoon. ``When Indian people come here, they cry and they get mad for the loss of that way of life, that freedom. It's something we'll never get back. That's what this place is for.''
With that in mind, Baker is preparing to solicit designs for a monument to be built on Last Stand Hill to commemorate the 50 or so Indians who died in the battle. It would be yards from a monument to Custer's slain soldiers.
Baker has made big plans for the 120th anniversary of the fight Tuesday and Wednesday. Whites and Indians from all the tribes in the battle - Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota, as well as the Arikira and Crow, who fought on Custer's side - will go to the monument for prayers, a buffalo feast and a ceremony that is generating some outrage.
The Mandan Hidatsa were not involved.
``We're going to have an Attack at Dawn ceremony,'' Baker said. It will be Tuesday, the anniversary of the day Custer and his men were all killed in the first part of the two-day battle.
Indians will ride horses to the boundary of the monument at daybreak, head for a mass grave where 200 troopers are buried, and ``count coup'' by using a stick to hit a stone obelisk that marks the grave. Counting coup was a battle tradition in which warriors proved their skill and courage by striking an enemy with a special stick and returning safely to the tribe.
``I've told the tribes, `This is your day,''' Baker said.
He has invited members of the present 7th Cavalry to attend a healing ceremony called Wipe Away the Tears at the 765-acre battlefield on the Crow Reservation, but Maj. Gen. Leon Laporte, who commands the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, which includes the 7th Cavalry, said through a spokeswoman that his schedule did not permit him to attend.
Members of several groups that commemorate the cavalry, including the Custer Battlefield Historical and Museum Association, contend that Baker's program insults the troopers who died.
``Gerard has a crusade going, the Indianization of the battlefield,''said Bob Wells, an editor of The Custer Little Bighorn Battlefield Advocate. ``He's gone way overboard. It would be a serious mistake to plant the Indian Memorial anywhere near the memorial of the 7th Calvary. The magnetism and dignity of that monument is that it occupies that hill.''
The Attack at Dawn also riles Wells, of Malibu, Calif., and his colleagues, who accuse Baker and other Indian leaders of double standards. ``What would people say if cavalry re-enactors went to Wounded Knee and touched the monument with sabers?'' Wells wrote in The Advocate.
Baker, who said he received three death threats in his three years of working at the battlefield, said the interpretation at the monument had always been biased and that he was merely trying to make things ``more user-friendly for Indians.''
He is supported by Indians such as Steve Brady, a Northern Cheyenne in Lame Deer and a consultant to the tribe on sacred sites.
``It's been a long time coming,'' Brady said, referring to changes in the battlefield museum that show what happened to the Indians after the battle. ``The Little Bighorn Battlefield is a sacred site because so many lives were lost there.''
Baker said he follows traditional ways. He pointed to a braid of sweet grass that he burns in his office for protection against negative influences. Along the Little Bighorn, on monument grounds, he has built a sweat lodge where he prays.
``If it weren't for the sweat lodge and the sacred objects,'' he said, ``I don't think I would survive this place. It's too controversial.''
Asked whether under his leadership it might seem that Indians are gloating over their victory, he said, ``That's right. It's about time.''
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Two unidentified Indians wait for the battle toby CNBbegin at the re-enactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn near
Hardin, Mont., Saturday. color.