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Commemorating Genocide: June 25, 2026

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            Whatever you call him, George Armstrong Custer was an American military leader who had no ethical problem with bringing the “horrors of war” to unarmed and innocent women and children.  As we reach in this year of commemoration the 150th anniversary of his death at the Battle of the Greasy Grass on June 25th, 1876, it is worth keeping that in mind.

            Long ago, when I lived in Billings, a friend and I drove out to a ranch on the Crow Reservation in Montana.  A promoter had scheduled a reenactment of “Custer’s Last Stand.”  We took our seats in the bleachers.  Crow actors played the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who wiped out the American forces. A traditional Crow healer blessed the actor playing Custer before the show began.  And, then, the actor playing Crazy Horse galloped into our view.  He stared down the audience, let out a war whoop, and then galloped off at full speed.  It was a striking and startling opening.  Immediately afterwards, the father of a white family seated in front of us turned to one of his tow-headed children and said, “There you go, Courtney. You’ve seen your first real Indian.” He could not see that the audience that surrounded him was made up overwhelmingly of Indigenous people from the Crow and neighboring Northern Cheyenne Reservation. They were decked out in t-shirts and jeans, baseball hats and cowboy hats and boots and sneakers. They were invisible to him.

            Custer saw little worth saving in Indigenous peoples.  He wanted them, and their way of life, to disappear. Custer was not alone. The poet Walt Whitman wrote a “Death Sonnet for Custer,” asserting that his resounding defeat

Continues yet the old, old legend of our race!

The loftiest of life upheld by death!

The ancient banner perfectly maintained!

(O lesson opportune—O how I welcome thee!)

Custer died for us, Whitman asserted, paying the necessary price for civilization to conquer barbarism.  It’s an image of Custer that enjoyed a long life.  Look at depictions of Custer in art: There he is, standing in his bright buckskin, long locks flowing, in the midst of a sea of savages. Custer fell, yes, but the Indians who killed him would fade away as well. Custer marched with orders to push them on to reservations; others would cart Indigenous children off to boarding schools, attack their religions, and coerce culture change. Except it did not happen quite that way. Custer was no martyr.  He was a violent fool. And with difficulty the people he attacked persisted.

I like much better the image of Custer portrayed by Richard Mulligan in Arthur Penn’s film “Little Big Man.” It’s the story of Jack Crabb, the oldest and only survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Played by Dustin Hoffman, Crabb had lived among the Indians, and he had been along the Washita River in 1868 when Custer’s forces launched their infamous attack. On the 1876 campaign, Hoffman’s Crabb served as a scout for Custer, who asked him about the Sioux village along the Little Bighorn.

Crabb: General, you go down there.

Custer: You’re advising me to go into the Coulee?

Crabb: Yes, sir.

Custer: There are no Indians there, I suppose.

Crabb: I didn’t say that. There are thousands of Indians down there. And when they get done with you, there won’t be nothing left but a greasey spot.  This ain’t the Washita River, General, and them ain’t helpless women and children waiting for you. They’re Cheyenne braves and Sioux. You go down there, General, if you’ve got the nerve.

Custer: Still trying to outsmart me, aren’t you, mule-skinner? You want me to think that you don’t want me to go down there, but the subtle truth is, you really don’t want me to go down there!”

Reassured, Custer launches his attack. Two thousand warriors camped there out of his sight. They determined to defend themselves and their families. Depicted so often in American myth as a famous “Last Stand,” Custer’s defeat was a rout. The Sioux and their Cheyenne allies mowed them down as they fled from a village so much larger than they had anticipated. The Sioux wiped out Custer’s command in the time, one Sioux observer later noted, that it took a hungry man to eat his dinner. Only Custer’s Crow and Arikara scouts, who recognized the power of the Sioux, survived the assault.

            The Lakotas won the battle, but they lost the war. That’s how the story is told. Once again, as in 1868, winter campaigns drove the Sioux and their allies back to the reservation. By the spring of 1877, most had returned. Crazy Horse surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency in May. He died four months later, stabbed to death during a guardhouse scuffle. Sitting Bull, who had fled across the border into Canada, held out until 1881, before he returned. He was gunned down late in 1890, just days before the massacre at Wounded Knee.

The campaign of 1876, and those that followed, taught the slow-learners in charge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to reconsider their approach. They recognized the extent to which they relied upon violence, coercion, and conquest to place Indigenous peoples upon reservations and to keep them there. Reservations had once seemed an attractive solution to what these men deemed the “Indian Problem.” By concentrating and isolating Indigenous peoples from the vices of the surrounding white population, the reservation, its advocates hoped, bought them time to become civilized and Americanized. But neighboring whites seldom respected reservation boundaries, and corrupt government agents undermined the paternalistic concern of the federal government to care for its Indian wards. Congress failed to provide reservation Indians with the supplies they needed to undertake the great transition their White Father envisioned. Indigenous peoples found themselves under siege. They no longer could live their accustomed way of life in their homelands. Neither could they live well on the reservation. Whether they moved to the reservations voluntarily or as the result of military conquest, they suffered. But they did not disappear. Despite the efforts of federal agents, missionaries, and teachers to eliminate their culture, and despite their own decisions to make use of some of what the Americans offered them, these communities survived.

This year is the 350th anniversary of the attempt to eradicate Virginia’s Indigenous people during a genocidal uprising known as Bacon’s Rebellion.  It is, of course, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence which unified rebellious colonists around their hatred of “merciless Indian savages.” It is the bicentennial of the 1826 treaty at Buffalo Creek, an agreement through which a business operation known as the Ogden Land Company and their friends in high places stole a third of the Senecas’ remaining lands in New York State in violation of the federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Act.  And, today, the we commemorate the defeat of a foolish proponent of genocide and the men who followed him.

            I am not sure what sort of commemorations will take place in Montana.  Custer seems like the kind of guy Trump would want celebrated. I remember the plaque erected at the Little Bighorn National Monument by a group of activists led by Russel Means in June of 1988. It read: “In honor of our Indian patriots who fought and defeated the U. S. Cavalry in order to save our women and children from mass murder. In doing so, preserving our rights to our homelands, treaties, and sovereignty.”

            That plaque was on display when I first visited Little Bighorn in the fall of 1994.  I was told at the time that the first Native American director of the National Monument was spit on by white visitors who grew angry when they saw the plaque in the small museum at the Visitor’s Center. I am not sure if it is still there, and its been thirty years since I last visited.  But I remember well that the Trump administration, just four months ago, ordered the removal of “signage describing broken promises to Native American tribes and references to the loss of Indigenous culture and language under boarding school systems.” The white supremacists nourished by the MAGA movement share the views of Custer. On this commemoration, let’s call them by their true names.

Teaching Native American History

We Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

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Two stories. Both of them are true. One the Trump administration has chosen to commemorate as part of the American nation’s 250th birthday celebration; the other it wants unremembered, proscribed, and erased.  Let’s see if you can guess which one is which.

            In the winter of 1777-1778, George Washington’s army camped at Valley Forge. A short distance away, the British occupied Philadelphia, living in relative comfort. The Continental Army, meanwhile, was starving, and its morale reached rock-bottom.  The patriot’s revolution was in grave danger.

            In the spring, help arrived. Forty-seven Oneidas, including the redoubtable Polly Cooper, arrived from what is today central New York. They brought with them bushels of Iroquois corn. According to Georgia Halbritter, relating Oneida oral history, “Cooper worked for George Washington, showing the Americans how to cook the corn properly.” Washington wanted to pay Cooper, the story goes, but she refused because, Halbritter said, “it was her duty to serve her country.” So, after the war, Washington sent his wife Martha, along with Polly, on a shopping trip in Philadelphia.  The future first lady bought Cooper a black shawl, a hat, and a bonnet.  As historian Karim Tiro pointed out, “the documentary record bears out some of the story’s details but is silent in regard to others.” Still, he suggested, it’s a powerful metaphor for the Oneidas’ costly yet highly significant contribution to the patriot cause.

FAR TO THE WEST of the Oneida homeland, the so-called “Great Sioux War” began in America’s centennial year. Many Lakota Sioux spent part of the year on the Great Sioux Reservation but moved out onto the Plains of eastern Montana to hunt in the spring and summer. They resented the American failure to adhere to the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which guaranteed them exclusive control of their land, and especially the hordes of prospectors who began to intrude into the Black Hills following gold strikes there in 1874. The Lakotas ignored demands that they return to their reservation—why should they honor a treaty that the white people had ignored—and by the spring of 1876, four army columns began marching toward the Powder River Country to force the Sioux to return.

Much of the fighting that followed took place in Crow country in eastern Montana. With the removal of the forts along the Bozeman Trail several years earlier, no American military presence remained to prevent Sioux encroachment on lands to their west. Conflict between the Sioux and the Crows increased, and the size and scope of this warfare intensified. Plenty Coups, the great Crow leader who oversaw his people’s adjustment to reservation life, remembered that he and his followers “knew the white men were strong, without number in their own country, and that there was no good in fighting them.” The Crows calculated their best interest, and that meant assisting the American forces. “Our leading chiefs,” Plenty Coups said, “saw that to help the white men fight their enemies and ours would make them our friends.” Already at war with the Sioux and their allies, they might as well fight them now with the assistance of the Americans. “Our decision was reached,” Plenty Coups concluded, “not because we loved the white man who was already crowding the other tribes into our country, or because we hated the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho, but because we plainly saw that this course was the only one which might save our beautiful country for us.”

The Crow leaders recognized that the Americans faced a formidable enemy. Large numbers of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors gathered in the Little Bighorn Basin, led by such stalwart leaders as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall, Hump, and Lame Deer. On June 17, 1876, warriors led by Crazy Horse forced the American column led by General George Crook to withdraw at the Battle of the Rosebud. Crow horsemen formed a screen that shielded Crook’s men from Crazy Horse’s warriors and bought them the time they needed to withdraw. Eight days later, an American force led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer foolishly attacked the village along the Little Bighorn. Two thousand warriors camped there. They determined to defendthemselves and their families. Custer had no idea what he had stumbled into. Depicted so often in American myth as a famous “Last Stand,” Custer’s defeat was a rout. The Sioux and their Cheyenne allies mowed them down as they fled from a village so much larger than they had anticipated. The Sioux wiped out Custer’s command in the time, one Sioux observer later noted, that it took a hungry man to eat his dinner. Only Custer’s Crow and Arikara scouts, who recognized the power of the Sioux, survived.

The Lakotas won the battle, but they lost the war. Once again, winter campaigns drove the Sioux and their allies back the reservation. By the spring of 1877, most had returned. Crazy Horse surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency in May. He died four months later, stabbed to death during a guardhouse scuffle. Sitting Bull, who had fled across the border into Canada, held out until 1881, before he returned.

THE ONEIDAS were the Americans’ most important Indigenous ally, but they benefited little from their alliance. While the United States, in the 1784 treaty with the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix, promised to protect the Oneidas, the state of New York moved expeditiously to dispossess them. No holds were barred. The records of state treaty councils, where this dispossession took place, show clearly evidence of fraud and deceit. By the middle of the 19th century, the Oneidas retained only a couple of dozen acres of land and many of their people had accepted “removal” to new homes in Wisconsin where they hoped to avoid the racists and land grabbers who would take whatever the Oneidas refused to sell.

            None of that sordid history has kept the US Mint from placing Polly Cooper, shown presenting corn to General Washington, on the tails side of the 2026 Sacagawea dollar. The Native American $1 Coin Collection was authorized by Congress in 2007 to commemorate the historic contribution of Indigenous nations and individuals to American culture. As Cherokee Nation member and Republican senator Markwayne Mullin put it, the coins are intended to celebrate “those who helped establish a country grounded in freedom and self-determination.”

            Representative of the Oneida Indian Nation Ray Halbritter said that “Polly Cooper symbolizes courage that is not just found on the battlefield, but in compassion and willingness to help others, which is just a part of Oneida culture and hospitality.” Cooper, he continued, was an important forgotten ally. “The whole country,” Halbritter said, “reaps the benefit of Polly Cooper’s conduct because we won the conflict and the United States was born.” That, it went without saying, was a story worthy of commemoration.

I HAVE BEEN TO LITTLE BIGHORN NATIONAL MONUMENT many times. When I taught in Billings, I could get there in just over an hour.  As many as 350,000 people visit the site of Custer’s “Last Stand” every year.  The talented National Park Service employees who work there have attempted over the years to provide more of the Indigenous side of the story.  And that always has met with resistance. According to reporting that originally appeared in the Washington Post, signage at Little Bighorn that described American land hunger, territorial encroachment by gold-seeking whites on reservation land, and a federal boarding school system that “violently erased cultural identities and language” was removed because it did not comply with President Trump’s executive order from March of last year intended to restore “truth and sanity to American History.” In particular, Trump denounced a “revisionist movement” led by radical leftists who sought “to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision,” Trump continued, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Last week signage in Philadelphia outside the home where George Washington stayed during the Constitutional Convention describing the important role of slavery in the first President’s life was taken down as well.

We must not think bad thoughts.

And the sins we choose to forget can never be forgiven.

SOMETIMES I THINK THE UNITED STATES hates Indigenous peoples. It does so in ways that it does not fully comprehend. Americans may celebrate Indigenous contributions to America’s greatness. Both political parties express their support for “self-determination.” Many good people work for the federal government, and they do much good work even as fascists have seized control, who may talk of collaboration, but only to the point where it begins to cost them something.  Colleges and universities, meanwhile, revel in empty gestures, supporting a shallow “diversity” while reading “territorial acknowledgments” in rooms filled with white people. Too often they fall victim to ethnic frauds and “Pretendians”: Elizabeth Warren, Andrea Smith, Thomas King, and Lisa Brooks are just a handful of recent examples. They routinely fail to put their money where their mouths are, to match their words with deeds. When too many of your allies are at best crusaders on the cheap, and your enemies are the white supremacists who control all three branches of the federal government, it is easy to see the magnitude of the problem.  So the United States will celebrate Polly Cooper, who is historically significant–and acceptable to white Americans–primarily because she helped carry some corn to a starving army that fought the British, we must remember, at least in part out of their anger that King George III unleashed the “merciless Indian savages” upon American frontiers. Try to talk about violence and dispossession, how the Oneidas’ neighbors transformed New York into the Empire State through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession, and you will find yourself in trouble.  So teachers in very blue New York State are allowed and encouraged to tell their students about the Cherokees’ expulsion from Georgia, but not how their own state used bribery, coercion, and deceit to steal a homeland. They will never consider that their families have benefited from dispossession. It’s a problem bigger than liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. As Onondaga sachem Irving Powless, Jr. put it more than fifty years ago to a state legislative committee that visited his Nation, “the Indian problem is the white people.”

            One cannot truly and meaningfully comprehend the history of this continent without considering Indigenous peoples’ histories, across a vast and diverse chronological and spatial expanse. But unless these stories make white people feel good about themselves, teaching them is proscribed. Do not dare suggest that what this country has gained came at the expense of Indigenous peoples.

            It’s all so screwed up.  The Trump regime acts like a wife beater, a domestic abuser. ICE invades American cities and blames the protestors for the beatings its agents deliver. They don’t show proper respect, we are told. Indigenous peoples, who have been stopped by ICE agents because of the mere color of their skin, are welcome to the national dialogue, but only if they refuse to remind the majority of the sins of its ancestors, and its own. Democrats, meanwhile, act like they disapprove of the beatings their neighbor gives his wife and kids, but are too afraid to do what they know is right. White Americans, meanwhile, nearly sixty percent of whom voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and, incredibly, in 2024, mostly continue to express their sympathy for the guy who hurt his fist because he punched his wife.