Leaving Billings, we headed southeast to the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn, an event bound up in an extraordinarily complex web of history, culture, ambition, frustration, and regret. Of course, the allied forces of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho carried the field and took no prisoners from among the troopers and Crow and Arikara under Custer. We now know that no one won. The public uproar over Custer’s fate sealed that of the Plains Indians. The site today is about reconciliation and the desire of all to live in peace.
The battlefield is on the rolling hills of the Crow Reservation that flow into the Northern Cheyenne Reservation on whose eastern edge lies a little museum at the St. Labre Indian School. It was graduation day for the high school seniors. The subtly (to us) different designs of the various tribes on the items in the collection reminded us again of the great number of tribes each with its own language and customs and rich history of migration and conflict with the Europeans who came to join them in ever greater numbers.
