Indians remember defeat of Custer

Press, 15 July 1976, Page 18

Indians remember defeat of Custer

By (

GRACE LICHTENSTEIN

in the “New York Times”

Nearly forgot, a amio the Bicentennial celebrations, the Custer Battlefield in rolling stretch of grassland, edged I the Little r?i «ho’ River, dented here and there by coulees (dry gulches) and dotted with unobtrusive white stone markers, reached a memorable anniversary last month. It was on June 25 and 26, 1876, that an at ot Indians won “one of the last armed efforts ... to preserv their ancestral way of life,” as the National Park Service brochure stati;.

Under t.ie auspices ot the park authorities, memorial services were held on the battlefield, wnile nearby a group of Inmans commemorated the 1" rite with a victory dance.

Even without the centennial of Custer’s last stand, there would have been other events in recent weeks to remind immigrant America that the “first Americans” are still struggling to cope with the white man’s world.

In Cedar Rapids, lowa, two Indian men ’ ive be'-

on trial for allege:’ ,- helping to murder two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents a ”~ar ago on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation (where the grandchildrer ot the Little Bighorn warriors live). In Washington. the United States Supreme Court recently uph 1 the important legal princi;' of tribal sovereignty by ruling that a Chippewa r •'t in Minnesota did not b—e t > pay county taxes on his mobile home because it is on a reservation.

The High Court now has before it a case of overriding importance to several mineral-rich Western tribes; the outcome wi’’ determine whether a tribe as a whole can control the exploitation of natural resources within its reservation b undaries. In Arizona, a Federal investigation has been digging into the tangled financial affairs of the Navajos, the nation’s largest tribe and one of the leaders in the drive for more selfsufficiency and less depend-

ency upon the Federal Government.

Can any conclusion he drawn from these events? A few tentative ones. First, the Indians, one of the smallest minority groups (about 800,000) pose a challenge io the United States t .t is out of proportion to their numbers; by every atistical index of well-being, Indians a-e the country’s most disadvantaged ethnic group. Second, the concept of land remains the glue that binds native Americans to their heritage. Third, the conflict that brought Custer and Sitting Bull to their fiteful encounter 100 years aro is still being fought, peacefully or otherwise.

From the time of Christopher Columbus, white intruders have tried various methods of dealing with Indians: accommodation, coexistence, eradication, ' ■>- tainment, integration, paternalism. The most recent emphasis by the Federal Government, which holds most Indian lands in trust for the tribes, has been on

more self-determination. In theory’, this means that Federal agencies should continue to assist tribes witb money and knowhow but that the tribes should decide how those tools will be used.

In practice, disputes over the meaning of "selfdetermination” have fei the larger conflict. Reservations with coal, oil or natural gas have charged tat the Bureau of Indian Affairs negotiated poor leases with private companies for the development of these resources.

The Crow Indians of Montana have been fighting among themselves, with Shell Oil and with the Government over the kind of deal that should be made tor their rich coal deposits. The Northern Cheyenne (allies of the Sioux at Little Bigm rn) of Montana are involved in the pending Supreme Court cases, which will decide the disposition of their considerable coal deposits. Coal has been strip-mined for some years at Black Mesa on the Navajo Reservation, much to the dismay

of some tribal activists, who feel their land is being ravaged for quick cash.

A tribe neighbouring the Navajos, the Mescalero Apaches of New Mexico, has tried the tourism route to economic self-sufficiency. They have turned a portion of their scenic mountain reservation into a luxury resort, mainly f„r whites. Many tribes do not have these kind of asr ’s. They arc stuck with land that is neither scenic nor productive. The Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux, for exai tie, who inhabit the second largest *■’- servation, wound up with a big stretch of semi-arid grazing land while the white men got the Sioux’s beautiful and gold-laden Black Hills. On reservations like Pine Ridge, it is not apparent how economic selfsufficiency, ard thus true self-determination, can taKe root.

What does grow is anger and a sense of hopelessness. It was there that -militants took ov-’r Wounded Knee in 1973, there that the American Indian Movement was strongest, there that a bitter

struggle for tribal leadership last year cost dozens of lives, there that the F. 8.1. allegedly made tribal sovereignty a joke by prowling the countryside at will, there that two of its agents died in a shootout last June. Many Sioux see the F. 8.1 as the newest incarnation of “Long Hair,” the hated General Custer, making a new grab for their land, however poor it may be. They will not tolerate it, becase, as N. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa novelist, recently wrote: “The American Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape. It is an investment that represents perhaps 30,000 years of habitation. That tenure has to be worth something in itself.” In this context, it is easy to see why the Cheyenne and Sioux would rather hold victory dances on the centennial of the big battle they won (while losing the war), than join W'hite people in celebrating the Bicentennial. A bumper sticker seen on Indian pickups in Arizona stated the case succinctly. It read: “America: Love It ... Or Give It Back To Us.”