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If you have an idea that you want to keep forever, find a really big rock that nobody can move and carve your idea into it so that it can't be erased. Simple. This is the basic premise of monuments and memorials. Make a statement that will live on for centuries. The trouble with this is coming up with the right message or memorializing the right person or event such that everyone agrees it is something worth honoring. This is the trouble found at Little Big Horn Battlefield. This national monument was first designated as Custer National Cemetery to protect the graves of the soldiers who died in the battle there against the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors. The stone monument stands atop a hill where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer made his historic "Last Stand." He was a hero of his day as a military leader who symbolized bravery having always been at the battlefront with his men throughought the Civil War. He finally died in Montana following the orders of President Grant to forward the vision of the Westward Expansion of the United States. Eventually, Custer's remains were reinterred at West Point, so the name changed to Custer Battlefield National Monument. Hollywood made many a movie glorifying the heroics of Custer, but it was not until more recent times that perspectives changed and what happened at Little Big Horn was also recognized as the heroic actions of many Cheyenne and Lakota warriors who died protecting their way of life. Sitting Bull who, trying to get his people safely to Canada so that they could continue living in freedom on the plains, resisted the U.S. Army's attempts to force them back on reservation lands and defeated Custer and his troops on the battlefield. Clearly there was more than one story to be told. In 1991, this national monument was renamed Little Big Horn Battlefield. Red granite markers were placed where Indian warriors lost their lives along side the white markers that marked the sites where U.S. soldiers fell. And a short walk from the monument atop the hill where Custer made his last stand, another memorial, one to the Native Americans who died in that battle, was erected with a message "In order to heal our Grandmother Earth we must unify through peace." Little Big Horn is just one place where we are forced to look at history from a different perspective and realize that truth is often more elusive than simply reading words that have been etched in stone. But if we are to continue to make monuments, those recently etched words about unifying through peace seem like words worthy of being carved in stone to me.
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