Sharon Carson I

This week marks the 147th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a commemoration more commonly known as Victory Day among many members of the Lakota, Arapahoe, and Northern Cheyenne nations who defeated the United States 7th Calvary on June 25th/26th in 1876.

The National Parks Service has long maintained a memorial site at what is now called the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument on the Crow Agency in Montana, and many tribal citizens travel to the site to remember a battle won and to honor relatives lost.

As is the case in many other National Parks Service sites, there has been a serious collaborative effort in recent years to construct a more representative story at the Little Bighorn site, and key in that effort was the design and creation of what is called the “Indian Memorial,” which was installed with temporary materials in 2003 and dedicated in its full inscribed granite form in 2014.

For our NDQ blog post this week, we wanted to offer you some sources linked to the creation of the Indian Memorial and some background on one of the regional artists involved. As in all projects of historical narration and monument making, there are multiple perspectives on the meanings and implications in marking space and time, and public commemoration always -and necessarily- remains a work in progress.

Here is the current NPS page explaining the evolution and some design elements of the Indian Memorial.

Here is the NPS program for the 2003 dedication (pdf), with much more detail about the design history and participants in its creation.

And here is an article from Indian Country Today (ICT) covering subsequent ceremonies and tribal nation commemorations at the Memorial.

Colleen Cutschall (Oglala-Sicangu Lakota) is the artist from Pine Ridges, SD who was commissioned to create the metal sculpture “Spirit Warriors” as part of the Indian Memorial, and she is a Professor Emerita at Brandon University in Manitoba. Here is her wiki page, with locations of her art in permanent collections in Manitoba and Canada. Here also is an interview with Cutschall in Canadian Dimension and here is a post from Richard Pearce’s blog where Cutschall describes her intriguing series of “brown bag collages.”

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Sharon Carson is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor, Department of English, University of North Dakota and the reviews editor (and former editor) of North Dakota Quarterly.