---
title: "At Little Bighorn, 150 Years On, Native Voices Lead the Remembrance"
description: "A century and a half after Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors routed George Custer's cavalry on the hills above the Little Bighorn River, descendants gathered in Montana to mark the anniversary — and to insist the victory be remembered on their terms."
category: "U.S."
category_url: https://herald.la/category/us
author: "Hana Nakamura"
published: 2026-06-28T22:58:45.000Z
updated: 2026-06-28T22:58:45.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/at-little-bighorn-150-years-on-native-voices-lead-the-remembrance
tags: ["Native Americans", "Little Bighorn", "history", "Montana", "Lakota", "Cheyenne"]
---
# At Little Bighorn, 150 Years On, Native Voices Lead the Remembrance

A century and a half after Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors routed George Custer's cavalry on the hills above the Little Bighorn River, descendants gathered in Montana to mark the anniversary — and to insist the victory be remembered on their terms.

For most of the last century, the battle was told as a tragedy of the men who lost. On its 150th anniversary, the people who won are at the center of the story.

## What happened on the Greasy Grass

On June 25 and 26, 1876, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors defeated five companies of the U.S. 7th Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer along the river the Lakota call the Greasy Grass, in what is now southeastern Montana, [the National Park Service notes](https://www.nps.gov/libi/index.htm). Custer and roughly 260 of his men were killed in the engagement that entered American mythology as "Custer's Last Stand."

The battle came during the Great Sioux War of 1876, set off after the United States failed to honor the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty once gold was found in the Black Hills. Thousands of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho people had gathered in a vast encampment, and leaders including Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Gall helped turn back a force that had badly underestimated them. The victory was decisive — and short-lived: within a year, the Army had forced most of the survivors onto reservations.

## From a Custer shrine to shared ground

For decades the site was known as Custer Battlefield National Monument, its central memorial honoring only the cavalry dead. That framing shifted slowly. Congress renamed it Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in 1991, over objections from those who saw the change as an affront to Custer's legend.

The most significant change came in 2003, when the [Indian Memorial was dedicated](https://www.nps.gov/libi/learn/historyculture/indian-memorial.htm) on a rise overlooking the battlefield. Mandated by Congress and built with federal funds, it honors the Native nations who fought and includes a sculpture of warriors riding to battle. A deliberate opening in its design — a "Spirit Gate" — faces the cavalry monument, and its theme, "Peace Through Unity," reaches toward reconciliation without softening what was at stake.

## A complicated commemoration

The anniversary, marked at the battlefield near Crow Agency, drew Native participants from across the northern Plains, [NPR reported](https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5825804/native-americans-mark-the-150th-anniversary-of-the-battle-of-the-little-bighorn). The ground itself holds layered histories: the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation, whose reservation surrounds the monument, supplied scouts to the very cavalry that the Lakota and Cheyenne defeated. Those differing memories now sit side by side, increasingly bound by a shared insistence that none be erased.

For many who came, the day was less a memorial than an assertion. The battle was a defense of a way of life that federal policy was designed to end — and the survival of those nations, their languages and their governments is, in this telling, the deeper victory. On a ridge where the grass still runs down to the Greasy Grass, that endurance was honored once more.

## Sources

- [Native Americans mark the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn](https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5825804/native-americans-mark-the-150th-anniversary-of-the-battle-of-the-little-bighorn)
- [Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument](https://www.nps.gov/libi/index.htm)
- [Indian Memorial at Little Bighorn Battlefield](https://www.nps.gov/libi/learn/historyculture/indian-memorial.htm)