Here’s how Susan Olp’s story of the Billings Gazette begins:

The Battle of the Little Bighorn is known around the world.

On Friday afternoon, about 500 people from as far away as England came to the Real Bird Ranch, adjacent to the Little Bighorn Battle Monument, north of Garryowen, to see the battle for themselves. The Real Birds, members of the Crow Tribe, have put on the re-enactment for about 17 years.

Visitors sat in bleachers overlooking the Medicine Trail Coulee, near where Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th Cavalry met decisive defeat on June 25, 1876. The brown Bighorn River drifted along lazily in the background.http://buffalopost.net/wp-admin/post-new.php

Authenticity is critical to the success of the re-enactment of the battle, said Ken Real Bird. Members of the cavalry wear uniforms and use firearms similar to the ones fired in the battle.

Those who portray the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors are only permitted to wear breechcloths and moccasins. Most paint themselves and their horses with symbols of red, white, yellow and black.

Between 70 and 80 people re-enact the roles of the soldiers, the warriors and tribal members. Friday’s presentatoin of the battle was choreographed by retired Lt. Col. Bobby Jolley, from Fort Lewis, Wash.

Steve Alexander, from Monroe, Mich., portrayed Custer. Frank Knows His Gun, a member of the Ogallala Sioux Tribe, portrayed Crazy Horse.

Want more? There’s a whole photo array, a schedule of events, and of course the rest of this most excellent story. Click here.

Gwen Florio

We’ve blogged earlier, here, about the new book on the Little Bighorn Battle, Nathaniel Philbrick’s “The Last Stand,” which takes a look at that day through the eyes of both Sitting bull and Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer.

The New York Times takes a look at Philbrick’s work, here, along with another book, this one about Quanah Parker of the Comanche.

The Times terms S.C. Gwynne’s book on Parker, “Empire of the Summer Moon,” transcendent:

Born the son of an Indian warrior and his white wife (who had been captured at the age of 9 during a raid on a Texas ranch), Parker grew up to become the last and greatest chief of the Comanche, the tribe that ruled the Great Plains for most of the 19th century. That’s his one-sentence biography. The deeper, richer story that unfolds in “Empire of the Summer Moon” is nothing short of a revelation. Gwynne, a former editor at Time and Texas Monthly, doesn’t merely retell the story of Parker’s life. He pulls his readers through an American frontier roiling with extreme violence, political intrigue, bravery, anguish, corruption, love, knives, rifles and arrows. Lots and lots of arrows. This book will leave dust and blood on your jeans.

Reviewer Bruce Barcott terms the Comanche a Native American superpower, and quotes Gwynne: “They held sway over some 20 different tribes who had been either conquered, driven off or reduced to vassal status,” Gwynne writes. “Such imperial dominance was no accident of geography. It was the product of over 150 years of deliberate, sustained combat against a series of enemies over a singular piece of land that contained the country’s largest buffalo herds.”

Parker’s own transformation mirrored that of his people:

Quanah Parker’s second act was, if anything, more remarkable than his first. Resigned to reservation life, he transformed himself from a death-dealing warrior to a prosperous cattleman and a hard-bargaining politician who earned the respect and friendship of Teddy Roosevelt.”

Barcott calls “Empire of the Summer Moon” “a forceful argument about the place of Native American tribes in geopolitical history.”

Sounds like a book worth reading.

Gwen Florio

Racial violence won’t be tolerated, Farmington officials tell Navajo group

The mayor and other city officials from Farmington, N.M., met with a Navajo human rights group last week to give them the message that racial violence won’t be tolerated in their town. The meeting follows an incident in which a developmentally delayed Navajo man was held by three other men who branded his arm with a swastika. The Navajo Times reports on the meeting here. Meanwhile, Farmington police are doing an internal investigation into how the incident initially was handled, KQRE reports (see video above). The first officer on the scene didn’t recognize that the man was disabled, and thought he was drunk, police say.

First Nations protest honorary degree to former Ontario premier
Former Ontario premier Mike Harris is scheduled to get an honorary doctorate of letters next month from Nipissing University. But that plan doesn’t well with aboriginal groups within Ontario, who recall the fatal shooting of a First Nations protester in 1995 at Ipperwash Provincial Park in southwestern Ontario, according to this Canadian Press story. Anishinabek Nation Grand Council Chief Patrick Madahbee says Ontario’s First Nations feel Harris doesn’t deserve it. The groups cite the “hostile” relationship between the provincial government under Harris at the time of the shooting.

Native American group denounces new Arizona ethnic studies law
Members of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association invited Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva to their Tucson convention to discuss a new law that effectively bans ethnic studies – including Native American studies – in Arizona public schools, KGUN 9 News reports here. Fifteen students recently were arrested during a protest against the law.

GOP gubernatorial candidates in South Dakota pledge tribal outreach
“Listen.” That’s the approach state government should take in working to heal old wounds and improve relations with Native American tribes in South Dakota, Republican candidates for governor told Rapid City (S.D.) Journal reporter Kevin Woster, here.

New book takes fresh approach to Little Bighorn Battle
Check out this review of Nathaniel Philbrick’s “The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.” Lorna Thackeray of the Billings (Mont.) Gazette calls it “one of the most readable ever to emerge” from the hundreds of books on the subject.

Touring Native American veterans exhibit comes to Flathead Reservation
A Smithsonian exhibit honoring Native American veterans will be touring Montana for the next year, making stops at all of the seven Indian reservations within the state. It’s starting out at the Peoples Center on the Flathead Indian Reservation, the Char-Koosta News reports here.

Gwen Florio

Here’s a story by Lorna Thackeray of the Billings (Mont.) on a new display at the Little Bighorn National Monument that honors the people who fought the U.S. troops. It’s a great, informative read:

LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT — In the heat of battle with an enemy dead at his feet, 19-year-old Northern Cheyenne warrior Limpy took the cartridge belt from a trooper who had dared threaten the village his people shared with the Lakota on the banks of the Little Bighorn River.

A cartridge belt was a valuable prize in a season rife with war. U.S. troops were moving in from east, west and south to force the Cheyenne and their allies onto reservations.

“In all of the belts taken from the dead men there were cartridges,” Limpy’s contemporary, Wooden Leg, told his biographer Thomas Marquis several decades after the June 25, 1876, battle. “I did not see nor hear of any belt entirely emptied of its cartridges.”

Marquis, a lawyer, physician, photographer and writer, befriended many survivors of the battle as a government doctor at Lame Deer. In 1922, he began to probe their memories to chronicle their version of the Little Bighorn Battle. He learned sign language and consulted his elderly sources including Limpy, Wooden Leg and Bobtailed Horse on every detail.

In 1927, more than 50 years after the battle, Limpy bequeathed his captured cartridge belt to Marquis. Marquis snapped a photograph of the old warrior holding the ragged souvenir and displayed it along with the belt in his private museum in Hardin.

Now it is part of a new display that Sharon Small, curator at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, is putting together at the visitor center museum near Crow Agency. Other items taken from the battlefield by the victors and later given to Marquis are also featured in a new display case.

“This is my favorite collection,” Small said of the Marquis photographs and artifacts.
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It’s one thing to know that the history books got so much wrong. It’s another to hear it directly from the source – and so soon after the event actually happened – and then to realize that so many books still got it wrong!

Just 18 months after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Hunkpapa Sioux chief Sitting Bull told what happened that day to Martin Marty of Indiana, a Benedictine abbot who lived with the Sioux and spoke their language, the Missoulian’s Kim Briggeman reports here.

Martin followed Sitting Bull and his people to Canada after battle and stayed with them for eight days, and took down Sitting Bull’s story and then passed it along to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

As Briggeman writes:

The American accounts of the battle are all wrong, the Hunkpapa chief claims. The Indians had 11 days warning that the soldiers were coming. Lt. George Custer’s Seventh Cavalrymen were too tired to fight, the horses broken down by hard travel and no food. The soldiers “had been so long in the saddle that they were overcome by sleep,” Sitting Bull said.

There were not the massive numbers of Indians involved in the fight as most reports had it, but they still outnumbered Custer’s men six to one. The annihilation was over in a few minutes.

“Our powder was scarce, and we killed the soldiers with our war clubs,” the chief told Marty. “The soldiers … were killed so quick they did not have time to fight us.”

Sitting Bull said the Sioux did not recognize Custer in the fight, and they did not know him to call him “Long Hair.”

Gwen Florio

It’s a stirring quote, one that quite rightly spurs emotion:

“Our land is everything to us. . . . I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives.”

So stirring, in fact, that as Politics Daily tells us here, Sarah Palin uses it to begin Chapter 3 of her book, “Going Rogue: An American Life.”

One problem. Palin attributes it to legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.

Various sites are having a field day with this one, reporting that it actually comes an essay by John Wooden Legs that is included in the book “We Are the People: Voices From the Other Side of American History.”

That book says Wooden Legs was referring to the defeat of George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, and that the complete quote goes thusly:

“Our land is everything to us. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes talk the Cheyenne language to each other. It is the only place where Cheyennes remember the same things together. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it — with their life. My people and the Sioux defeated General Custer at the Little Bighorn.”

Well, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Gwen Florio

LaShawna Rides The Bear tells the story of the Little Bighorn Battle all day every day, to hundreds and hundreds of people over the course of the summer.

So she didn’t take notice of one of the visitors on her Apsaalooke Tours bus at the battlefield. But the visitor took notice of the tour guide, who is Crow and Sioux, and who greets her visitors in Crow before switching to English.

The man, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Land Grant office, was so impressed with Ride the Bear’s presentation, that he’s invited her to the annual First American Land Grant Consortium conference in Washington, D.C., in October. Read the details here.

Nice story, isn’t it? It gets even better. Rides the Bear is pretty insistent that her fellow tour guides accompany her.

“We all work together. We all do the same thing,” she says.

So the guides are raising money to make that happen, in party by raffling off a beaded miniature cradle-board.

Gwen Florio

They came from California, Colorado, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C. – and Alberta, Canada, and even Switzerland – to south-central Montana yesterday to watch a re-enactment as educational as it was exciting. (Read about it here.)

The annual presentation is told from the perspective of the Indian people involved, and was written by Crow historian Joe Medicine Crow.

Among the participants was P.J. Pease of Hardin, Mont., who is Crow and Lakota. He says the role he plays of a Crow warrior – he’s done it for 13 of the event’s 20 years – carries forward to today: “That we will never stop fighting for our rights.”

Gwen Florio

So said Terrence Limberhand, a member of the Morning Star Riders, a group that honors the Northern Cheyenne and Sioux who fought at the Battle of the Greasy Grass – also known as the Little Bighorn Battle.

Limberhand rode yesterday in honor of his great-great-grandfather Limber Bones, a suicide rider who vowed to fight to the death the day Lt. Col. George Amstrong Custer and more than 200 7th Cavalry men.

The 77 Morning Star riders participated in ceremonies this week marking the 133rd anniversary of the battle.

As for the riders’ ancestors, “They live in our hearts again today,” said Northern Cheyenne President Leroy Spang. Read their story here.