Hokahey. It’s a sad time in America these days, and particularly last week Friday. Twenty-five years ago, on September 11th, 2001, a coordinated terrorist attack led by Al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people in the beloved USA. This summer, during our country’s 250-year Fourth of July celebration of freedom, my red dog RoZie and I journeyed to another seemingly tragic site in our history: The Little Big Horn Battlefield. In southeast Montana, on a scorchingly hot Sunday and Monday one hundred and fifty years prior, a similarly coordinated attack was led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the US Army. When thousands of warriors of our land’s indigenous people bravely stood up to defend their sacred, ancestral Way of Life, June 25th-26th, 1876, it was anything but a sad time in America.
Known to the natives as The Battle of the Greasy Grass, the fight occurred in the valley of The Little Big Horn River, where heavy morning dew and moisture on the tall grass left a slick, shiny and greasy sheen, coating the peoples’ moccasins and their horses’ bellies. Custer’s charge was met by a collective force of thousands of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors. The rest, as they say, is history. “The Battle of the Little Bighorn continues to fascinate people around the world,” reads the park brochure. “For most, it has come to illustrate a part of what Americans know as their western heritage. Heroism and suffering, brashness and humiliation, victory and defeat, triumph and tragedy — these are the things people come here to ponder.”
A big part of our LIBI experience, in Alpha code of the National Park Service, was connecting with the coolest, most authentic, traditional modern scholar of the Battlefield Monument. Her name is Olivia Rose Williamson, Chieftain of Indian Battle Tours. You can look her up on Facebook, but even better, you can catch her energy below. Rose is a Sundancer and the real deal and she made our LIBI visit extraordinary.
I had no idea Battlefield Rose would be this cool, sharing sharp points of history with the energized knowledge of a Native (perhaps still a hostile!), on our crazy cool thirty-mile car ride to Last Stand Hill. That said, I’m just going to let some videos and posts roll, as we also roll into Autumn with newly energized stories, new workshops and Fall offerings, and new pride in our connection to America, the America that existed here long before the founding fathers little bucked shoes even set foot on this land.