The result was a record that preserved some of what Lakota witnesses said while distorting other parts of it — and that left significant elements of the Native experience simply unrecorded, because the questions weren’t asked, the interviewers weren’t trusted, or the answers didn’t fit the story that American audiences expected to hear.

THE MEMORIAL AND ITS MEANING

For more than a century after the battle, the site on the bluffs above the Little Bighorn River was commemorated almost entirely as a monument to the 7th Cavalry’s dead.

The Custer Battlefield National Monument, as it was originally named, centered on the grave markers for Custer’s men — white marble stones placed where bodies had been found.

The names on those stones were the names the monument preserved.