Every year over 200,000 people visit the site of the Battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana. Long known as the Custer Battlefield National Monument, the name of the site was changed in 1991 when Congress made it the Little Bighorn National Monument and the monument to the Indians was planned. This shift in emphasis at the popular tourist attraction is the result of changes in the perception of the battle's meanings for both Native Americans and white Americans. The change represents an outward sign of the re-thinking of history that has slowly recognized how both popular myths and supposedly objective history serve hidden agendas. Feminist and ethnic groups' critiques of the way all kinds of history has been written have gradually produced wider recognition of the fact that these underlying interests need to be brought out in the open and reviewed before history can again be thought of as possessing some degree of truth. Those whose points of view are excluded in every other aspect of our culture have also been ignored in the writing of history and when their voices are heard a very different picture of history emerges along with an informative critique of history as it used to be written.
More has been written about the Battle of the Little Big Horn and Custer's "Last Stand" than about any battle in the history of the United States. Contemporary news accounts along with later books, magazine and journal articles fill hundreds of volumes. The overwhelming attention paid to the battle by the print media is matched by the numbers of engravings, paintings, films, and television productions that have been made since 1876. But history is always written by the winners and the vast majority of these accounts were prepared by white Americans. It seem like a significant irony that the clear winners of this particular; battle were so overwhelmingly the losers in the war. Yet the irony is not so great for, as Hofling points out...