A late precursor species to modern humans was Homo habilis or “handy person,” so called because of its ability to use tools. The development of tools was a pivotal moment in human development. But perhaps the greatest tool ever developed was not the hand ax or the bow and arrow but the story. The power of a story has pushed forward the boundaries of human knowledge and art but has also motivated people to persecute or even attempt to destroy other peoples. It is important to understand the difference between a story and a fact. Fact can be hard to know with assurance. It may be a fact that light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum but I only know that because I looked it up. I really can’t measure that myself.
Stories, on the other hand, I tell myself all the time, and who can say that one is right and one is wrong? As Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has noted, stories are fine as long as they are useful but once they have outlived their usefulness, we probably ought to let them go and find new ones.
This week we visited the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Montana. The site, which is managed by the U.S. National Park Service, is the site of “Custer’s Last Stand” where in 1876 George Armstrong Custer led the men U.S. 7th Cavalry to a massive defeat as he was slaughtered along with his men at the hands of the allied Lakota, Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe American Indian tribes.
Since 1946, the site had been known as the Custer Battlefield National Monument. It existed to tell a story of the brave men who tried to beat back the “savages” who would interfere with the Manifest Destiny of the white citizens of United States to occupy the continent from sea to sea. Custer and his men died in the attempt but they died heroically, according to the story.
That story made sense (at least to the white folks) in Custer’s day and still did 75 years later when codified in the name of the place in 1946 right at the beginning of the cold war with the Soviet Union.
But in 1991 (one year after he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall), President George H.W. Bush signed a law changing the name of the Custer Battlefield to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was a small change that indicated that the story itself was changing.
Today, the narrative descriptions on the site tell a story of a people whose land was stolen from them, who saw treaty after treaty broken, whose way of life was being taken and who fought back heroically and won a battle to preserve their way of life although ultimately they lost the war.
We happened to visit the site on the anniversary of the battle and got to hear native story tellers, many of whom were descended directly from the Indian combatants, Crazy Horse, Rain in the Face, and Sitting Bull.
Across the street from the battlefield is a “Trading Post” (large gift shop and restaurant). As we perused the tskotches (native word meaning knick-knacks) an older Crow gentleman who appeared to work there began speaking to us. His words were almost stream of consciousness and somewhat hard to follow. He quoted Aristotle and Tip O’Neil. He had lived in Washington DC and in New York. He had worked in the financial industry, as a staffer to Mo Udall, and for the National Park Service. Now in his 80s he had returned home to live on the Crow Reservation.
Stories can change he said. A law can be part of the way a story change. The name of a battlefield changes who the heroes are.
What stories are being told now about what America is and who we are? Who gets to tell those stories and who gets oppressed or freed by them? Facts are hard to know, but the differences in our stories hint at a deeper truth.