Nyugodjon békében.
Tudom, halottakról vagy jót vagy semmit, de nem olyan régen olvastam Robert Utley ("A lándzsa és a pajzs" írója) "Custer and Me" c. memoárját, melyből itt idéznék egy rövid részletet, mert tanulságos. Russell Means is szerepel benne, akiről Utleynak nem volt éppen a legjobb véleménye. Milyen is az, amikor a történelem a politikai cirkusz áldozatává válik. Utleynak a centenáriumi ünnepségen elmondott beszéde igencsak figyelemre méltó. Nagy kár, hogy a politikusoknál (álljanak bármelyik oldalon) és az általuk felheccelt tömegeknél az efféle vélemény mindig süket fülekre talál.
As an assistant director of the National Park Service, I had helped
face down Russell Means and addressed a troubled audience on
the centennial anniversary, June 25, 1976.
Although Vietnam finally drew to its tragic finale in 1975, it left
enough residue of social unrest to worry the National Park Service
about the approaching centennial of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
The park had made commendable strides in bringing more
balance to the interpretive presentations, telling the story in both
military and Indian dimensions and virtually eliminating the heroic
cast of my years on Custer Hill. But in the activist climate of the
early 1970s, no amount of “balance” could satisfy demands welling
up from the writings of Vine Deloria and Dee Brown and the noisy
theatrics of the American Indian Movement (AIM). One of my
more moderate Indian friends, a Sioux woman on the Fort Belknap
Reservation in Montana, quipped that AIM stood for “assholes in
moccasins. ”
The zealots cared for the historical record only as it could be
twisted to fortify their campaigns. Custer Battlefield had become
the battleground in a new war, a war of symbolic possession. Who
owned this symbol, and all it could be made to yield in terms of
tangible public atonement for centuries of white oppression? Russell
Means and his fellow agitators in AIM valued the battlefield not
for the story it told but as a publicity tool to dramatize their social,
political, and economic objectives.
From within as well as from without the Park Service a rising
chorus called for renaming Custer Battlefield National Monument.
Few battlefields bore the name of either the victor or the vanquished,
ran the argument, so why should Custer be enshrined in the
designation of this battlefield? Proponents of the name change
wanted to substitute “Little Bighorn” for “Custer.”
I took no part in this debate. In truth, I did not care very deeply
about the issue. On one hand, the name reflected the intent of
the officials who set aside the park shortly after the battle and
thus took on historical importance in itself. Moreover, I had
enough experience in tampering with established nomenclature
to know that it always set off a controversy. On the other hand,
“Little Bighorn” described the battlefield as well as “Custer,” and I
felt little would be lost if the advocates won. As I foresaw, tampering
with this nomenclature grew into another of the battles in the war
over symbolism.
Nor did I take much part in the debates in and out of the Park
Service over what kind of ceremony should mark the centennial
of the Little Bighorn in June 1976. Planning began in 1970 under
the auspices of the Custer Battlefield Historical and Museum
Association, the park’s nonprofit cooperating organization. The
same people whom Vince Gleason had betrayed by spending their
money on the Baskin drawings in my park handbook now prepared
for an elaborate celebration that would rival the fiftieth anniversary
extravaganza of 1926. They hoped to draw one hundred
thousand spectators. A dramatic attraction would be a “Custer
Reride,” as many as four hundred cavalry reenactors staging the
final day of Custer’s approach to the Little Bighorn.
At the same time, Russell Means and his AIM cohorts excited
national publicity with plans to stage their own ceremony at the
battlefield, a ceremony that implicitly courted violence. Means
even vowed to set fire to the museum displaying Custer’s uniforms
and other personal memorabilia. Park officials took the possibility
seriously enough to move much of Custer’s belongings to safe
storage at the museum laboratory in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.
No one ever told me the motive for moving the main ceremony
from June 25 to June 24-1 suppose some misguided hope of
throwing Russell Means off stride. The day was cold and cloudy,
with occasional falls of light rain. Instead of one hundred thousand
spectators, about seven hundred gathered. As I rode up the hill
with the public information officer from the regional office, she
told me that security would be heavy but inconspicuous. “Low
profile,” she muttered as we drove through the gate and took in
the array of ranger cars with light bars on the roof, a heavily
armed SWAT team of rangers assembled from parks throughout
the region, a contingent of the Montana Highway Patrol, and
even some U.S. Park Policemen from Washington with attack
dogs on leashes. Only the FBI agents remained “low profile.”
A speaker’s platform and rows of folding chairs had been set up
next to the road between the museum and the national cemetery.
A handsomely uniformed army band flanked the gathering audience.
Before the program even began, the band had hardly struck up
“Garryowen,” Custer’s rollicking battle song, when the sound of
thumping Indian drums drifted from beyond the national cemetery.
The Indians, it seems, had gathered almost as stealthily on
this battleground as they had a century earlier.
Around the corner of the cemetery and up the road toward us
marched 250 Indians, chanting, singing, and pounding drums.
Russell Means led. Behind him, two Indians dragged an American
flag, upside down, over the pavement-a signal, it was later explained,
of distress.
Park superintendent Dick Hart, an affable, easygoing man with
a white beard, now performed probably the signal contribution of
his career. He advanced to confront Russell Means and emerged
with a truce if not a treaty. Means would be given his time at the
microphone, after which he and his little army would withdraw
to the monument and stage their own ceremony while ours got
underway below.
Of the tirade Russell Means delivered I have little memory. It
was typical of the bluster that characterized most of his speeches.
It included what had become an article of faith with AIM and its
supporters: Custer had led an invasion of the Sioux homeland with
the intention of killing as many Indians as he could and seizing
territory that belonged to the Sioux. The Sioux fought back to
protect their families and homeland. Conveniently omitted, if ever
even understood, was that the Sioux Custer attacked were intruders
on Crow tribal ranges, that in fact the battle occurred within the
reservation set apart for the Crows in the Treaty of 1868.
Ironically, my speech featured an appeal to avoid corrupting
history and this battlefield for the purposes that Russell Means and
his demonstrators were at that very moment inflicting the corruption.
I don’t know how many in the audience carefully followed
my plea, for Means had left his palace guard behind. As I spoke,
about a dozen beefy Indians in red berets ringed the seated
assemblage and stood with folded arms and scowling visages.
If they were listening, I doubt that they caught the message in
my concluding paragraph:
In the spirit of reconciliation we should dedicate ourselves
in this bicentennial and centennial year to righting the wrongs
of the past. But in reaching for that goal, let us not infuse
this battlefield with a modern meaning untrue to the past.
Let us not bend it artificially to serve contemporary needs
and ends, however laudable. Let us accept it and understand
it on its own terms, not ours. As we shall want posterity to
look back on us, so we ourselves must look back at those who
have preceded us.
That was a cry lost in the wilderness. It also betrayed a bit of my
own ndivetk. Fifteen years later Edward T. Linenthal, in Sacred Grand:
Americans and Their Battlefields, thoughtfully explored the ways in
which Americans had exploited the “sacred ground” of their battlefields
to promote modern purposes. Of my words about bending
the past to serve contemporary needs and ends, he wrote: “Of
course, for a century patriotic orthodoxy at the battlefield had done
precisely that: it had helped shape a culturally constructed-hence
an ‘artificial’-interpretation of the battle.” And as Linenthal rightly
observed, “Utley’s caution about twisting history for political purposes
certainly meant little to protesters who saw this as their
opportunity to overturn symbolic domination by winning the symbolic
battle of the Little Bighorn.”
The day’s adventures did not end with my speech. In the
audience were two old friends. I had first met Colonel George
Armstrong Custer 111, Brice’s son, as a newly commissioned second
lieutenant at the battlefield on June 25, 1950. I had first met Larry
Frost, the Monroe podiatrist, in 1948 and visited in his home in
1950. Since then Larry had published a couple of well-received
books on Custer and had become an exalted idol of the Little Big
Horn Associates.
Colonel Custer had brought with him a floral wreath with ribbons
emblazoned to the memory of the brothers George, Tom, and
Boston; the nephew Henry Reed, and the brother-in-law Lieutenant
James Calhoun. He wanted to lay the wreath on the monument.
That would have been an invitation made to order for Russell
Means-television cameras recording another confrontation between
a braided Sioux and a George Custer. The arbiters of security ruled
against any such rite so long as Means and his crowd remained on
the battlefield.
Late in the afternoon, after Means and nearly everyone else
had left, I went out from the museum building, linked arms with
Colonel Custer, and marched up the hill to the monument. Larry
Frost fell in behind, together with George’s son Kip, a college
student with blonde curls and brushy mustache that made him
almost a mirror image of his famous forebear. At the monument,
as Larry, Kip, and I stood by, Custer solemnly placed the wreath at
the base and saluted.
The 1976 centennial pleased hardly anyone. It was a big battle
in the war for symbolic possession of Custer Battlefield, but not
the final battle. Others lay in the future. Custer Battlefield had not
seen the last of me - nor, less constructively, of Russell Means.
