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It began to cloud over that afternoon as we drove to the area where the Yellowstone River cuts a canyon through the park. We had planned to take pictures, and so parked at an overlook, down river from the Lower Falls, where a short flight of stairs wound down to a lookout point balanced on the tip of a precipice. A plaque at the top of the stairs informed one that, prior to an earthquake in the 1980's, the precipice had stretched out one hundred feet further. Nevertheless, I reluctantly accompanied my wife down to take pictures. We could see layers of rock and earth, some black, some yellow, some brown, in the cliffs across the chasm. Looking down to where the base of our cliff met the base of the opposite cliff was a sliver, crooked thread - the Yellowstone River. My wife took some photographs, including one of me looking not too pleased, and I quickly headed back to the parking lot, where a large bird had landed in a small tree and was haranguing the tourists. The bird was used to people and seemed to want its picture taken. The light was dim for taking pictures, and a light drizzle had started. To the east, where we could see the Lower Falls, a thunderstorm was rolling toward us. We took refuge in our van as the storm broke, and we watched for fifteen minutes. It stopped as abruptly as it started, and we got out of our van. Below us, the delicate silver thread had turned into a twisted beige rope. The surrounding firs seemed to have broken out in a cold sweat. As the storm sailed away like a dreadnought, wisps of remaining storm clouds brushed the tops of the down river cliffs on both sides of the canyon. We drove farther up river, closer to the Lower Falls, and took more pictures, and then decided to head back to our room in Montana. A mile north of the canyon, we saw a rainbow. It arched boldly across the sky from north to south. The sky on one side blue, and on the other side, deep purple, with a arched prism of droplets fracturing the sunlight into the spectrum of colors. It was the last picture we took in Yellowstone National Park. Next morning, Saturday, we started east by going north. It was Saturday, and we left Gardiner at nine AM, taking Route 89 to Interstate 90, east. The Yellowstone River accompanied us as far east as Billings, where it flows northward, along with Interstate 94. We continued on Interstate 90, east, as it dipped southward and picked up with river called Little Bighorn, through the Crow Indian Reservation. Forty-seven miles north of the Wyoming border, we stopped at Little Bighorn National Monument, where Custer made his last stand. The Indians call it "The Battle of the Greasy Grass". It had been fifty-seven degrees that morning in Gardiner. Now, as the sun beat down on us on the rolling hills of the Great Plains, we sweated in eighty-degrees. There was a parking lot, and a historical center, in which was a small museum of artifacts from the battle. Relics from soldiers and Crow scouts of the U.S. Cavalry and braves from the Sioux and Cheyenne nations laid in glass cases. Walking into an adjoining room splashed with sunlight, a large object caught my eye; it almost felt like a presence. Leaning against a far wall was a large piece of steel, about half an inch thick, and approximately four feet by four feet, which had the following written onto it with a blow torch: In honor of our Indian It was dated exactly one hundred twelve years after the battle occurred. I wondered why a more conventional plaque had not been used; I was to receive an answer a day later and two states away. This room was dedicated and maintained by Native Americans. On a corkboard were Xeroxes of various newspaper clippings concerning a law passed by Congress in 1990 called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. This law reaffirms the rights of Native Americans to sue for the return of the remains of their ancestors to their native burial grounds. In one instance, in the late eighteen hundreds, some Indians had been caught off the reservation by U.S. troops. They were slaughtered, and their bodies given to medical schools, including Yale's, back east. There was a Native American among the visitors, a young man in his mid-twenties, and he fell into conversation with a group of whites, who wanted to know what had become of the Sioux. "Most of us live on reservations. It's a little depressing when I go back for a visit, because of all the poverty; but it's still my home. You what I mean?" He went on to describe the lawsuit against the U.S. government for ownership of the Black Hills - sacred to the Sioux - and how the federal government was taking back the reservations from the Indians. "By Federal law, you have to be pure Indian for five generations to be able to vote on what happens to the reservation. What the government is counting on is that if the Sioux keep intermarrying with whites, there will legally be no more pure 'Sioux' left with any legal claims to their land rights." I asked him how that
could be, since I had read in Vine Deloria's book, Custer Died for
Your Sins, that the government's policy of Termination had stopped
in the late nineteen-sixties. He looked around and thought for a moment,
as if debating the wisdom of talking so freely. Then, he grinned with
only one side of his mouth and said, "They haven't stopped the policy;
they only stopped calling it "Termination'". |