Trip of the Tongue by Elizabeth Little Read Free Book Online Page B

this, being the sort of person whose entire day can be ruined by even the most glancing reminder of my own mortality. I remember seeing a single, sad cloud in one far corner of the sky, which was enough to send me spiraling off into melancholy. Searching for some semblance of profundity, my brain skittered about the first few words of a much-loathed Wordsworth poem I’d been forced to learn in high school, and as I approached the monument, I felt with a sudden, horrible certainty that someone was going to start playing taps. With no small amount of dread, I slowly made my way to the memorial.
    There are two sets of gravestones at the battlefield. The first form the almost comfortingly regular columns and rows of the memorial cemetery. The others are on Last Stand Hill. Most of the bodies of the U.S. cavalrymen who died here were, grotesquely, left in the open for five years until 1881, when they were gathered into a mass grave. So though there are to this day still a great many unanswered questions about what exactly happened over the course of the battle, the final resting place of each combatant is not in doubt. The gravestones here, unsettlingly weathered and lopsided, mark the exact spots where the men fell.
    Custer’s gravestone is straighter, bolder, and marked with a small American flag, but it is otherwise no different from the unnamed markers of his brethren. The only text is his rank, his name, the date, and the words “fell here.”
    Scattered throughout the hill are other, newer stones, polished granite with crisp white engraving. These mark the deaths of Indian warriors. Until very recently, a visitor to the battlefield would not have seen even these small reminders of Custer’s opponents. As a matter of fact, until 1991 the monument itself was actually known as the Custer Battlefield National Monument. It wasn’t until the appointment of Barbara Sutter, the site’s first Native American superintendent, that the name change was enacted and progress began to be made with regard to a greater acknowledgment of Native involvement. The markers were first placed in 1999, and in 2003 the Indian Memorial—a sculpture based on the drawings of a Cheyenne warrior—was dedicated.
    For roughly 132 years, then, the only sign of what is arguably the greatest military victory a Native group has ever achieved against the U.S. Army was a solitary wooden marker the National Park Service reluctantly erected in the 1950s. How must that have felt, I wondered, for the descendants of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho men who fought there? How did that affect the perceptions of the schoolchildren and tourists who visited? How much has our understanding of Native peoples been guided, purposely or not, by the administrators of government bureaucracy?
    Without a doubt, the fate of the Crow language—of any language—rests in large part on matters of education, economic opportunity, and technology. But my time in Montana led me to consider the influence of a more nebulous set of variables: namely, the popular portrayal and understanding of language, culture, and history. The vitality of a language cannot be unrelated to the nature of its representation among its speakers and non-speakers alike. At each stop along my journey, I continued to discover the many ways in which this is true.

Chapter Two
    Arizona: Navajo
    Later that summer, I found myself on a remote stretch of Highway 160 just south of the Utah-Arizona border, speeding toward a town whose name I didn’t even know how to pronounce. I was heading off to investigate another Native language, one I thought might help answer some of the questions I’d come up against in Montana. The Crow reservation had given me a broad sense of the challenges faced by indigenous languages in the United States. I was hoping Navajo Nation might help me fill in some of the details.
    Part of the vast Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit language family, the Navajo