WASHITA BATTLEFIELD Washita Symposium: Past, Present, and Future November 12-14, 1998

WILLIAM B. LEES, Moderator

HENRIETTA MANN
EDWARD LINENTHAL
PAUL HUTTON
Panelists

Lees:

Webster defines "battle" as a "general encounter between armies, ships of war, or airplanes." "Massacre" is defined several ways; one is "the act or instance of killing a number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty." In juggling those two definitions to try to resolve what Washita was and is, our panelists will briefly present their positions on the issue, and then we will engage in a discussion amongst ourselves, and also engage the audience in discussion of their viewpoints.

Linenthal:

I want to approach the question in the following manner because it would be the height of arrogance, it seems to me, to come to the Washita for the first time and try to simply answer "yes" or "no" whether it was a battle or a massacre. What has interested me very much, not only about this battlefield, this violent site, but others, is for whom is the question important, and why is it important to them? I would like to address briefly those issues.

I do not think one can separate, particularly here, the issue of battle and massacre from the figure of George Armstrong Custer. So many people—Custer defenders and Custer haters, Custerphiles and Custer foes, as I like to call them—have a vested interest in answering the question in either way, and the answers either strengthen their attack on Custer or their defense of him. For example, those who think of it as a battle consider Custer a military man following orders, launching a surprise attack as part of a military campaign; it was part of a larger story of the often tragic encounter between native and European cultures, and Custer was a military man and nothing more. For those who think of it as a massacre, Custer was an instrument of genocidal policy whose tactics reveal the atrocity-producing situations that were the inevitable by-products of a brutal policy of conquest. Here the figure of Custer is absolutely essential: the martial megalomaniac of Little Big Man, or if not, the Christlike figure of They Died with Their Boots On, simply a military man following orders. What narrative of Custer one chooses will partially define how one answers the question of whether it was a battle or a massacre.

Other people will raise some specific kinds of questions. Those who tend to think of it as a battle might emphasize that the intent was not to massacre women and children, and that the inability to discriminate in combat was a dreadful result of a particular kind of warfare. For those who think of it as a massacre, the distinctions about intent and discrimination are at best splitting hairs and at worst an offense against memory, a failure to engage the moral issues of massacre.

When I read about the Little Bighorn some years ago, it occurred to me, after my first trip into the valley to the site of the Indian village, that the ideology of "place" is tremendously important in how we think about things. Where one stands determines what one sees. It was very different to stand in the valley at the Little Bighorn, the site of the Indian village, and pick up on Maj. Marcus Reno riding into the village, full not only of warriors but of women and children. It was an inedibly different perception of the battle than standing on Custer Hill from the perspective of the Seventh Cavalry, with the pathos and the drama of those last minutes inevitably shaping the narrative with which you saw the battle, and very much the same is true here.

To stand on the hills, thinking about riding down into Black Kettle's village as part of a campaign, or to stand in the village itself, produces very different senses of things. So the perspective of whether it was a battle or a massacre may very well depend on where one stands. Is it a site of shame? A site of contamination by mass murder? Or is it a battle site, sanctified by the blood of those who fought and died?

I find it very interesting to hear how the language of "battle" and "massacre" are used so often even in the same kinds of presentation. In the county building there is a dramatic statue of the Indian woman fleeing with her baby; the text of that panel clearly uses the word "massacre," even the word "holocaust." Other times the word "battle" is used. It seems to me that it is the National Park Service's job not to answer that question at all, but to realize that different American communities will respond in different ways.

I believe it is very important, when we use terms like "holocaust" and "extermination," to be very clear about what it is we are talking. One does not have to defend a brutal, culturally genocidal, wrong headed, often murderous and criminal policy of the American government toward American Indians to say that the government's intent was never, from colonial New England to the Plains, a process of physical extermination of every Native American. Let me be absolutely blunt about that. Had the Nazis come down out of the hills to the Washita campsite, there would have been no prisoners, because all Jews by virtue of the fact of being Jews were killed. When Turks killed millions of Armenians, they killed them simply because they were Armenians. Were there genocidal episodes in the American West? Yes. Were there exterminationist rhetoric and impulse and action? Yes. Was there a governmental policy of physical extermination? No.

It makes much more sense, to my mind, to think about cultural genocide; that it was in fact often the policy to try and kill the Indian and create a white man, and that the effects are still with us today as Native Americans struggle to regain their sacred sites, as Native Americans still seek to enact the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to make sure that their practices—like all other Americans—are given credit; that the Native American Church does not get charged criminally for practices that have gone on for years. To think about cultural genocide, to me, makes a great deal of sense. To think about governmental policy of total extermination does not.

Mann:

I think you know how I feel personally. As Cheyenne people, we say that we accord the highest and greatest degree of freedom to individuals to make their choice. In terms of our value systems, there are what we call "don'ts" and "do's"; the "don'ts" are that you never tell a lie, you never cheat, you never steal, you never marry your relatives, and you never commit murder. There was a time when that was very tribal-specific, in terms of Cheyennes to intratribal life. I do not know what we are to do with that, but I can only present you both sides of the argument. Murder. The killing of a person. A person.

A number of individuals killed by the military at the Washita had superior weaponry; there were women and children in that camp. There is a report from Custer about what was captured and taken from the Washita camp of Black Kettle. The Cheyennes did not have a kind of fast weaponry—the Spencer repeating rifles, seven-shot guns; there may have been one or two there, but their weapons were old. They had weapons, yes, but when we assume they were only going to be used for war, we are being guided away from the fact that warriors not only went to battle, the warriors went out to hunt food to sustain the people. They had bows and arrows, but I do not think every woman and child in that village had bows and arrows. Maybe the women had the skinning knives they used to prepare food for the family. I am talking about genocide—I will use that term, but I will also talk about battle and massacre in a very alien language.

I have attained three degrees in this language [English], and know we use language in ways to justify whatever position we are trying to take. The English language is very manipulatible; you can justify anything that you want and any position. What I am concerned about is the surprise attack upon the peaceful village of the most peaceable of all Cheyenne peace chiefs, who chose to bring his people south after Sand Creek rather than fight with some of the Dog Soldiers and the warrior society members. Black Kettle wanted to find a place of peace and safety and protection, only to have the nightmare of Sand Creek repeated four years later.

By whatever language, people were killed, innocent children were killed, women were killed. Yes, some were taken prisoners, and had it not been for Ben Clark, who was watching from the hill with Custer, more would have died. As Clark watched some soldiers pursuing a group of women and children, he said to Custer, "Are you going to let that happen?" And Custer said, "No, go down and put them in one of the lodges." I do not know what would have happened if Ben Clark had not pointed that out to Custer.

But we know what happened to Joel Elliott. Elliott went far off from the battleground to pursue some women and children, and in pursuing them farther than he should have, he met his death; he sacrificed his men. And even then, Custer had to stand criticism about not looking for Elliott. Whether you want to call it cultural annihilation, whether you want to use the word "extermination," whether you want to use words like "holocaust," I reiterate that it was the blood of our ancestors, the Cheyenne people, that was shed there, and if it were but one little child who was killed, in my estimation that is murder. Even in today's judicial system, when a person is found guilty of causing the death of another person, that act is punishable by death. So, semantics is what we are obviously looking at; semantics is something that will not be debated by others than me, because I look at this from the heart, from the spirit, from the sight and the experience, and from the people to whom I belong as a Cheyenne woman.

Hutton:

The question goes to the very heart, I believe, of why this national monument has been established and what its very reason for existence will be. Thus, the question is central in terms of the founding of this place, and the way it will be interpreted. My roots in this country do not go very deep; I came over on the boat in 1952. So I do not have a stake in terms of ancestors involved in this particular struggle. But I have a stake in it as an American, and my children who were born in this country certainly have a stake in it as Americans. That is the fluid nature of our society, so that the immigrant soldiers who were fighting with Custer were just as much Americans as were the Cheyennes who defended their village and their way of life.

When I read the congressional legislation, I was, in fact, surprised that it named this site a battlefield; that seemed to me a way for Congress to look for controversy, and no controversy was needed at all. If it had just been called Washita National Monument, then its neutral status would have been retained, and individual visitors could have read the story and made up their own minds, which ultimately is what everyone has to do. There are three points, however, that I will make about what was going on in the nineteenth century, about the nature of warfare, and about the reasons for the monument that I think are privilege to this question.

First, Dr. Mann mentioned the vast lands claimed by the Cheyenne people, over which they had traditionally roamed, and indeed that is true. Keep in mind, though, that the story of the nineteenth century is the story of many great empires that rose and fell. In the nineteenth century, England and Germany and France and their empires spanned the globe. That is the nature of the historical process, that kind of change is absolutely inevitable, and almost always it is accompanied by human tragedy and human pathos that helps define who we are. And so indeed, what happened not only to the Cheyennes, but to the other great Indian nations of the Plains, was a story that was going on around the world with many people, both European people and African people, people in South America, people in Asia.

Secondly, it was the changing nature of war. Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, and Abraham Lincoln who set them loose, had enunciated a new method of warfare; the old ways were over. The Civil War had unleashed not warfare that was made simply against armies, it was warfare between contending armies simply to endure. The new war was far more terrible; it was made against populations, civilian populations, and indeed the new generals—Sherman and Sheridan—understood that if they could impoverish people, bring pestilence and starvation along, they would sue for peace, that indeed it was easier to make war on noncombatants than upon the armies contending on the fields. From the Washita, we can draw a fairly direct line to the fire-bombing of Tokyo in which 300,000 Japanese were killed by American flyers who were generally regarded as heroes, and to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, so that in the last years of the twentieth century, be it right or wrong, we make war on civilians first. We kill women and children first. That is the way military policy is fought out today, so I am very hesitant to look back upon those in the nineteenth century and define anybody as a barbarian.

Thirdly, what is the reason for this monument? Is it to be a monument to ancestor worship? To the sacrifice of some whose people still live in this land and have retained closeness to it? Or is it to be a monument for all Americans, no matter what their origins? And what is the story that will be told here, and how will that story be controlled, because that is what history is about. History is about the control of the story of our past, because the story of our past defines who we are today. In this area especially, over the next few years, this process will work itself out in a very dramatic form. The struggle over whether this will be Washita Massacre National Monument or Washita Battlefield National Monument will be a struggle for the story, and a struggle for how we define our own history.

Lees:

At this time, I will defer my comments and ask the audience for comments or questions for the panel.

Female Speaker #1:

I cried at the battlefield; I cried over this land that the Cheyennes talked about. But I have to ask myself a question. The Cheyennes warred with other Native Americans. Did they always spare an enemy to live? Did they only go on war parties against the warriors? Did they attack each other's villages? It would be a horrible thing if that would be true, too; I think total war is horrible. I understand how this happened, but I cannot defend that kind of massacre and murder. But was it so terribly different from the intertribal warfare that went on before the whites came?

Hutton:

There was considerable intertribal warfare. More often than not they were enacted by small raiding parties and did not result in great loss of life. On other occasions there were revenge raids and major war parties that attacked villages and there was great loss of life in terms of women and children. More often than not, because native societies had such a population stress upon them, especially after contact, they took captives in many of the attacks on villages simply to replenish the numbers of the tribe or to bring new blood into the tribe. The Cheyennes were a very proud warrior society. I do not believe that is a surprise to anybody, and it is a source of great pride in their history; they did not get that reputation by being Quakers.

Female Speaker #2:

I just want to make a statement about something that I have noticed. I am Henrietta [Mann]'s aunt, and I am fullblood Cheyenne. I was born here in Hammon, Oklahoma, like she was. But I notice, as some of you must have, that the two gentlemen on the panel do not have any ties or feel the way the Cheyennes feel about the Washita; it should be "the massacre" of the Cheyenne people at Washita. And I have noticed there is only one Indian on the panel with two white men. This is the way we have been put all through these years. I just want to make that statement. Thank you.

Hutton:

I believe Dr. Mann has us outnumbered though, in every way.

Male Speaker #1:

This symposium, among many things, has given me a higher respect for my Cheyenne neighbors. I have learned more here than in sixty years of trying to learn otherwise. I have lived in Wyoming the last twenty-five years and I wonder if the Cheyenne people believe that too much credit has gone toward the Sioux people, such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, who were involved in the Indian wars. Maybe they all are seen as brothers.

Mann:

Your question is whether I may feel that the Sioux people have gotten a larger place in history?

Male Speaker #1:

Yes; some people thought Custer got too much, as compared to other generals, or that Captain Benteen, for example, resented Custer.

Mann:

That is a very good question, and you are forcing me to think. I think the very fact that there has been one Indian nation that has been given a place in history is exceptionally generous on the part of American history. Unfortunately I am put in a difficult position because we look upon the Sioux as our allies. In fact the band at Washita was a mixture of Cheyenne-Sioux people; if I say I feel they got too big a page in history then it is talk against and about my ancestors who have intermarried with the Lakotas, which is what they prefer to call themselves.

There are some very important events in history that we need to think about. Custer certainly put a lot of things in motion, from a culture perspective, by smoking the pipe in the most sacred of all of our honor tipis and by making promises that eventually brought about his demise and the demise of his entire command, but not just by the Lakotas, Cheyennes and Arapahos also were there at Little Bighorn.

I guess I have never been one to say that if you give twenty pages to the Sioux people then you had to give twenty to the Cheyennes and the Arapahos. I believe we just need to know more about ourselves; we need to look upon the sacred group of the world being made up of all people. We begin a new page of history today by according each other respect—not just one person to another—in a way that we present our history as a country

Female Speaker #3:

I wonder if anybody would care to comment on the implications for us today? Dr. Hutton, you mentioned Iraq, and I wondered how we describe an air strike on a city today. Is it a battle? Is it a massacre? Have you come up with another term for it? Dr. Mann, you mentioned the human dimension. Is it easier for us now, not seeing the faces of the enemy? Where do we go from here?

Linenthal:

Please let me respond, and then whoever else. The face of warfare in recent years is not so much inhuman as it ahuman, and the terms we use to describe it are ones that remove us from what in fact happens. We talk about "search and strikes," we talk about "taking out positions," we talk about "collateral damage"; we do not talk about what it does to human beings. So one can, I believe, talk about the devolution of warfare from the human to the inhuman and now to the ahuman, where warfare seems to have little to do with human beings because we are not confronted with it in the ways we used to be.

The other thing that I would like to say in regard to whole "battle/massacre" issue is that the idea of massacre for so long in white American culture was resistant because it threatened the very identity of who white Americans are. Righteousness and innocence are without question two of the building blocks of European-American identity, and the notion that European Americans could be guilty of massacres struck at the very heart of that. It seems to me that we are taking tremendous energies to talk now about those places where massacres occurred—or write about them—particularly since the 1960s. So Sand Creek and (for those who look upon this event as a massacre) Washita and Wounded Knee and so many others do in fact alter the American narrative.

The latest and most interesting example, to my mind, of resistance to Americans thinking about ourselves as being capable of massacre is of course My Lai. Let me remind you that, if you read the accounts by American GIs, there is nothing in any Polish village that is any more horrible than what Americans did at My Lai. This was the response: Most people who saw the photographs in Life magazine of what happened in My Lai wrote in to object to the photographs, not the event. People wrote, "I don't believe our boys could do this." The very notion that this could happen was so alien. Had we told our stories better, much earlier, it would not have been so alien. So we have a very recent event that continues to show our resistance to opening the American narrative to including these kinds of stories. Let me also remind you that while we castigate Germany and Japan and many other nations for allowing war criminals to walk free among them, Lt. William Calley has been, for several decades now, a free man, and if that is not one of the most obscene offenses against the memory of the murder of people of color, I do not know what is.

Mann:

I would like to make the point that I was very careful in my earlier presentation not to use the words "massacre" or "battle"; I referred to Sand Creek, I referred to Washita, I referred to them as "conflict." I am very cognizant of the kinds of words that can bring up feelings of defensiveness or create feelings of ill will, and so I try to be very careful about how I use the English language as my second language. I am not saying that we as Cheyenne people lived in a utopia, or that we were perfect, but we were quite pleased with the ways of life that Ma'heo'o, the Great Spirit, had given us. Sometimes it meant we had to defend ourselves against other tribal people, for example, when the Crows came among us into our hunting grounds or took some of our people hostage. Unfortunately sometimes in the way we lived, in the way we understood intertribal relationships, there had to be some conflict to preserve the peace. I do not know if it was the intent to preserve the peace that prompted Washita or Sand Creek; it was for land.

Male Speaker #2:

This is a loaded question, obviously that we are dealing with, but Sand Creek has been termed a massacre in the literature by all historians today. What is there about Sand Creek and Washita that would make the difference between them as per a battle or a massacre? And then, where do we draw the line, if there is a line, between the two?

Hutton:

As a historian who writes on this topic and has given considerable time to it, frankly it is very clear to me what a massacre is and what a battle is in the context of the western Indian wars. That is why the nature of warfare is so important in this discussion here.

In the Mountain Meadows in Utah in 1857 the Mormons and their Indian allies got 140 California immigrants to surrender and then essentially slit their throats; that was a massacre. In 1863 William Quantrill's men pulled together most of the male and boy citizens of the town of Lawrence, Kansas, into the town square and shot them; that was a massacre. In Goliad, Texas, in 1836, 350 Texans had surrendered to the Mexican forces and were a week later marched out and all shot down; that was a massacre. At Sand Creek, Cheyenne people had been promised protection and were under the American flag. They were then attacked wholly by surprise and through deceit, and when they simply fled the site, they were hunted down and murdered; that was a massacre.

At the Washita, the Cheyennes had been informed by the government that they were the prey of the government and that government troops were looking for them, and thus I suppose, in a military sense, had been given fair warning. They were the victims of what is indeed the sad nature of Indian warfare in the far West, which is government troops assaulting villages at dawn.

The very reason I support this national monument so wholly is that it is the best example of Indian warfare in the West; Little Bighorn is not. This is the way Indian warfare in the West was. By telling the stories that Dr. Mann has told, and that Cheyenne oral tradition contains, and by putting a face upon this encounter at the Washita, I believe we will make the nature of Indian warfare in all of its tragedy much clearer to the American people. That would be a good thing to put a face on tragedies; then maybe we will think about it in the future.

Lees:

It is very important for each of us to understand what happened here at the Washita, to draw our own conclusions as far as what to call it, But we can all agree that whatever we call it, it was a tragedy in history and is an important thing for us and others to know about. That will be the job of the National Park Service for the years to come.