Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies

Beyond Custer’s Last Stand: The forces that led to the Battle of the Little Bighorn

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:18:25 +0000

Beyond Custer’s Last Stand: The forces that led to the Battle of the Little Bighorn Rachel Sauer Tue, 07/14/2026 - 17:18

Bradley Worrell

CU �鶹ӰԺ historians Thomas Andrews and Noah Ramage argue that the seeds of Little Bighorn, which happened 150 years ago, were planted years before Custer’s defeat

The Battle of the Little Bighorn has long occupied a unique place in American memory. Often remembered through images of Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer making a heroic last stand against overwhelming odds, the battle has been mythologized in movies, books and popular culture for nearly 150 years.

But according to �鶹ӰԺ historians Thomas G. Andrews and Noah Ramage, that familiar story obscures a much larger and more complex reality.

Andrews, faculty director of the Center of the American West, says that rather than a simple clash between the U.S. Army and Native Americans, the battle (which many Indigenous people refer to as the Battle of Greasy Grass) emerged from shifting alliances with Native nations amid a backdrop of competition for territory, economic transformation and mounting pressure on Northern Plains tribes. To understand what happened at the Little Bighorn on June 25-26, 1876, Andrews argues that it is necessary to understand the forces that led up to it.

CU �鶹ӰԺ historians Thomas G. Andrews (left) and Noah Ramage (right) argue that the seeds of Little Bighorn were planted years before Custer’s defeat.

At the center of the conflict were several Native nations with different histories and interests, some of which allied themselves with the U.S. government while pursuing their own agendas and some of which violently resisted any efforts by the government to dispossess them of their territories. Among that latter group was a coalition led by Lakotas, joined by Northern Cheyennes and smaller numbers of Arapahos.

“Over the course of the 18th and the first part of the 19th century, the Lakotas really become a kind of great power in the Northern Plains,” Andrews explains.

Their rise was fueled largely by horses, which transformed mobility, trade, hunting and warfare. As Lakota influence expanded westward, Andrews says they moved into territories claimed by other tribes, including the Crow and Arikara. Those longstanding rivalries later helped explain why some Native groups chose to align themselves with U.S. forces, he says.

The United States and the Lakotas had already fought before Little Bighorn, Andrews notes. During Red Cloud’s War in the 1860s, the Lakotas and their allies successfully resisted U.S. efforts to establish the Bozeman Trail through their territory.

“They would actually win,” Andrews says. “They ended up winning a favorable treaty from the United States in 1868.”

That treaty guaranteed hunting rights in the Powder River Country and recognized Sioux sovereignty over vast territories. Yet even as the ink dried on the agreement, a confluence of factors was building that would ultimately lead to renewed hostilities, says Ramage, an assistant professor whose research focus is Native American and Indigenous history.

Expansion, gold and a new federal policy

By the mid-1870s, Native nations on the Plains faced enormous pressures. The completion of railroads accelerated western settlement, while Custer’s 1874 expedition into the Black Hills triggered a gold rush into lands protected by treaty, Andrews says.

“You basically had this huge influx of American squatters essentially moving illegally into territories that the government had recognized as sovereign Sioux territory,” he adds.

‘What my great-grandmother saw at Little Bighorn’

For many Americans, the Battle of the Little Bighorn is remembered as “Custer’s Last Stand”—a dramatic clash of armies on a Montana hillside where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 soldiers of the 7th Calvary were killed on June 25, 1876.

For Rick Williams, an Oglala Lakota/Northern Cheyenne Native, historian, Indigenous rights advocate and �鶹ӰԺ Center of the American West former board member, the battle was never just a chapter in a history book.

It was a story passed down through his family in hushed tones, told by his great-grandmother in her native Lakota and Cheyenne and translated into English for him by his grandmother.

“I’m probably one of the few people living today who has a direct connection with someone who was there,” says Williams. “My great-grandmother was born in 1869 … and she was a little girl in the Cheyenne camp during the Battle of the Little Bighorn; she witnessed what happened.

“Growing up, my grandmother and great-grandmother would tell these stories, but they always warned me not to repeat them. They believed they could still get into trouble, possibly from the public or maybe with the government,” he adds. “Even in the 1950s and 1960s, there was still a fear surrounding (Native American) discussions of what happened at Little Bighorn, because Custer was still revered.”

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Ramage argues those developments reflected a broader shift in federal policy and attitudes toward Native nations. By this time, Ramage says the federal government was becoming increasingly willing to ignore existing agreements. In 1871, Congress stopped making treaties with Native nations, signaling that Washington increasingly viewed itself as possessing unilateral authority over Indigenous peoples and their lands.

“Instead of negotiating with Indian nations as they had in the past, a very aggressive United States starts to dictate policy to Indian nations,” Ramage says, “partially because it views them as inferior.”

He places the conflict within a broader era of American territorial expansion.

“The United States was incredibly ‘grabby’ at this moment,” he says, comparing events on the Northern Plains to a broader period of aggressive imperial expansion in which the United States seized more than half of Mexico’s territory in 1848 (through a treaty) and the annexation of Hawaii in 1898 (without a treaty).

“The U.S. wants to finally monopolize power in the Northern Plains—and to do that it had to finally overcome Lakota power,” Ramage says. He adds, “This is not a war that starts because of some sort of misunderstanding. The U.S. started this war, and it started it with the explicit aim of subjugating the Lakotas.”

Destruction of the buffalo

At the same time settlers poured westward, Andrews and Ramage say another force threatened the foundations of Plains Indian life: the destruction of the bison.

Buffalo were essential to Native economies and cultures. They provided food, clothing, shelter materials, trade goods and spiritual meaning. But industrialization suddenly transformed buffalo hides into valuable commodities, Andrews says.

In 1871, a tanning process was developed that allowed buffalo hides to be converted into belts for industrial machinery.

“It was really kind of this remarkable, literal harnessing of these massive herds of wild creatures on the Great Plains that suddenly could become industrial inputs driving American economic growth,” Andrews says.

The consequences were devastating, Andrews and Ramage agree. Commercial hunters armed with long-range rifles slaughtered buffalo in enormous numbers.

“They were really just hide hunting at that point,” Andrews explains. “Usually, they were not even taking the tongues off of the buffalo that they killed but just stripping the hides off and leaving the carcasses to rot.”

Ramage and Andrews agree that federal officials understood the significance of what was happening.

“U.S. military leaders recognized how profoundly Plains Natives depended on bison,” Andrews says. “They understood that attacking bison would serve U.S. national interests.”

Reservations and resistance

At the same time buffalo populations were collapsing, the federal government was attempting to force Native peoples onto reservations, which were intended not merely as places to live but as mechanisms of control, Andrews says.

“Their main way of trying to do this was by establishing reservations and by trying to use food, the provision of rations, to control Native peoples,” he says.

Native leaders disagreed over how best to respond. Some believed accommodation offered the best chance for survival. Others argued for continued independence.

Sioux veterans of the Battle of Little Bighorn (Photo: Library of Congress)

Initially, many Native people were willing to try reservation life, Andrews says. However, federal corruption, underfunding and bureaucratic failures made reservation existence increasingly untenable, he adds.

“Native people who tried to comply with what the United States wanted usually ended up starving,” he says.

By the summer of 1876, many Lakotas and Cheyennes had left the reservations and gathered in the Powder River Country, where treaty rights still guaranteed hunting access. What emerged was one of the largest Native encampments ever assembled on the Northern Plains, Ramage says.

The Army marches into disaster

As the U.S. Army moved to force these groups back onto reservations, Custer and the 7th Cavalry advanced toward the encampment, relying heavily on Native scouts for tracking.

While those scouts reported that it was the largest gathering of Native peoples that anyone had ever witnessed, Andrews says U.S. commanders failed to grasp the true size of the force they faced. On the fateful day of battle, Custer’s detachment of 7th Cavalry members encountered thousands of Native combatants rather than the few hundred they anticipated, he notes.

“The Americans had so badly underestimated what they were up against,” he says.

Ramage argues that this failure extended beyond Custer himself.

“Little Bighorn was arguably an intelligence failure for the United States as a whole—not just Custer,” he says. He blames federal officials for consistently underestimating Lakota power.

Grave markers at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana. (Photo: Victoria Stauffenberg/National Park Service)

“Many U.S. officials incorrectly assumed they were fighting racial inferiors,” he says. “They were consistently over-confident.”

Defeat at the Little Bighorn

The Battle of the Little Bighorn remains one of the most studied and debated engagements in American history. Andrews cautions that key details remain uncertain because most of Custer’s immediate command died in the fighting.

“We don’t have their perspective, and we never will,” he says.

Historians continue to debate Custer’s decisions and the roles played by subordinates Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen, both of whom had contentious relationships with their commander.

“Reno and Benteen both despised Custer,” Andrews says.

What is clear is that the Army encountered a vastly larger and more capable force than expected. Native warriors rapidly mobilized from the enormous village and overwhelmed Custer’s detachment of about 200 soldiers. Andrews says he believes the outcome can be attributed in large part to the Cavalry commander’s ego.

“I think really it’s Custer’s arrogance,” he says.

Ramage cautions that focusing solely on tactical mistakes can distract from the larger strategy being pursued by the Army.

“From my perspective,” he says, “there is a way in which focusing on (Custer’s) strategic blunders … seriously overlooks the fact that the ‘successful’ U.S. military strategy at this moment was often defined by horrific attacks on vulnerable non-combatants.”

For Natives, victory in battle, defeat in war

News of the defeat shocked Americans, Andrews and Ramage agree.

The battle occurred during the nation's centennial year, a period Andrews describes as marked by economic depression, political corruption and uncertainty. The death of a famous cavalry officer and the destruction of his command seemed almost unimaginable, he says.

At the same time, the battle quickly became part of a national mythology. Andrews says the story of “Custer’s Last Stand” helped transform a military disaster into a narrative of heroic sacrifice.

Meanwhile, for Native peoples, their victory proved short-lived.

“The government was dead set on retribution and on securing eventual victory,” Andrews says. He notes that federal authorities intensified military operations, tightened ration policies and increasingly used hunger as a method of coercion.

“The government essentially tries to starve Native peoples into submission,” he says.

By the spring of 1877, most Native groups had surrendered or fled to Canada.

Ramage says the Army’s defeat at Little Bighorn did not change the government’s end objectives.

This is not a war that starts because of some sort of misunderstanding. The U.S. started this war, and it started it with the explicit aim of subjugating the Lakotas."

“The U.S. was deeply committed to its military goals,” he says, “and even a humiliating defeat at Little Bighorn would not and did not change its course in terms of policy.”

Lasting consequences still felt today

With the subjugation of these Northern Plains tribes, the U.S. government reduced the size of the Great Sioux Reservation, seized the Black Hills despite treaty protections and intensified its campaign to assimilate Native peoples.

Even today, the legacy remains unresolved. Andrews notes that Lakotas never accepted the seizure of the Black Hills. While federal courts later approved financial compensation, the Lakotas rejected monetary settlements. “They actually want the land,” he notes.

For Ramage, the ongoing dispute illustrates that Little Bighorn’s significance extends well beyond a single military engagement. The battle occurred during a period when the federal government increasingly abandoned treaty-making and asserted unilateral authority over Native nations—a shift with consequences that are still being debated today.

“This is a war with one very clear aggressor: the United States,” he says.

Meanwhile, the battle’s memory continues to evolve. Once commonly remembered as “Custer’s Last Stand,” Andrews and Ramage say modern historians increasingly place the conflict within the broader context of Native resistance, U.S. expansion and the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty. The historians say tribal histories, oral traditions and Native perspectives have become a more prominent part of the story, challenging earlier interpretations that focused almost exclusively on Custer and the 7th Cavalry.

For Andrews, that continuing conversation is evidence that the battle remains relevant.

“The histories and its legacies are still absolutely active in Indian country,” he says. “There are still so many unresolved issues.”

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CU �鶹ӰԺ historians Thomas Andrews and Noah Ramage argue that the seeds of Little Bighorn, which happened 150 years ago, were planted years before Custer’s defeat.

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Top painting: "The Custer Fight" by Charles Marion Russell, 1903

Building a digital home for Arapaho, one sentence at a time

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:54:34 +0000

Building a digital home for Arapaho, one sentence at a time Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/13/2025 - 09:54

Young Arapaho dancers (Photo courtesy the Wind River Casino)

Cody DeBos

CU �鶹ӰԺ linguistics scholar Andrew Cowell helps Arapaho stories find new life online

The Arapaho words beteen, meaning “sacred,” and beteneyooo, “one’s body,” have a special connection for those who speak the language. Their linguistic similarity isn’t a coincidence.

Andrew Cowell, a �鶹ӰԺ professor of linguistics and faculty director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS), says the Arapaho see it as a lesson encoded in the language. “It indicates that the body is sacred and therefore we have to protect it,” he says.

Such examples of cultural knowledge don’t always survive translation. That’s exactly why Cowell’s belief in the importance of preserving Indigenous languages led him to redirect the entire trajectory of his career.

CU �鶹ӰԺ linguist Andrew Cowell, faculty director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS), has partnered with a host of collaborators including CU students, community partners and native speakers to build digital tools to protect and revitalize the Arapaho language.

It’s also why, for the past two decades, he and a host of collaborators including CU �鶹ӰԺ students, community partners and native speakers, have been building digital tools to protect and revitalize the Arapaho language.

Cowell didn’t originally come to CU �鶹ӰԺ to work on Arapaho, but he has long been curious about Indigenous languages, in part thanks to his personal connection to Native Hawaiian culture through his wife.

“Arapaho was the native language of �鶹ӰԺ, so when I got hired at CU I decided, well, I’ll look into Arapaho,” he recalls. “I started looking into Arapaho more and more and doing more work on the side and eventually decided to switch departments into linguistics so I could focus all my energy on indigenous languages.”

Two databases, one goal

Today, Cowell’s work on Arapaho takes two forms: one, an online lexical database; the other, an unpublished, in-depth text database of natural language conversation and narratives.

The lexical database, freely accessible online, functions like a living dictionary. With more than 20,000 entries and a searchable interface, it’s often used by learners across the Arapaho-speaking world in place of print dictionaries, according to Cowell.

But a larger effort has quietly been taking shape behind the scenes.

The text database, which is not publicly released, contains more than 100,000 sentences of spoken Arapaho. Among them are natural conversations and stories recorded over decades.

“At this point, I’ve got over a hundred thousand sentences of natural speaking that I have not only recorded, but also transcribed into written Arapaho, translated into English, and then it has linguistic analysis attached as well,” Cowell explains.

The database is the backbone of several major projects, all with the goal of making learning Arapaho more accessible and preserving it for future generations. One effort is a student grammar dictionary that focuses on the most useful and common words.

“We’ve gotten a list of the frequency of all the nouns in the language and all the verbs," Cowell says. "We ranked those, and it allowed us to produce a really small student dictionary where we only included words that occurred around 40 times or more.

“It means (students) don’t have to flip through rare and uncommon words they’re unlikely to be really interested in as initial learners.”

A pathway for new learners

Beyond the student dictionary, Cowell and his team are working on developing a scaled curriculum for teaching Arapaho. It guides learners from basics to more complex concepts across sequential levels based on real-world language use patterns.

Young Arapaho dancers (Photo courtesy the Wind River Casino)

“We’ve developed 44 steps of knowledge, and even within that there's 23a and 23b and so forth,” he says. “It’s all based on looking at the text we've collected and looking at the frequency of certain kinds of grammatical features that occur.”

Unlike French or Spanish, Arapaho wasn’t historically taught in a classroom but passed down through families at home. Cowell’s team has had to build an instructional framework from the ground up.

“With Arapaho, no one’s really ever tried to teach it as a second language. Now we’re trying to learn it and teach it, and the databases have allowed us to really produce that scaled curriculum,” Cowell says.

Generations of trust

Ensuring that his work isn’t just academic has been a priority for Cowell since the start. The database project is built on decades of trust between himself and the Arapaho community.

“The one thing Native American communities have often had problems with in the past is someone comes in, does their research, then disappears. Then the community is left wondering what they are getting out of it. In some cases, nothing,” Cowell says. “I worked hard to establish that I really want to learn the language and ensure my work is something that will feed back into the community and help out.”

That commitment has led to rich partnerships, sometimes spanning generations.

“We’re close to having 100 different native speakers represented in our data. At this point we’ve got grandparents and now their kids are working on it,” Cowell says.

A worthy effort

From a linguist’s perspective, Cowell explains, Indigenous languages expand our understanding of what language, and indeed human cognition, can do.

“We’re close to having 100 different native speakers represented in our data. At this point we’ve got grandparents and now their kids are working on it.”

“There are many cases in the history of linguistics where people have made a claim like ‘no language could possibly do this,’ and then someone goes to the Amazon and discovers a language that does it,” he says.

More importantly, the motivating force that has kept Cowell working for over twenty years comes from the Arapaho speakers themselves.

He says, “In my experience, Native American communities are very invested in their language. They see it as really crucial, central to their identity.”

That’s why the full text database hasn’t been released publicly, especially with growing concerns about how the data might be used or exploited by artificial intelligence. Still, Cowell and his team are taking steps toward broader access.

A grant from the National Science Foundation will support the release of 5,000 carefully selected sentences from the text database for public use. The snippets, which have been approved by native Arapaho speakers, will be available online with additional computational linguistic labeling.

As for Cowell, he says that even after 20 years, he never tires of seeing the work evolve. He hopes it shows CU students what’s possible when you follow your curiosity.

“You never know where you’re going to end up and what results are going to come out of something. You just have to trust that research is going to turn out to be interesting. You can’t necessarily predict when or where.”

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CU �鶹ӰԺ linguistics scholar Andrew Cowell helps Arapaho stories find new life online.

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Top image: "Two Riders Leading Horses" by Arapaho artist Frank Henderson, ca. 1882 (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Healing Indigenous communities from the ground up

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 23:46:02 +0000

Healing Indigenous communities from the ground up Rachel Sauer Mon, 06/23/2025 - 17:46

Sarah Kuta

Mushroom mycelium can clean up the soil. Can it also help Indigenous people reconnect to the land? CU �鶹ӰԺ researcher Natalie Avalos aims to find out

Fungi are powerful and versatile organisms. They’re being used in a variety of beneficial ways, from degrading hard-to-recycle plastics and purifying contaminated water to developing new medicines and restoring forests after wildfires.

Now an innovative project from the �鶹ӰԺ will explore fungi’s ability to remediate urban soil and, in the process, reconnect Indigenous families to the land.

The project is being led by Natalie Avalos, a CU �鶹ӰԺ assistant professor of ethnic studies and core faculty member of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS). She’s working in partnership with Carissa Garcia, a Denver-based writer, educator and combat veteran with Picuris Pueblo heritage.

CU �鶹ӰԺ researcher Natalie Avalos, an assistant professor of ethnic studies, is leading a project to explore fungi’s ability to remediate urban soil and, in the process, reconnect Indigenous families to the land.

With grant funding from CNAIS, the duo plans to use mushroom mycelium to clean up the soil at various locations in Denver and Commerce City. They hope to inoculate small farm plots and garden beds on properties that are owned or rented by Indigenous people.

Soil remediation will allow Indigenous families to grow their own foods and medicines and may even lead to the revitalization of ancient crops. But, beyond that, Avalos and Garcia hope their land-based healing project will help Indigenous people restore and strengthen their sacred relationship with the land.

“We talk about decolonization as land repatriation, or the return of Indigenous lands to Indigenous people,” says Avalos. “But this is a form of rematriation, thinking about land as mother and returning to this relationship where you are tending to the health and well-being of the mother so that she can better attend to your health and well-being in return. Restoring that symbiotic relationship is profoundly impactful for families.”

The power of fungi

Mycelium is the name for the network of dense, fibrous, root-like threads that make up the body of a fungus. It’s typically hidden underground, often out of sight and out of mind until it produces mushrooms, which grow above the soil and help fungi reproduce.

In the wilderness, mycelium acts as nature’s clean-up crew. It plays a vital role in decomposition, breaking down dead plants and returning essential nutrients to the soil.

But researchers have also come to realize that mycelium can be a powerful ally for combating pollution. The process, known as “mycoremediation,” harnesses fungi’s natural abilities to remove or break down harmful contaminants in the soil. Scientists are using fungi to clean up everything from heavy metals and pesticides to petrochemicals and other hazardous substances.

Avalos and Garcia want to use mycelium to create healthy and resilient soil for Indigenous families, including some that live in heavily polluted areas on Colorado’s Front Range. They plan to take detailed measurements before, during and after inoculation, to see how the mycelium affects the soil, as well as the plants that will eventually grow in it. Based on these initial results, they hope to expand their mycoremediation work to other Indigenous farms and gardens—and, possibly, even to tribal lands.

They also want to use the soil remediation project to create hands-on educational opportunities for Indigenous communities, particularly Indigenous youth.

Garcia will spearhead the soil remediation work, which is slated to begin later this year. Then, after the mycelium works its magic, Avalos will investigate how the project is affecting Indigenous people.

“I’ll start collecting some oral histories, some ethnographic testaments about what this means to them,” says Avalos. “How is this confirming their relationship to land? How is it speaking to or shaping their religious life, their sense of identity, their Indigeneity? How is it that having restored soil is supporting their health and wellness and contributing to human flourishing?”

“We talk about decolonization as land repatriation, or the return of Indigenous lands to Indigenous people. But this is a form of rematriation, thinking about land as mother and returning to this relationship where you are tending to the health and well-being of the mother so that she can better attend to your health and well-being in return. Restoring that symbiotic relationship is profoundly impactful for families.”

Sovereignty and self-determination

Avalos is also curious to learn how soil remediation might contribute to sovereignty and self-determination for Indigenous people, especially those living in cities. Today, roughly 70% of American Indians and Alaska Natives live in urban areas—but this population is often overlooked.

“How is it that Native people can act as stewards of land, even though they often have less control over that land?” Avalos says. “They may be renters, they may be living in very polluted areas. But just to have that little bit of agency.”

Denver sits on the ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, the Cheyenne, the Ute and other tribes. But, today, the city is home to Indigenous people with a wide array of tribal backgrounds. This diversity largely stems from a federal program that pushed Native Americans away from reservations and into urban areas in the 1950s and ‘60s, as part of the government’s broader attempts to force Indigenous people to assimilate. Denver was one of nine relocation sites located across the country.

“For folks living in cities that have been impacted by displacement and disconnection, I want to document, how are they reconnecting? How are they re-Indigenizing?” Avalos says.

As the world grapples with pressing environmental issues, many Indigenous people are now looking to their sacred ways of life for answers. Long displaced from their lands and separated from their traditional cultural practices, they’re returning to ancestral medicines, deepening their relationships with all living creatures and opening themselves up to the knowledge that’s embedded in the land.

Avalos and Garcia hope their soil remediation project might play a small role in that broader work.

“We can’t count on the treaties, we can’t count on our federal leadership or even our state leadership to really protect us and protect land,” says Garcia. “My generation is looking at a grim future. We’re at a place where many of us are asking, how do we embody the Indigeneity and our sacred ways of knowing and being, and mesh that with an Indigenous futurism that will heal the planet and our people?”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about ethnic studies? Show your support.

Mushroom mycelium can clean up the soil. Can it also help Indigenous people reconnect to the land? CU �鶹ӰԺ researcher Natalie Avalos aims to find out.

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Top image: mycelium growing on a log (Photo: iStock)

Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies

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