ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on ethnographic and archival research conducted during the summer of 1994 to explores the asymmetrical cultural histories and hierarchical relations produced at the monument through commemorative exclusion and segregated stories. It argues that the local patterns and precepts of imperial recollection that emerge at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument construct asymmetrical histories, incommensurable cultures, and hierarchical relations. Studies of the intersections of colonialism and culture in Africa and Asia have tended to neglect the contemporary United States, whereas those studies concentrating on American culture have all but ignored the ways in which mnemonic technologies shape American colonial contours. Within the memorials at the monument, the complex constructions of the nation-state, the citizen subject, and the past demand the commemorative exclusion of the Native American combatants, as well as the hierarchical ordering of the American forces.
