CROW AGENCY — Little Big Horn College Library employees are expressing frustration following a recent decision by President Donald Trump's administration to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion content across military and government online platforms, which resulted in the removal of many webpages highlighting contributions of Native American military members, including Chief Joseph Medicine Crow.
“We've endured so much already,” said Danetta Jane Half-Holds, an audio and visual technician whose work revolves around preserving the history of the Crow Tribe.
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Half-Holds emphasized that the loss of historical narratives is frustrating.
“I don't know why they did that because there's hardly any to begin with,” Half-Holds said on Tuesday.
Half-Holds has many family members who served in the military, including her father.
"My ex-husband was in the Army. He was stationed in Germany. My brother at the end was in Vietnam, too. And then my uncle was shot in Germany," she said. "So, it's, yeah, my family's in military. My son was in Afghanistan."
Recent searches on the U.S. Army website reveal a drastic reduction in available articles about Native American contributions to military history. A search on the U.S. Army website for the term "Native American" showed several articles, many on Native American Heritage Month, had been erased.
“I think it’s a mistake. It’s part of history, and Native Americans have contributed a lot to American history,” said Jon Ille, the archivist at Little Big Horn College. "I think it's kind of whitewashing, literally, those things in history that are important, and people should know about them."
Among the missing articles is one about Chief Joseph Medicine Crow, a significant figure celebrated for his military achievements, as well as his cultural impact.
“Joe was kind of a model, and he was highly accomplished in both the Native and the white worlds," said Tim Bernardis, director of the Little Big Horn College Library. "I was pretty disgusted by it, taking that down.”
Here is what the Medicine Crow article used to look like:
Now, this is what the article looks like. Only an error message remains.
It's the latest example of purges of DEI content from military websites. Recently, a story about Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to play in Major League Baseball, was removed from the U.S. Army site (Robinson was a World War II veteran) before being restored following backlash. Several stories about Native American Code Talkers were also removed, but some seem to have been republished following more criticism.
Bernardis has worked as the library director at Little Big Horn for 40 years and has dedicated his life to Indian education.
“Are you just wiping the original owners' inhabitants of this country off the face of the map?” Bernardis said.
Storytelling is a vital part of Native culture, and Half-Holds highlighted the importance of oral history.
“Oral history is how we learned. It wasn't from a book,” she said. “They tried to kill all of us. And yet we're still here. So yeah, we're here to stay. We're not going anywhere.”
