Once again, there’s trouble brewing at Custer Battlefield.

Fans of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer are up in arms to defend their deceased hero against Barbara Booher, the superintendent of the National Park Service’s Custer Battlefield Monument in Montana.

Although Booher, the park’s first American Indian administrator, might not seem a formidable foe alone, the Custer fans say she’s asking the unthinkable—what amounts to an objective view of history.

Specifically, Booher wants to erect a monument to the 100 Indians who died in the 1876 battle of Little Bighorn. Already, 225 marble markers are placed on the spot were the men of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry died.

But more importantly, Booher also wants park guides and museum pamphlets to give the 250,000 park tourists per year a more objective view of the famous—or infamous, if you prefer—battle.

As it is, historical markers throughout the park call the 250 slain cavalrymen “fallen heroes” and “brave cavalry men,” while the Sioux and Cheyene are referred to as “hostile Indians.”

This one-sided storytelling makes for Euro-centric tales about the wild West, but it also taints history, making it seem almost justifiable that these “rabble-rousing” Indians were killed.

And anyway, who wouldn’t be hostile if a bunch of guys on horses rode in one afternoon and tried stealing the land you lived on for centuries?

It’s time those who oppose Booher—namely the 4,600 members of three nation-wide historical societies devoted to Custer and the traditional interpretation of the Battle of Little Bighorn—ease up.

As a nation that calls itself a melting pot, we have an obligation to correct history’s short-sightedness when we realize it’s biased or wrong.

For centuries, Americans have taken pride in being unyielding defenders of what is “right,” but there’s no sense in being pig-headed when hindsight teaches us a lesson.

It would be an impossible task to fix all the injustices that happened in the 214-year history of the United States, but we can correct the way history is portrayed.

And critical thinking about American history is catching on ….a friend of mine just invited people to her “celebration of fall,” rather than a Thanksgiving dinner.

So what’s the difference? To her, celebrating Thanksgiving makes a mockery of the good will extended by the Indians.

Just years after teaching the Pilgrims how to survive the foreign environment of North America, the sentiment turned to “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Building an Indian monument at Little Bighorn isn’t flogging ourselves for bygone injustices, but a real-life lesson that there are two sides to every conflict.

Critical thinking can reveal many perspectives to the same issue. British historians could claim the Pilgrims were religious nuts and George Washington committed treason, just as American Indians could dispute that the West wasn’t won, but rather stolen.