Category: Nation & World

CROW AGENCY, Mont. — As a child in South Dakota, Ernie LaPointe was told: Don’t tell anyone who your great-grandfather was.

If his neighbors or friends knew he was descended from Sitting Bull, the storied Hunkpapa Lakota leader, he would never have a normal childhood, his mother told him.

“‘There will be a time and place when you get the permission to do it,’” LaPointe, now 77, recalled his mother saying.

LaPointe kept mum until the early 1990s, when, he said, an aunt told him it was time to “come out from the shadows.”

Now he protects the legacy of Sitting Bull, who helped lead the resistance to the U.S. government’s seizure of the Great Plains and became perhaps even more famous in death than in life.

Almost 150 years ago, Sitting Bull’s followers defeated Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one of the most closely studied and hotly debated military clashes in American history. Sitting Bull is said to have had a vision that presaged a great victory, which came weeks later for warriors led by Crazy Horse.

More than a thousand miles south, in Arizona, Chip Custer’s lineage was not something he could have hidden, even if he wanted to.

He was born George Armstrong Custer IV, the great-great-grand-nephew of the famous lieutenant colonel. After his father (George Armstrong Custer III) died suddenly in 1991, Chip inherited the job of minding the legacy of a man who is among the most lionized, and vilified, figures in American history.

Chip Custer, 70, has long been familiar with the criticism — of Custer’s devastating offensive against the Cheyenne, of his military tactics, of his ego. He hopes people will try to view his relative in his full complexity, in light of his successes and in the context of his time.

“If someone wrote a thousand stories about me,” he added, “what would I end up looking like after all the time under the microscope?”

Last week, crowds converged where the Little Bighorn River snakes through grassy hills in southeastern Montana and where Custer and all of his men died during an attack on a Native American encampment on June 25, 1876. There were reenactments, ceremonies, and talk of a new visitor center scheduled to be completed in the coming months.

To the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and other tribes, the battlefield remains hallowed ground, a place of great triumph over a government that suppressed their way of life.

To historians, it remains an inexhaustible source for debate. Had one cavalry major been drinking? Was Custer undone by recklessness or flawed intelligence?

Chip Custer and Ernie LaPointe are students of the battle and fluent in its intricacies, but their interest is not simply in military history. It is based in a mission to preserve their family legacies.

“The blood of my great-grandfather is in me,” LaPointe said. “He cared for the people; he cared for everything. He even cared for the people who tried to kill him.”

Custer’s kin

Chip Custer first visited the battlefield in 1976, for the 100th anniversary of the battle, as a 21-year-old hippie with no expressed interest in family history. He drove up from college to surprise his father, a retired Army officer who had fought in three wars.

As they sat through a quiet ceremony near what is known as Last Stand Hill, the American Indian Movement leader Russell Means spoke out to celebrate the cavalry’s defeat.

“My father, of course, was incensed over the way that whole event went,” Custer said. “So that was my introduction.”

The national park was known as Custer Battlefield National Monument then, though Native American activists had begun to draw attention to the site’s narrow focus on the more than 260 U.S. deaths, part of a wider discussion of broken treaties and American expansionism.

White marble headstones peeked out of the grass across the haunting prairie to mark where soldiers had fallen. The same was not true for the 60 to 100 Native Americans who the National Park Service has estimated died that day.

“You’d see that powerful landscape out there and it was just the 7th Cavalry headstones,” said John Doerner, who was an historian at the battlefield for more than 20 years.

Perspectives were evolving. Chip Custer said his father recognized that depictions of their relative — long embraced by many as a gallant, fearless commander carrying out Washington’s will to push Native Americans toward reservations — had grown more complicated.

In 1970, the movie Little Big Man portrayed Custer as a vain commander who foolishly led his soldiers to slaughter. Chip Custer remembers watching it on an Arizona army base and that his red-faced father stormed out. His father was similarly upset in 1991 at a proposal to drop the family name from the site. He died of a heart attack just months before Congress rechristened it the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.

In the decades since, Chip has served as an occasional spokesperson for the Custer legacy, even as he ran a landscape design business and raised two daughters with his wife. Chip is descended from one of the famed soldier’s brothers, Nevin, whose health problems prevented him from joining the military. Two of George Armstrong Custer’s brothers died with him on the battlefield.

Chip has written about Custer’s rowdy days at West Point and his celebrated successes as a Civil War “boy general,” which included commanding the Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Battle of Gettysburg. He has spoken to groups of Custer buffs.

In 2021, he opposed calls to remove a Custer statue in Monroe, Mich., the lieutenant colonel’s hometown. In a letter to the City Council, Chip argued that Custer, in his writings, had recognized why Native Americans resisted the confinement of reservations and that he had unfairly become the “poster boy for all wrongs committed against the American Indians during our roughly 250 years as a nation.”

The council ultimately left the monument as is.

When it comes to that final battle, Chip Custer believes his relative unquestionably shoulders some blame for the outcome, though some point fingers at subordinates.

“I think he would, as any commander, accept full responsibility for how that all played out,” he said. “But I regret that we only remember him by the last day of his life.”

Sitting with history

For LaPointe, an Army veteran born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the challenge has been defending, not his relative’s legacy, but his own.

After LaPointe publicly embraced his lineage, he began representing the family at events like the 1992 dedication of a bronze bust of his great-grandfather to the National Hall of Fame for Famous American Indians, in Oklahoma. But in the face of competing claims, his connection was still closely scrutinized by the Smithsonian in the mid-2000s as it worked to repatriate some of Sitting Bull’s belongings. Once satisfied, the museum gave LaPointe a braid of Sitting Bull’s hair and a pair of wool leggings obtained by a doctor who had custody of the Lakota leader’s body after his death.

Sitting Bull was fatally shot in 1890 on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during a botched arrest by Native American police officers following orders from U.S. officials. In the years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the U.S. government had responded to the loss by escalating its efforts to force Native Americans onto reservations.

LaPointe’s ancestry was later scientifically confirmed by a Danish researcher, who did a DNA test on a small clipping of his great-grandfather’s hair. When the results were published, news of LaPointe’s lineage ricocheted across domestic and international media. It escalated the outreach he had long received from people who claim to be his long-lost kin.

“They call, they email, they come to the house,” said Sonja LaPointe, his wife of more than 30 years. “One guy from Wisconsin brought his Winchester to the house because he wanted to take a picture with Ernie.”

LaPointe was involved in the creation of an Indian memorial at the Little Bighorn battlefield, and in 2003 he attended the dedication of a sculpture by Colleen Cutschall, an Oglala-Sicangu Lakota artist. The bronze outline of warriors on horseback is level with the horizon, with the sky and grassy hills shining through the tableau.

With permission from park rangers, LaPointe had a pipe ceremony at the memorial that night and said he noticed something special in the air. “You could hear the horse hooves all around us,” he said.

LaPointe was also asked to share the oral histories he had heard as a child with Doerner, who worked to add red granite markers where Native American warriors fell.

LaPointe and Custer have each been to multiple events at the battlefield, but neither planned to attend the anniversary this week. Sonja LaPointe said her husband and Custer briefly crossed paths at a battlefield event years ago, but the men do not remember meeting.

Around 2007, LaPointe did speak with Chip’s uncle, Brice Custer, who called him after LaPointe gave a talk in George Armstrong Custer’s hometown.

Brice, who named one of his sons Garry Owen after the 7th Cavalry marching song, told LaPointe he had not felt well enough to make the trip but wanted to express how much respect he had for Sitting Bull.

“I said I appreciated his call,” LaPointe recalled, “and I don’t hold any animosities toward nobody.”

“‘It happened many years ago,’ I said. ‘I think we have to heal from that.’ He agreed.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said on Saturday that “multiple individuals” had been arrested for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and that problems with a more than $14 million renovation project had become so severe that the pool would have to be at least partly drained for “necessary repairs.”

The president’s announcement late Saturday, made on social media, was his starkest acknowledgment of the pool’s rapid deterioration in recent days. The water this week became covered by clouds of blooming algae, which were obscuring a floor that had just been painted a shade that Trump has called “American flag blue.” The paint then began to peel off, making it a tourist destination for unusual reasons.

Among those accused of vandalism was David Carter Hearn, 67, a cyclist and three-time Olympian as a canoeist who says he stopped at the site Friday just to have a look, then reached down to touch a strip of peeling blue paint mixed with the algae.

The U.S. Park Police arrested Hearn shortly after, accusing him of destroying government property, a crime that can carry up to a 10-year prison sentence. Hearn denies the charge.

“I was just a curious, concerned citizen,” he said in an interview. “I guess I was there at the wrong place, wrong time.”

The administration has not released the names of others accused of vandalizing the pool, a crime that Trump said Saturday could lead to “years in jail.” In a later post, he said without evidence that vandals had “poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”

The project, one of many Trump is undertaking around the capital as the United States nears its 250th birthday, has faced intense scrutiny, including from engineers and other experts who warned that the hastily undertaken project was unlikely to undo the problems that have plagued the pool for decades. A construction company tied to Trump was awarded a no-bid contract and painted the bottom of the pool.

Trump said Saturday that he had met with contractors earlier in the day to discuss the state of the pool.

The Interior Department said this week that agency workers had “killed the algae” that had expanded with heat and humidity. But on Friday afternoon, the water was stained by clumps of algae where National Park Service staff members had scrubbed away bright green blooms along the bottom of the basin. The pool’s new coating was also missing large sections, including a gap roughly the size of a park bench. Underneath appeared to be the original concrete basin.

Hearn, of Bethesda, Md., said that he was on a 50-mile bike ride before stopping at the pool, and that Park Police officers detained him for more than four hours Friday at a facility south of the National Mall without allowing a phone call. They also did not say more about why he had been arrested, he added. The White House and Park Police did not respond to requests for comment.

Late Friday, Trump claimed on social media that the “inside surface that was just installed” had been damaged by vandals.

Hearn said that he had “reached into the water to feel the characteristics” of a dislodged paint piece “still attached to the bottom.” He compared his actions to those of Jonathan Karl, an ABC News reporter who lifted a detached piece of paint at the pool Thursday in a video the news organization published.

“I didn’t remove anything,” Hearn said. “I was bending and feeling this 2-millimeter-thick, rubbery flap.”

Until his retirement 18 months ago, Hearn ran a company selling special materials for building canoes. That, he said, made him particularly interested in the materials contractors had used before the paint at the base of the pool began peeling.

Hearn said that he had already received offers of pro bono representation following his arrest.

“I’m getting a lot of support from my community,” he added.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — At sunrise, when the day’s first golden glow washes over the 29-foot-tall limestone Jesus atop Mount Cristo Rey, Lourdes Castañon feels the presence of the divine. “The rays catch it,” he said, “and, oh man, I think I’m touching the face of God.”

Countless pilgrims from around the world journey to the sacred site just on New Mexico’s side of the southwestern border, but Castañon fears for its future. At the mountain’s base, President Donald Trump wants to build his border wall, and the small Catholic diocese that owns the land is trying to stop it.

The Department of Homeland Security is attempting to use eminent domain to seize 14 acres of desert from the diocese, based in Las Cruces, N.M., so it can raise about 1.5 miles of new wall. The church claims a towering steel barrier would desecrate a holy landmark and violate the religious liberties of those who wish to worship there.

“It will look like a scar on Mother Earth,” said Castañon, 74, a volunteer with the Mount Cristo Rey Restoration Committee, an independent group that works to keep the site clean and accessible.

Homeland Security sued to wrest control of the land from the diocese last month, offering about $180,000 as compensation. The diocese, which had pleaded with the Trump administration to consider alternatives to a wall, countered in court, arguing that the lawsuit flouted the First Amendment and laws to further protect religious freedom.

“The wall is a physical manifestation of this government’s attitude toward migrants,” the diocese said Friday in a legal brief that detailed its arguments and included testimony from local bishops and others. “Nothing could be less Catholic.”

The ongoing federal case is the latest example of opposition to a border wall Trump wants to extend across the entire southern frontier. Since Trump’s first term, aggrieved landowners, environmentalists, and Native American tribes have fought the president’s barrier-building, tying up government lawyers in court.

The Trump administration has claimed broad authority over wall construction, but opponents have secured a few tentative wins, including this year in Texas’ Big Bend National Park, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection had to change plans after a bipartisan outcry.

Now, an administration that holds itself up as a defender of the devout is facing off with Catholics asserting their freedom of religion.

“This is not a battle between the church and the government; it’s a battle between symbols,” said Deacon Jim Winder, the chancellor of the diocese. “One is a 29-foot statue of Christ the King, which is meant to symbolize unity and hope, and the other is a 30-foot iron monstrosity that symbolizes exclusion and division. Our symbol was there first. The wall is an in-your-face insult.”

Customs and Border Protection has acknowledged Mount Cristo Rey’s significance, but the agency has argued that the site is also popular for drug smugglers and human traffickers. The mountain is the only stretch of land in the area not fortified with tall fencing — Cristo Rey was long considered a natural barrier — and the federal government now sees the gap as a security problem.

Part of the new segment will be built on federal land and the rest “will have no adverse impact” on Mount Cristo Rey, the government has said, because it won’t block the trail leading up to the Christ sculpture. Construction will occur several hundred feet below the statue.

“Anyone who spent 30 seconds examining a map of Mount Cristo Rey and the southern border would realize how ludicrous these claims are,” John B. Mennell, an agency spokesperson, said in a statement, referring to the church’s arguments.

Mount Cristo Rey, known also as Sierra de Cristo Rey, near El Paso, Texas, and the suburbs of Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez, saw its first pilgrim in the early 1930s, after a local priest, Father Lourdes Costa, gazed out his window at the distant peak and envisioned a soaring crucifix at its summit.

Costa made the challenging trek and shared his premonition with the Diocese of El Paso, which purchased the land from the state of New Mexico. In the nearly 90 years since the sculpture was completed, hundreds of thousands of faithful have traveled to the top, some on their knees and others barefoot, over rough ground studded with yucca and creosote.

It also attracted those looking to cross into the United States illegally. As migrant apprehensions soared, members of the restoration committee, among the mountain’s most frequent visitors, noticed an uptick in vandalism and crime at the site.

Not all of Mount Cristo Rey’s devotees oppose the wall. Ruben Escandon, whose parents and grandparents preceded him as Cristo Rey caretakers, worried that border-related safety concerns have held the site back from being considered one of the world’s premier Catholic attractions, like the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro.

He is opposed to Trump’s immigration agenda, he said, but the surrounding segments of the border wall are funneling migrants onto his cherished mountain. The barrier needs to be completed, he said.

“It has nothing to do with immigration policies; it has to do with keeping Mount Cristo Rey safe,” said Escandon, a former police officer who specializes in performing cross-border marriages. “Hopefully it will allow the traditional visitor to come without fear.”

But environmental and migrant rights groups say the new wall would disrupt a fragile desert ecosystem and make an already dangerous journey over the border more deadly.

The diocese said it respects the Trump administration’s authority to secure the area. When Border Patrol officials asked in recent years to carve a roadway through Cristo Rey property, the diocese agreed and charged the government nothing. The church has not objected to the agency’s use of sensors and cameras around the mountain.

But a wall is too far, Winder said.

Barrier construction elsewhere has threatened or destroyed other cultural sites, including a 1,000-year-old Native American etching that federal contractors mistakenly bulldozed in Arizona this year. And the blasting involved in building near Cristo Rey could damage the statue, he said.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have been pushing to accelerate the case, filing motions to condemn the property and take possession of it in quick succession. “Time is of the essence,” they argued, because the government has already contracted with construction companies and could be fined if the project is delayed.

“We’re just getting run over,” Winder said.

A Justice Department spokesperson, Natalie Baldassarre, said “the taking is authorized by law” and that it “will not impact activity or use of the shrine.”

Kathryn Brack Morrow, an attorney for the diocese, said the government’s urgency was not justified.

“This is a self-inflicted emergency,” Morrow said. “The diocese has raised weighty religious liberty concerns that warrant deliberate consideration.”

Contractors have already begun working at the base of Cristo Rey. On a recent morning, 15-year-old Fernanda Vazquez hiked up the winding trail with her family and looked down at the ribbon of dirt where the wall may soon be built.

“It just breaks my heart,” she said. “It just doesn’t seem right.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Colombians headed to the polls Sunday in the most polarized election in years, with voters choosing between the country’s governing leftist political movement and a President Donald Trump-endorsed right-wing outsider.

The vote pits Sen. Iván Cepeda, a longtime human rights activist and ally of President Gustavo Petro, the country’s first leftist president, against Abelardo De La Espriella, a former criminal defense lawyer who vows a sweeping crackdown on guerrilla groups and drug-trafficking gangs.

The high-stakes contest has drawn international attention following De La Espriella’s endorsement by Trump, who called Cepeda a “Radical Left Marxist.”

The move marks the latest instance of Trump endorsing right-wing candidates in Latin American elections as the region increasingly shifts toward the right, driven in part by concerns over rising insecurity.

Who are the candidates?

Cepeda, 63, is a senator and well-known advocate for victims of Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict. He was also part of the negotiations that led to Colombia’s landmark 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that was meant to help end that conflict.

Running as the candidate of Petro’s party, he has pledged to preserve many of his policies, including anti-poverty programs, land redistribution efforts, and negotiations with armed groups.

De La Espriella, 47, is a former high-profile criminal defense lawyer and businessperson with no previous political experience and who spent years living in Florida.

Nicknamed “El Tigre,” or “the tiger,” he has campaigned as an antiestablishment outsider, though he has long been close to Colombia’s right-wing political power elites as a lawyer.

Why has the vote spurred controversy in the U. S.?

Some of De La Espriella’s campaign promises echo policies pursued by other Latin American right-wing leaders, such as Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and Javier Milei of Argentina. His platform includes building 10 megaprisons, shrinking the state, and collaborating with the United States to combat drug trafficking.

He has also been known to legally pursue his opponents — including journalists. After he received Trump’s endorsement and the support of some Republican lawmakers, De La Espriella, a naturalized U.S. citizen, began warning that he would go after anyone who challenged him, with the assistance of the United States.

Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a memo saying that the presence of a progressive activist living in Arizona, Beto Coral, interfered with U.S. foreign policy after the activist criticized De La Espriella. Coral, 40, was detained by U.S. immigration authorities Tuesday, a move decried by Democrats in Congress and by rights groups.

What are voters focused on?

Along with complaints about Petro’s rocky four-year-term, voters cite concerns over crime and extortion and the growing power of armed groups in rural areas.

Violence surged even during the campaign, which saw a presidential hopeful assassinated, two De La Espriella campaign workers killed, and Cepeda’s running mate briefly kidnapped.

Critics say Petro’s flagship “Total Peace” strategy, which sought negotiated settlements with multiple armed groups, allowed those groups to grow stronger during ceasefires.

Humanitarian organizations say violence has reached its highest level since the 2016 peace accord, but Colombia remains far safer than it was during the height of the conflict in the 1980s and 1990s.

While De La Espriella says he will completely abandon peace talks and crush narcotrafficking groups within 90 days, Cepeda has said he will continue his own version of peace negotiations.

The election is also seen as a referendum on Petro’s presidency. Supporters credit his government with expanding social programs, and increasing the political visibility of historically marginalized groups.

But critics say his tenure has been marked not only by deteriorating security, but by a troubled state takeover of the health system and runaway spending that has left Colombia with a public debt that is at pandemic levels.

Why the first round of voting was a surprise

De La Espriella finished first in the opening round with 43.7% of the vote, compared with 40.9% for Cepeda.

The result surprised many analysts. Despite complaints, Petro has maintained approval ratings above 50% and has created a broad coalition of movements that support the left. Cepeda enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls into last month.

Yet many voters instead turned to De La Espriella, a political newcomer who promised a clean break not only with the left, but with traditional parties and the “same ones as always.”

Since the first round, most polls have shown De La Espriella holding the lead. However, analysts note that the right-wing candidate’s increasingly strident language has worried more middle-of-the-road Colombians, making it harder to predict whom undecided voters will support.

After May’s first round, Petro claimed electoral fraud without evidence, raising concerns that he could refuse to accept the results of Sunday’s election or call for protests.

When are results expected?

Polls were open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. local time. Preliminary results were expected within hours of the polls closing.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.