For days now I've been trying to write about seeing the The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. I don't know why I'm having so much trouble. Why, in the first place, did I want to go there? What did I think I would see, or find?

I'm sure death had something to do with it. That Great Separation, the Great Mystery—every death, every time. And this battlefield, a place of violent death in large numbers, connected to other violent deaths, like the women and children and old ones slaughtered in the snow not long before, or far away.

In the area of this national monument, the map is busy with battlefields. The dark pall lingering from these places cannot be mapped, but spreads over time into all our lives, far beyond the anniversary when survivors or representatives from both sides meet and shake the very hands that once were raised against each other.

A few months ago, there was a tv show about modern forensic methods being used on artifacts found at various locations of this battleground. Thus they were able to more accurately establish where this person or that one fell, and perhaps better understand the events of those days. But why does it matter? Why do I want to know that each white stone and each Indian marker is in the right place? And I too want to see the belts, the spent bullets, the wrinkled or torn clothing, the picture of the loved one carried next to the heart. Does it bring us closer to that person in the moment he moved with so many others away from life as we know it?

What did I expect to find of Abraham Lincoln, when as a teenager I got in line and waited to see, under hard plastic, the pillow stained with that dying man's blood? What is this yearning? To join in spirit, to comfort, to stand in awe, to show respect, to change the course of things as we participate in imagination? To become all the people we can hold inside as we expand into ourselves?

A Clash of Cultures our brochure says. Today, those edges are softening, as the fiber of each culture emerges patterned by the other, though still strained. It is strange to come from my country, with whose battles and forced or chosen migrations I am familiar, to this country whose history holds no emotion for me. Where there are signs along the way that indicate land of various First Nations peoples, and signs and brochures for Native Cultural Centers inviting us to visit. In my state of open ignorance I welcome the diversity, knowing that here there is also pain and grief and a long slow mending underway. I enter the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network programming and rest in the slower pace, the talking and long periods of listening rarely found in television today.

The tragic confrontations across the broad landscape of human history do not easily lie down and rest in peace. But sometimes the land itself, traversed without the burden of historical facts, engulfs us in its own monumental story.