AMNA NAWAZ: It's been 150 years since the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one of the most famous and enduring events in American history.

While Native Americans were victorious, Judy Woodruff reports on how the battle reshaped the government's policy towards indigenous people, and why it still resonates so deeply for so many today.

It's part of her series Crossroads: America at 250.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Along this stretch of sweeping prairie on the Crow Reservation in Montana, members of more than a dozen Native American tribes have gathered for what's known as a Victory Ride.

It commemorates the end of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, or what Native Americans here often refer to as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.

TRINA LONE HILL, Oglala Sioux Tribe: I still look at it as a moment in history that we should be proud of.

They're the last ones to surrender.

They're the last ones to come onto the reservations and accept our new fate, basically.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Trina Lone Hill, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota, helped organize the Victory Ride.

She says she's been coming to this annual event for more than 30 years and hearing stories of her ancestor Susie Shot-In-the-Eye.

TRINA LONE HILL: My great-great-great-grandmother fought here alongside her husband and her sons.

And so I continue to tell that to my children.

This is why we're here.

This is why we fight.

MAN: This is the 150th anniversary, and it's good to see everybody here.

JUDY WOODRUFF: One hundred and fifty years later, it's an especially poignant moment for Native Americans, as the nation celebrates its own anniversary, 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document that culminates with a list of grievances against the British crown and refers to Native Americans as merciless Indian savages.

NED BLACKHAWK, Author: One of the things about the founding is that, when you establish something, it creates enduring legacies.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Ned Blackhawk is an historian at Yale University and the author of "The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S.

History."

NED BLACKHAWK: That grievance is something obviously that Native Americans have a lot of trouble with, myself included, because it is vilifying and homogenizing and representing indigenous Americans as if they were other than American.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It's a giant contradiction.

NED BLACKHAWK: It's a giant contradiction.

It's an enormous paradox that sits at the heart of America.

These are the most misunderstood subject of American history, and we need to understand them to understand ourselves more fully.

DONOVAN TAYLOR, Researcher: We're still here today.

We persevered the Europeanism and colonialism and we're adapting.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Donovan Taylor is a Northern Cheyenne tribal member and a researcher for "The History They Tell," an oral history project that interviewed hundreds of descendants of Native Americans and First Nations people who fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

LEON EAGLE TAIL, Gros Ventre Tribe: This battlefield is just a reminder of what we can accomplish if we all get together.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Leon Eagle Tail and Chester Whiteman traveled from Washington state and Oklahoma to be here.

They joined thousands of other Native Americans from across the country who set up camps and teepees along the banks of Montana's Little Bighorn River.

CHESTER WHITEMAN, Cheyenne Tribe: We have always been like a second-class citizen.

We weren't citizens until 1924.

But we were here before anybody else came.

LEON EAGLE TAIL: We experienced a great genocide.

We are recovering.

But a lot of times, it takes things like this to help us remember what we went through.

JUDY WOODRUFF: This remembrance includes a reenactment of the famous battle that started after the U.S.

Army's Seventh Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer attacked a village of mostly Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho Native Americans who had gathered in defiance of orders to return to reservations, the military's goal, to force these nomadic tribes back onto reservations as the United States continued to push farther West.

DONOVIN SPRAGUE, Lakota Sioux Historian: The big thing was gold in the Black Hills.

See, two years before this, Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills, so there was a push to take that land.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Donovin Sprague is a Lakota historian and a descendant of both Chief Hump and the legendary Native American warrior Crazy Horse, both of whom fought here.

DONOVIN SPRAGUE: We had a very big village just right over here that was just kind of like bursting at the seams.

And then as soldiers came in and were detected, they come out to meet that resistance.

After that, it was a big turning point.

The soldiers were dismounted, and they're just running to Last Stand Hill.

JUDY WOODRUFF: More than 260 U.S.

soldiers were killed, including Custer, who is believed to have died here on what is now known as Last Stand Hill.

But it was a victory that would soon bring devastating consequences.

NED BLACKHAWK: It's tragically ironic that the defeat of this relatively small party in Montana will set in motion a policy reform that convinces the federal government that it has to do more aggressive intrusions into Indian country.

And it begins punishing these recalcitrant tribal members, as it sees it, in ways that are unprecedented, the removal of children to the boarding schools, the subdivision of their lands, and begin a process of what is known as Americanization that tragically dismantles essential economies, often governments, and even family relations across Indian country.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It's a history that many Native Americans say the nation has yet to fully reckon with.

CHESTER WHITEMAN: Declaration of Independence, we're still classified as savages.

That needs to change.

There's a lot of things that need to change, because we're not savages.

We're human beings.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And this legacy of mistreatment continues to cast a long shadow.

Today, Native Americans have the highest poverty and lowest life expectancy rates of any racial or ethnic group in the United States.

LEON EAGLE TAIL: From the Trail of Tears to being put on the reservation in Oklahoma called Indian Territories, to where they put us on reservations here, that's the reason why this battle took place, because they had orders to put us back on the reservations.

It's no different than the concentration camps that the Jews had to survive in Germany, no difference.

JUDY WOODRUFF: After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, more Western lands would be taken.

And Ned Blackhawk says, even in defeat.

George Armstrong Custer would become an emblem of American identity, portrayed in countless advertisements... NARRATOR: Errol Flynn in his greatest role.

JUDY WOODRUFF: ... and in feature films like the 1941 Western "They Died With Their Boots On," starring Errol Flynn.

NED BLACKHAWK: The West becomes after 1876 the most imagined region of the United States.

And Custer becomes one of its most singular figures.

So this vision of Custer in many ways becomes a vision of America itself.

WOMAN: Introduce yourself.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But today there are new efforts to begin changing that vision.

WOMAN: Just talk to each other like you guys are at home, OK?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Native American journalists urged tribal members to record their own family histories and stories of ancestors who fought here.

And for those we spoke with, it was a time for reflection.

DONOVAN TAYLOR: I don't like that feeling of animosity.

I want to be at peace.

Our ancestors already done that.

Why should we have to do that too?

JUDY WOODRUFF: And for many others, it was a moment to acknowledge both the pain of the present while remaining hopeful about the future.

TRINA LONE HILL: You know, I see so much despair on the reservation.

We talk -- there's so much -- countless stories about poverty and alcoholism and suicide, all of these things that are modern problems.

I want to see -- I want to bring our kids out of that.

I want them to feel this pride.

I want them to I guess get a different perspective.

LEON EAGLE TAIL: We are the survivors, him and me.

We survived.

But we want our children and grandchildren to thrive.

So that's why I'm here.

CHESTER WHITEMAN: Everybody talks about healing and things like that.

But both parties have to heal together.

And for a long time, it wasn't like that.

Nobody would stick the hand out to try to help the other side.

And, today, it's starting to turn, where everybody wants to hear our story, the real story.

JUDY WOODRUFF: A story still being written, as the nation marks its 250th anniversary.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Judy Woodruff in Crow Agency, Montana.