Custer rides again in Happy Meal

RAPID CITY, S.D. — Say it isn’t so! Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer has invaded Lakota country again, this time through the Happy Meals sold to little children at McDonald’s.

Bobbie DuBray, administrative assistant for the Lakota Peoples Law Project, was not only shocked by this apparent display of racial insensitivity but also angered by it.

DuBray said, “I went through the drive-through ... to get a Happy Meal for my 5-year-old son. I got home and my brother opened the meal and found the Custer doll.” She said he then asked her to come and look at what he found. To her shock it was Custer toy. Her son wanted the toy and she told him, “No. that’s a bad toy.” She said that her 10-year-old daughter did not understand why the toy was bad. She and her mother, Betty Handley, then gave the girl a history lesson “My daughter was not taught about this in school. What are they teaching our children?” she asked.

DuBray, visibly upset by this experience, said, “I think it’s insulting. It’s like handing out KKK dolls in the South where there are a lot of African-Americans.”

Impressionable children

Belva Morrison, Indian child welfare specialist for the Lakota Law Project, said, “It is insensitive for local merchants to hand out these dolls where there is a large Indian population. They should have thought twice about promoting these figurines. I don’t believe we’re overacting. I think we are not tolerating things like this anymore. They’re targeting young kids whose minds are easily impressed.”

Pam Duncan, executive director for United Sioux Tribes, when asked about the Custer figurines said, “Why are they honoring Custer? I don’t know how they (McDonald’s) could be so insensitive. Especially the way we are experiencing racism right now. That’s teaching our kids the wrong culture.”

Custer is best known to the Lakota as an “Indian killer,” and as the man who attacked an encampment of the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho at the Little Big Horn and paid the ultimate price for this folly. He was the head of the 7th Cavalry unit that attacked a sleeping camp of Cheyenne/Arapaho on the Washita in Oklahoma, ruthlessly slaughtering men, women and children.

Josh Ullmark, restaurant manager of the McDonald’s in Rapid City most frequented by Indians, said he was aware that the Custer figurines were being distributed in the Happy Meals. When Ullmark was asked for a comment, he offered an 800 number for McDonald’s Midwest Regional Office in Peoria, Ill., and refused to comment.

The Happy Meal prize shows the man they labeled “General Custer” (he was a lieutenant colonel) riding a motorcycle and his figurine is accompanied by a card explaining a bit of Custer’s history. “Ever hear of Custer’s last stand? It was named after George Armstrong Custer who lead (their spelling) his troops into the battle at Little Big Horn,” the card reads.

The question that immediately came to the mind of Jason Wolters, an Oglala Lakota, was, “I don’t think the big shots at McDonald’s realize what an insult this is to the Lakota people. Here was a man responsible for the death of many Lakota and a man responsible for discovering the gold that eventually led to the theft of the Sacred Black Hills of the Great Sioux Nation, and they have the audacity to hand out his likeness to children here in Rapid City, a town now fighting to prove it is not a racist community?”

Obvious insult

Wolters compared the insult to putting a figurine of Adolf Hitler in a McDonald’s Happy Meal served in Israel. “Most white people would never understand our perspective on this horrible faux paux, but to every Indian in America, the insult is obvious,” he said.

I tried to get a comment from the bigwigs at McDonald’s to no avail. They kept shoving up the food chain until it ran out. The chief bigwig remained silent.

Yesterday several customers, white and Indian, visited different McDonald’s shops in Rapid City and ordered Happy Meals. They soon discovered their packets did not contain a Custer figurine and motorcycle.

X Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the founder and first president of the Native American Journalists Association and is now the publisher of the Native Sun News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.