'It was a massacre': Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders push to rename Oklahoma site

As the sun rose on a cold morning in 1868, hundreds of U.S. soldiers, led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, attacked Cheyenne families camped for the winter along the Washita River. 

Stories passed down by survivors recount what happened as a massacre. Other evidence backs them up.

Yet when people visit the land today, the first thing they see is its official name: Washita Battlefield National Historic Site.

Cheyenne leaders asked Congress in the 1990s not to label the place where dozens of their ancestors were killed in a surprise attack as a battle. The name stuck, though, and the National Park Service has managed the western Oklahoma site ever since. Now tribal leaders are renewing their push for “battlefield” to go amid a broader reckoning by the U.S. government to reconsider racist or otherwise offensive landmark names and how they came to be.