Some have noted that the oral tradition is inherently variable — that different accounts from different community members contain different details, and that the story has evolved in its telling over generations.

This is not a reason to dismiss the tradition; all historical sources evolve in their transmission, including written ones.

But it is a reason to hold specific claims carefully.

Some have pointed out that multiple women were observed in the fighting at Little Bighorn — the battle was fought at the edge of a camp full of warriors and their families, and there are accounts from various sources of women fighting in the defense of the camp.

Identifying any specific action by any specific woman in the chaos of that battle is genuinely difficult.

Others have emphasized what is not disputed: that Buffalo Calf Road Woman was present at the Rosebud, that her act there is well-attested, that she was in the Little Bighorn camp community, and that the Cheyenne oral tradition regarding her role at the battle represents genuine historical memory — even if the specific detail of striking Custer cannot be corroborated by other sources.

What is clear, regardless of the specific details of her role at Little Bighorn, is this: the Northern Cheyenne remember her.

They have always remembered her.

In a community that was stripped of so much — land, horses, children taken to boarding schools, ceremonies forbidden, languages suppressed — the memory of Buffalo Calf Road Woman survived.

That survival is itself a form of historical testimony.