For the Cheyenne, the Little Bighorn was not primarily Custer’s story.

It was the story of their people’s survival — of warriors and women who stood between the U.S.

Army and the families in the camp, who fought with everything they had for the right of their community to exist.

And in that story, a woman was central enough to give the battle its name.

The Battle of the Rosebud was, by most conventional military analysis, a tactical draw — Crook’s column was stopped but not destroyed, and both sides claimed some measure of success.

But in Cheyenne memory, it is remembered as the battle where a woman’s courage saved her brother’s life.

The military outcome is secondary to the human story.

This difference in historical framing — between the dominant American narrative that centers military figures and official outcomes, and the Cheyenne oral tradition that centers human moments and community values — is itself part of what makes Buffalo Calf Road Woman’s story important today.

She asks us to consider what history is for.

What it means to say that something “happened.” Whose experience of an event is considered primary.