She was not a chief.

She was a woman who fought, and whose fighting was witnessed by people who called her “a squaw” in their notes — when they noted her at all — and moved on.

At a deeper level, the dominant culture’s ideological frameworks made Buffalo Calf Road Woman literally difficult to see clearly.

The Victorian gender ideology of the 1870s did not accommodate the concept of a woman warrior.

Women were supposed to be passive, domestic, in need of protection.

The idea that a Cheyenne woman had ridden into battle to rescue her brother — and possibly fought at the Little Bighorn — simply did not fit the available categories.

When it was witnessed, it was marveled at as a curiosity rather than integrated into any larger understanding of who Cheyenne women were and what they were capable of.

And then there was the systematic suppression of Native cultural life that followed the reservation period.

The boarding school system, which forcibly removed Native children from their families and communities and forbade them from speaking their languages or practicing their traditions, was explicitly designed to destroy intergenerational knowledge transmission.

Generations of Northern Cheyenne children were removed from the communities where elders could teach them their history.