Languages in which stories were told were suppressed.

Ceremonies in which history was honored were forbidden.

Under these conditions, the survival of the memory of Buffalo Calf Road Woman was not guaranteed.

It survived because Northern Cheyenne people — in whatever spaces remained available to them — kept telling the story.

SECTION 13: THE REDISCOVERY — HOW HER STORY CAME BACK

The recovery of Buffalo Calf Road Woman’s story — its movement from the interior of Northern Cheyenne community memory into the wider public consciousness — happened gradually, and through the efforts of multiple people over several decades.

The earliest serious scholarly attention came from ethnographers and historians who worked with Northern Cheyenne community members in the mid-to-late twentieth century.

Researchers who took Indigenous oral testimony seriously — who went to the reservation, sat with elders, listened to what the community remembered, and then wrote about it in ways that credited the community’s knowledge — began to assemble a picture of Buffalo Calf Road Woman that the earlier military histories had missed entirely.

John Stands in Timber, a Northern Cheyenne historian who worked with anthropologist Margot Liberty to produce the landmark oral history “Cheyenne Memories,” published in 1967, included accounts that touched on women’s participation in the Plains conflicts.

This work, done in collaboration with the Northern Cheyenne community, preserved historical knowledge that might otherwise have been lost.