The reservation encompasses approximately four hundred and fifty thousand acres in the Tongue River valley of southeastern Montana, a landscape that, while much reduced from the vast ranges the Northern Cheyenne once traveled, at least includes pieces of the country they have always called home.

The Northern Cheyenne Nation today has a population of approximately eleven thousand enrolled members, with about five thousand living on the reservation.

They have a tribal government, a tribal college, schools, cultural programs, and — crucially — ongoing efforts to revitalize the Cheyenne language, which the boarding school era had nearly destroyed.

The language revitalization effort is one of the most important things happening in Northern Cheyenne communities today.

The Cheyenne language carries within it not just communication but history — the specific words and phrases in which oral traditions like the story of Buffalo Calf Road Woman were preserved, the ceremonial vocabulary without which certain rituals cannot be properly performed, the ecological knowledge encoded in the names of plants and animals and places.

When a language dies, it doesn’t just lose its speakers.

It loses everything that was uniquely expressible in that language — everything that could be said precisely in Cheyenne and only approximately in English.

The people working to revitalize Cheyenne are not just preserving a communication system.

They are preserving the interior world of a people — the forms of thought and memory and relationship that have made the Northern Cheyenne who they are.

And among the things carried in that language, in those forms of memory, is the story of Buffalo Calf Road Woman.