SECTION 15: WHAT HER STORY CHANGES — RETHINKING NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN’S HISTORY

Buffalo Calf Road Woman’s story is not an exception to the history of Native American women.

It is a window into a history that has been systematically obscured.

The popular image of Native American women in the era of the Indian Wars — shaped largely by depictions in American popular culture from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth — was reductive and deeply distorted.

Native women were typically portrayed either as passive victims of the wars around them, or as exotic figures defined entirely by their relationship to the men in their communities.

Their agency, their complexity, their individual heroism — all of this was erased.

This erasure served ideological purposes.

The narrative of the Indian Wars required Native peoples to be, in some fundamental way, less than fully human — simpler, more savage, less capable of the individual moral courage and complex decision-making that Western culture attributed to fully-realized human beings.

Women who rode into battle to save their brothers, who fought in the defense of their communities, who demonstrated courage that exceeded that of the professional soldiers opposing them — these women didn’t fit the narrative.

The historical record, however — when it is constructed honestly, using Indigenous sources as well as American documentary ones — shows a very different picture.