It changes the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

For nearly a hundred and fifty years, the Little Bighorn has been Custer’s story — “Custer’s Last Stand,” defined by his defeat, shaped by the need to explain and narrativize that defeat in terms that maintained his heroic status.

The battle has been fought over by historians and popular culture with an intensity that reveals how much the national self-image depended on a particular interpretation of it.

When you add Buffalo Calf Road Woman — when you put her at the center of the story, or even in the story at all — the battle looks different.

It is no longer primarily about Custer’s choices and Custer’s fate.

It is about the people who were defending their families, their community, their way of life.

It is about the women and men who stood between the United States Army and a camp full of children, who fought with everything they had because they had no choice.

It changes what we know about Native American women.

The image of Native American women as passive, peripheral, historically marginal — an image that has served to reduce and diminish Indigenous communities for generations — cannot survive the full story of Buffalo Calf Road Woman.

A woman who rode into gunfire to save her brother.