They named a battle after her — and in that naming, they did something that the entire apparatus of official American historical memory failed to do for over a century.

They told the truth about who was there.

She was there.

She was one of the people whose courage shaped the events that shaped the history.

She was a woman, a sister, a wife, a mother, a warrior — someone whose life contained all the complexity and contradiction and love and courage that any human life contains, lived under conditions of extraordinary duress, in a world that was trying to destroy everything she belonged to.

She didn’t save her people.

No single person could have done that, against the forces arrayed against the Northern Cheyenne in the 1870s.

But she saved her brother.

And in the saving of her brother, she embodied everything the Northern Cheyenne were fighting for — the love of family, the protection of community, the refusal to let the people you love be taken from you without a fight.

She died young.