The government offered to buy the Black Hills.

The Lakota refused to sell.

The government declared non-reservation bands hostile and launched the 1876 campaign.

The Northern Cheyenne were not party to the Fort Laramie Treaty in the same way — the treaty’s specific terms applied primarily to the Lakota — but they had their own treaty history, their own broken agreements, their own experience of promises made and violated.

The 1868 treaty had also included provisions relevant to the Cheyenne, and those provisions had not been honored any more faithfully than the Lakota provisions.

What the Cheyenne and Lakota leaders who gathered in the Little Bighorn valley in the spring of 1876 understood — what Buffalo Calf Road Woman and every warrior and woman in that camp understood — was that they were fighting for survival in the most literal sense.

This was not a war over territory in the conventional sense, in which two parties each had legitimate competing claims and a middle ground might exist.

From the perspective of the Native community, the treaties were clear, the violations were documented, and the government’s intention was not compromise but elimination — not of lives, perhaps (though Sand Creek had established what the Army was capable of), but of way of life, of cultural identity, of the right to live as Cheyenne or Lakota or Arapaho.

The resistance at the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn was not, from this perspective, aggression.

It was defense — of family, of community, of the right to exist on terms the community recognized as legitimate.