It is incomplete because recognition after the fact cannot give Marie Dorion the place in the national historical consciousness that she would have if her story had been told with appropriate attention when it was happening, or in the decades immediately after.

The reasons for the historical gap are structural, as this article has argued: the documentary record was created by and for the participants who were assumed to be the primary subjects of history.

The assumptions that shaped that documentary record were assumptions about gender and race and the relative significance of different kinds of experience.

Those assumptions are not the final word on what matters.

They are, themselves, historical artifacts: the products of a specific time and specific set of social arrangements, not timeless truths about what is or isn’t historically significant.