This context matters for understanding Moving Robe Woman’s decision to ride into the battle.

She did not violate the norms of her society by doing so.

She acted within a tradition that, while it did not expect every woman to fight, recognized the possibility and honored women who did.

Her story is also part of a broader pattern of Indigenous women’s resistance to colonial violence.

From the eighteenth-century raids on New England settlements to the conflicts of the nineteenth-century plains to the twentieth-century political activism of figures like Anna Mae Aquash and Winona LaDuke, Native women have occupied positions of leadership, resistance, and sacrifice that American popular history has consistently underrepresented.

The movement to recover and center these stories is not a new phenomenon.