A woman named for a moving robe or a walking blanket carried in her name something about the way she moved through the world — though the precise significance of the name in her specific case is not documented in the sources available to historians.

What is documented is that she kept her name, that it was passed down in the accounts of the battle, and that it has survived to the present.

In a historical record that reduced most Lakota women to invisibility, the preservation of her name is not a trivial thing.

The diacritical marks in the Lakota spelling — the Ȟ, the ȟ, the marks that distinguish Lakota phonemes from anything in standard English orthography — represent a language that survived the systematic effort to destroy it.

The boarding school system that removed generations of Native children from their families and punished them for speaking their languages did enormous damage to Lakota.