The shift from the Custer-centered monument to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument is part of the larger transformation in how American culture has grappled — slowly, incompletely, but genuinely — with the actual history of what happened on the northern Great Plains in the 1870s.

ORAL TRADITION AND THE SURVIVAL OF HER STORY

Moving Robe Woman’s story survived for two reasons: her own testimony, recorded in at least one documented interview, and the oral tradition of the Hunkpapa Lakota people who knew her story and kept it.

Oral tradition is often dismissed by Western historical practice as unreliable — too subject to variation, embellishment, and the passage of time to serve as credible historical evidence.

But for the events of June 25-26, 1876, the oral traditions of the Lakota and Cheyenne have repeatedly proved more accurate about the specifics of the battle than the assumptions the U.S. military made in the immediate aftermath.