Among the most important sources for Lozen’s story are the accounts of people who had known her as children and who were still alive when Eve Ball conducted her interviews in the mid-twentieth century.

These survivors — people like James Kaywaykla, who had been a child during the Victorio War — were the living links between the events of the 1870s and 1880s and the documentation of those events that began to be produced in the twentieth century.

The survivor accounts are invaluable but also deeply shaped by the specific experience of survival.

The people who lived through the Apache Wars, the prisoner years, and the reservation period had experienced a level of trauma and disruption that shaped how they remembered and told their stories.

They had also lived through the decades when telling their stories could have consequences — when speaking openly about the resistance and about the people who had fought in it might be seen as incitement or as challenging the official narrative.