It is an independent and authoritative source, carried by the people who are most directly connected to the events — the descendants of the survivors of Sand Creek, of the Washita, and of the decades of displacement and deprivation that followed.

The oral tradition includes specific memories that the documentary record does not preserve: the experiences of survivors, the specific ways that different people understood what happened to them, the continuity between the nineteenth century and the present that the community experiences as lived reality rather than historical narrative.

For the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho community, the story of Black Kettle is not history in the sense of something that happened long ago and is now over.

It is a defining event in the community’s understanding of itself — of what it has survived, of what was done to it, of the specific forms of betrayal and loss that constitute the community’s collective experience.