The obligations created by the treaties he signed — the real obligations, not just the symbolic ones — have not all been honored.

The Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people carry the consequences of those unfulfilled obligations today.

Black Kettle.

Cheyenne peace chief.

Survivor of one massacre, killed in another.

The man who raised the American flag at Sand Creek and was attacked anyway.

The man who sought protection at Fort Cobb and was killed three days later.

He deserves to be remembered, in the fullest sense — not as a footnote to Custer’s story or Sheridan’s story or the story of American western expansion, but as the central figure in his own story: a leader of extraordinary courage and commitment who was destroyed by the failure of others to honor what they had promised.