Black Kettle’s specific role in the story — as a peace chief who had just been at Fort Cobb seeking protection, who was killed in his own camp along the reservation boundary — is now part of the site’s official interpretation.

The acknowledgment of this specific context represents a significant evolution in how the American government represents this history.

The Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma maintain their tribal sovereignty and their cultural traditions in the area that was assigned to them by the Medicine Lodge Treaty — the territory that Black Kettle signed away his people’s broader claims to receive, and in which his descendants continue to live.

The memory of Black Kettle is preserved within that community in the ways that community memory works — in stories told across generations, in ceremonial contexts, in the naming of places and the keeping of specific traditions.