This geographical dispersion is another factor in understanding how knowledge of the burial might have been preserved or lost: the people who carried specific pieces of it were not all in the same place.

The Significance Of The Stars

Lakota spiritual life maintained a specific relationship to the night sky that is relevant to understanding the burial and its meaning.

The Lakota name for the Milky Way — Čhaŋkú Lúta, the Red Road — and the broader Lakota understanding of the stars as the spirits of the dead and as sources of spiritual guidance reflect a cosmological framework in which the relationship between the living and the dead extends into the sky.

The night sky above the burial site — wherever it is — holds the same stars it held in September 1877.