The Amazon comparison was also a way of exoticizing her — of placing her outside the normal order of things rather than understanding her within the specific Crow context that had produced her.

It said, in effect: this is a wonder, a curiosity, a thing outside ordinary human experience.

It did not say: this is what it looks like when the Crow system of meritocratic leadership recognizes exceptional capability in someone the system wasn’t designed to accommodate.

The exoticization of Woman Chief in these accounts is one of the reasons her story has been difficult to situate correctly.

If she is understood as a wonder — as a mythological Amazon, as an oddity, as an exception so extreme as to be outside normal human experience — then her story becomes a curiosity rather than evidence.