What Her Story Reveals About Native History

The story of Bíawacheeitchish challenges a specific set of misconceptions that have attached to popular understanding of Native American history, and naming those misconceptions explicitly is part of what makes her story valuable to tell.

The first misconception is that Native American women were uniformly subjugated, domestically confined, and politically invisible.

Denig himself expressed this view in his general statements about Crow women — “regarded in an inferior light in every way” — before then spending pages documenting the most remarkable exception to that general rule that he had ever personally encountered.

The general statement is an overstatement shaped by Denig’s own cultural assumptions; the specific documentation of Woman Chief’s life is more careful.