The more interesting question is the one that Denig was trying to ask — badly, in the vocabulary of his era, but genuinely.

How did a person with this specific combination of abilities, in this specific cultural context, build this specific form of authority?

What does that tell us about how Crow society actually worked?

What does it tell us about the relationship between individual capability and social structure?

What does it tell us about how authority is built and recognized in societies that don’t have rigid hierarchies based on birth or wealth?

These are questions that her life answers, concretely and in detail, in ways that no amount of general theorizing can.