She was recognized as such by the people she led.

She held a council seat.

She participated in the governance of a sovereign nation.

She built a war record that exceeded what most male warriors achieved.

She was celebrated in songs that her community sang.

And she is known today primarily through a fur trader’s ethnographic notes and a frontiersman’s fictionalized memoir.

That disproportion is not an accident.

It is the product of specific historical choices — choices about whose lives to document, whose achievements to celebrate, whose stories to teach.