This is consistent with everything else known about her — she had spent her life taking significant personal risk in pursuit of military goals, and the risk structure of a peace mission was not fundamentally different from the risk structure of a raid.

She went toward danger because that was what she did.

The Gender Frameworks and Their Limits

The historical literature on Woman Chief has struggled with the question of how to describe her gender identity and her relationship to Crow gender norms, and an honest account of this struggle is part of understanding the challenges of telling her story.

Early accounts, including Denig’s own, used the framework of “gender reversal” — the idea that she had taken on a male role while being a female person.

This framework assumes a fixed binary of male and female roles, treats her choices as a departure from a norm, and positions her as an anomaly.