The Native Woman Who Became A Chief — The Forgotten Story Of Woman Chief, The Warrior Who Led The Crow

Return, for a moment, to the songs.

The Crow sang songs about her victories.

They sang them in camp, at gatherings, after successful raids.

They sang them in the tradition that was the oral history of Crow military achievement — the tradition that remembered great warriors by name, that attached specific deeds to specific people, that made the past present through performance.

Those songs are gone.

The specific words, the specific melodies, the specific deeds they commemorated — these are not recoverable.

The tradition of sung history that preserved them within the Crow community did not survive the pressures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a form that recorded them for outside audiences.