White Bird, who reportedly expressed his refusal to surrender partly through contempt for the army’s assurances and partly through his distrust of the promises being delivered, was not simply refusing the army.

He was refusing a message delivered by nimíipuu men who had made different choices than he had.

The internal divisions of 1877 — between treaty and non-treaty bands, between those who saw accommodation as survival and those who saw accommodation as surrender, between those who stayed and those who fled — were not resolved at Bear Paw.

They persisted into the reservation period, into the twentieth century, and in some form into the present in the complex internal politics of the tribe.

The Other Leader: Looking Glass’s Arc