In the introduction, editor Chad Sweeney writes that “Maurice Kenny spent his life and career exploring the intersection of the Native American with the European. In interviews, essays, and personal conversations, Kenny often confessed that he was searching for himself in exploring these historical figures of contact. In his final work, Maurice Kenny interrogates that crisis of contact between European-American expansion and the free Cheyenne Nation, and especially the enigmatic woman, Monahsetah, the Cheyenne second “wife” to General George Armstrong Custer, whom the Cheyenne reviled . . . In tracing Monahsetah’s cultural negotiations, Kenny is perhaps, once more, trying to locate himself within that insoluble inquiry: after five centuries of massacre and exploitation, how may one's Native loyalties be reconciled to one's European roots? And what forms may resistance take?”
