From the time that the Apsáalooke, or Crow peoples, captured the ten-year old girl named Bar Chee Ampe from the Gros Ventre Nation around 1806, she demonstrated interest
in performing the activities of boys. Her foster father therefore treated her as his son and taught her to ride horses and to hunt game with a hunting bow and a rifle. Like many other Native American peoples, the Apsáalooke believed that gender-nonconforming individuals, whom colonial explorers called berdaches, offered unique contributions to their people by serving as artisans, shamans, and spiritual intermediaries. As Bar Chee
Ampe grew older, she assumed leadership for
her foster family’s lodge; became known as biawacheeitchish, or “woman chief,” to the Apsáalooke people; and orchestrated valiant incursions against the enemy Blackfoot Confederacy. Following the Apsáalooke warrior tradition, she eventually attained enough property and prestige to take four tribal women to serve as her wives. “Strange country this,” Montana trapper Edwin T. Denig wrote, “where… women turn men and mate with their own sex!”

Pine Leaf (Dakota), photographer unknown; ca. 1850.
Courtesy the George V. Allen Collection of Native Americans and the American Frontier at the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, item 09986200. Sources: Denig, Edwin Thompson; John C. Ewers, ed. Five Indian
Tribes of the Upper Missouri: Sioux, Arickaras, Assiniboines,
Crees, Crows. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma, 1961. Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.