The novel’s conclusion uses a multi-layered structure—an epistolary journal, a Codicil, and an Epilogue—to transform May Dodd’s personal record into a historical text. This framework critiques the creation of official narratives and champions the power of personal testimony. May’s first-person account ends abruptly with her death, a narrative rupture underscoring the violence that silenced her. The journal becomes a physical testament to this violence; the bullet that kills May first passes through its pages, leaving a hole Abbot Anthony notes is “soaked with the dried blood of May Dodd” (291). The survival of the text signifies the resilience of truth. This moment highlights the connection between testimony and embodiment, turning May’s body and her writing into indistinguishable vessels of memory. The damaged journal stands as both artifact and wound, representing the archive as a site of suffering as well as preservation.

The narrative shifts to Abbot Anthony’s Codicil, an external account that provides the resolution her own story was denied. Anthony’s belated narration, filtered through religious contrition, converts witness into confession, positioning him as a stand-in for a nation seeking retrospective moral clarity. Decades later, the Epilogue brings the story into the modern era with May’s great-grandson seeking the truth his family suppressed. The journey of the notebooks—from diary to a sacred object within the Cheyenne’s’ Sweet Medicine bundle and finally to a tool of reconciliation—charts their symbolic apotheosis. By integrating a white woman’s history into the tribe’s most holy collection of artifacts, the Cheyenne redefine their sacred history, absorbing May’s story into their own cultural legacy. The novel thus closes by collapsing personal, tribal, and national histories into one continuous moral ledger, suggesting that reconciliation is possible only through the acknowledgment of shared trauma.

In these final sections, the narrative dismantles the binary of civilized versus uncivilized, revealing that brutality is a fundamental component of the American expansionist project. This collapse is catalyzed by parallel atrocities. The first is the return of the Kit Fox warriors with the severed hands of Shoshone infants. This act of “savagery” horrifies the white women. May’s reaction—“Barbarians! You will burn in Hell! Bourke was right…” (278)—articulates the apparent confirmation of a prejudiced worldview. However, this event is immediately compared with the US Army’s massacre of the peaceful village. The attack violates the trust established by a white flag of surrender and is executed with cold, military efficiency. Captain Bourke personally executes the unarmed Horse Boy, the child who had just saved May’s life. The comparison of these two acts of violence exposes the violence of both cultures under extreme conditions, but only one—the US Army’s—carries the authority of the state and the illusion of righteousness. Fergus uses this contrast to suggest that patriotism is often used to excuse and institutionalize violence.

May’s death at the hands of Bourke’s forces creates an irony that forces a reevaluation of the concept of civilization. This reversal demonstrates that atrocity is not the failure of civilization but its logical extension; technological order amplifies cruelty rather than restraining it. The novel presents the Cheyenne atrocity not to condemn a people, but to show that their violence operates within a specific cultural logic. The army’s violence, in contrast, is an act of indiscriminate extermination, an expression of a “civilization” that ultimately destroys the very people it purported to assimilate. By staging these events sequentially, the text demands a moral comparison between intention and consequence, revealing that moral accountability cannot be measured by cultural affiliation. Bourke’s dual role as protector and executioner personifies the contradictions of American idealism, exposing how reason and brutality coexist within imperial authority.

The theme of Female Agency in Patriarchal Systems reaches its redefinition as the narrative shifts from proactive defiance to desperate acts of survival and bearing witness. Early in Notebook VII, May and Gretchen’s construction of a women’s sweat lodge represents a conscious subversion of a male-dominated custom. This episode reclaims spiritual practice as a space for women’s communal healing, suggesting that ritual can function as an assertion of intellectual and bodily autonomy. The subsequent massacre, however, renders such assertions of autonomy moot. In the face of annihilation, agency is stripped to its most essential form: the preservation of life and legacy. This is illustrated in May’s final actions—sacrificing a mare to warm an infant and using her last moments to record the truth of the attack. Her composure amid physical collapse reframes authorship as resistance, proving that the will to testify can persist even when physical survival cannot. Phemie finds her ultimate expression of agency in dying as a warrior, a final act of self-definition. Her death in combat extends the novel’s argument that moral strength can emerge through defiance rather than endurance, aligning physical courage with the intellectual courage May embodies through writing. The Codicil details the divergent fates of the survivors, illustrating that there is no single path for female resistance. Martha’s return to Chicago is a pragmatic form of agency focused on her son’s survival, while the Kelly twins’ turn to retaliatory violence represents a traumatized rejection of societal norms. Ultimately, the most enduring act of agency is May’s, achieved posthumously through the preservation of her journal and the survival of her daughter.

The birth of May’s daughter, Wren, functions as the final culmination of Cultural Incomprehension and the Failure of Assimilation. The BFI program was predicated on a crude theory of biological mixing, but Wren’s existence subverts this logic. May, a proponent of assimilation, gives birth to a perfectly white baby girl whom she knows is the child of Captain Bourke. The Cheyenne, however, interpret Wren’s whiteness not as infidelity but as a divine miracle, hailing her as the “vo’estanèvestomanehe, our Savior” (267). This misunderstanding, which fuses Christian messianism with Cheyenne spirituality, exposes the chasm between the two worldviews. The Cheyenne’s sanctification of Wren demonstrates the adaptive power of Indigenous spiritual frameworks. By contrast, the white world’s silence about Wren’s paternity exemplifies the rigidity of a culture that performs purity by maintaining secrecy.

Little Wolf’s acceptance of the child is rooted in a cultural fiction, while Bourke’s lifelong secret support is a consequence of his shame. Wren, the biological product of two white parents, becomes a symbol of Cheyenne hope and is raised entirely within their culture, inverting the government’s assimilationist goals. Her survival, and her descendants’ role as the keepers of the journals, represents the absorption of a white woman’s story into a Cheyenne sacred tradition, a reversal of the intended colonial power dynamic. The final gesture of J. Will Dodd receiving the journals closes the cycle between suppression and recovery, revealing that truth, once recorded, cannot be destroyed. In this sense, the novel’s ending transforms history from an instrument of domination into a site of shared remembrance, where May’s voice continues to mediate between the living and the dead.