Time & Perspective Quote by Stephen Ambrose

Ambrose frames Crazy Horse as the antidote to the modern, museum-glass way of treating the past. “Integrated” and “incorporated” aren’t decorative synonyms; they’re doing cultural work. They suggest a worldview where history isn’t a timeline you consult, it’s a set of obligations and meanings embedded in land, kinship, ceremony, and decision-making. The present isn’t “after” history. It’s one of history’s active surfaces.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, Ambrose is granting Crazy Horse intellectual seriousness: not merely a “warrior,” but a thinker operating with a coherent philosophy of time. On another, he’s quietly indicting the Euro-American habit of turning history into paperwork - treaties as abstractions, displacement as an “era,” violence as a chapter heading. For the Lakota, the past isn’t settled by signature; it keeps showing up as lived reality. That subtext helps explain why U.S. expansion and treaty violations weren’t just political disputes but existential ruptures: they tore at a continuity that was supposed to be carried daily.

Context matters: Ambrose, writing from within a late-20th-century historical tradition, is also trying to correct the genre’s old distortions, where Native leaders are flattened into symbols. Yet the sentence carries a risk of its own: it can romanticize Indigenous temporality as mystical “oneness,” smoothing over strategy, disagreement, and change. Still, it works because it reframes resistance not as reactionary nostalgia, but as a present-tense defense of a living historical order.