She joined the Army because the Marines couldn’t take her right away and because one morning in 1986, standing by the Bighorn River that runs through the Crow reservation in Montana, she looked into the eyes of the man next to her and knew he wanted to kill her.

He was a former boyfriend turned violent. According to Big Man, he tried to drag her into the water, ready to drown her after arguing all night, telling her: “If I can’t have you, nobody can.” She got away, but her next steps were to a recruiter’s office. She was tough, having served stints as a dockworker and firefighter, but she knew that if she didn’t leave him, within a year she would be “dead or in jail.”

She served two tours in Iraq, volunteering for missions just to prove herself to her male colleagues. A combat action badge was pinned on her uniform, the result of living through a mortar attack on her unit in 2005. Even as she retired in 2009 as a sergeant first class, she put her name down on a list of reserves to be called back in case they needed her again.

Michael Joyner, a staff sergeant and friend who served with her in Iraq, recalled her as one of the first people to say “I’ll do it if nobody else does it.”

“We both wear the same uniform. It doesn’t make men better than women,” he said. “She was always trying to prove that point.”

The racism she encountered as a Native American in the military bothered her.

She recalled a query from a colleague: “You’re my first Indian I ever saw. You still live in a teepee?”

Big Man said she replied “yes” and then added: “We also shop at Walmart.”

“When you ask stupid questions, you get stupid answers,” she said. “It’s a stereotyping that we just can’t seem to get past.”