BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) – Joseph Medicine Crow walked in “two worlds” – white and Native American – and made his mark on each.
Medicine Crow, who died Sunday in a Billings hospice at the age of 102, grew up in a log home on Montana’s Crow Indian Reservation, hearing stories during his childhood from direct participants in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Decades later, he returned from World War II a hero in his own right for performing a series of daring deeds that made him his tribe’s last surviving war chief.
Medicine Crow went on to become a Native American historian who gained recognition in scholarly circles, even as he sought to live according to Crow tradition.
“I always told people, when you meet Joe Medicine Crow, you’re shaking hands with the 19th Century,” said Herman Viola, curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Indians. “He really wanted to walk in both worlds, the white world and the Indian world, and he knew education was a key to success.”