Those problems — the water rights, the economic opportunity, the treatment of Native veterans, the question of what a country owes the people it has used as symbols — those problems outlasted him by decades and some of them are still being worked on.

He did not live to see any of the progress.

He died before the water came back to the Gila River.

He died before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 fully protected Native American voting rights in practice.

He died before the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 began shifting federal policy toward tribal sovereignty.

He died before the American Indian Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s brought Native rights into national conversations in ways that his own story had never quite managed.

He died at thirty-two, in the winter, on the land he came from, and the country gave him a state funeral at Arlington and kept using the photograph.