If we had listened more carefully to what he said, we might have heard in it a critique that his public role prevented him from making directly: that a country which uses its Native veterans as symbols of its greatness while failing to address the conditions in those veterans’ communities is not fully honoring what it claims to honor.

He was a patriot who knew that the country he had served had not fully kept its part of the deal.

He honored the men he served with.

He tried to set the historical record straight when it was wrong.

He struggled, very publicly and very painfully, with the damage that the war and the fame had done to him.

And he died young, on his reservation, in the desert.