He attended Bacone College in Oklahoma during part of his education, later studied at Linfield College in Oregon, and eventually reached the University of Southern California.

In 1939, he earned a master’s degree in anthropology, with work focused on his own people.

USC later described his thesis on the effects of European contact on Crow economic, social, and religious life as a foundational scholarly treatment of the subject.

The accomplishment was historic within the Crow Nation.

Medicine Crow became the first member of his tribe to earn a master’s degree.

The achievement did not separate him from home.

It gave him another language with which to explain it.

He had learned from elders that history lived in remembered experience.

At the university, he learned that institutions demanded dates, archives, written evidence, categories, and arguments.

Instead of choosing one system and rejecting the other, Medicine Crow learned to move between them.