Through two human lives, memory stretched from the era of Custer to smartphones.

This is one reason oral history can feel so startling when placed beside dates.

A century looks enormous on a timeline.

Inside families, it can be only a grandfather and a child.

Medicine Crow understood this intimacy of history.

It shaped the urgency of his work.

He knew that when an elder died, information could disappear permanently if nobody had listened carefully enough.

He also knew that written records could not reproduce every aspect of a spoken story.

Tone matters.

Humor matters.