Community members may reasonably worry about what knowledge should or should not be shared publicly.

Institutions may treat a Native expert as a representative of all Native people rather than a scholar with a specific national tradition.

Medicine Crow navigated those pressures for decades.

He became one of the most recognizable Apsáalooke intellectuals of the twentieth century.

And the battle he discussed most often was not the one in which he stole German horses.

It was the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The Battle He Inherited Rather Than Fought

For much of the United States, the Battle of the Little Bighorn became inseparable from George Armstrong Custer.

Books, paintings, Wild West shows, films, and tourist sites repeatedly framed the 1876 battle around the destruction of Custer’s command.

Native nations appeared as a collective force surrounding a famous American officer.