He preserved oral histories that might otherwise have vanished.

And throughout his life, he repeatedly argued that the point of remembering war was not to celebrate killing.

To understand why stealing horses from Nazi soldiers mattered to him, it is necessary to go back long before Europe — to the Crow Reservation in Montana, to the elders who trained him, and to a childhood lived close enough to the nineteenth century that the Battle of the Little Bighorn was still family memory.

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Source: https://www.nps.gov/bica/learn/historyculture/joseph-medicine-crow.htm
Image search keyword: Joseph Medicine Crow National Park Service portrait

A Childhood Within Living Memory

Joseph Medicine Crow was born on October 27, 1913, near Lodge Grass, Montana, on the Crow Indian Reservation.

In his own lifetime he would witness astonishing changes: the last years of horse-centered reservation life, the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights era, the rise of Native self-determination movements, the digital age, and the election of a president who would eventually place the nation’s highest civilian honor around his neck.

But the history surrounding him at birth reached much further backward.

The Apsáalooke, commonly known in English as the Crow, had long occupied and moved through a broad region of the northern Plains and northern Rocky Mountains.

Horses were central to mobility, hunting, trade, status, and warfare.