Sometimes it depends on the person reviewing a map before a road is built.

Sometimes it depends on recognizing that a rise in the landscape is not empty land.

Sometimes it depends on knowing that a place described in an old family story corresponds to a location now being considered for construction.

Medicine Crow could bring together archaeological method and community memory in those moments.

This was another way his education returned value to the Crow Nation.

He had learned how outside institutions classified land and evidence.

He could use that knowledge to protect places that those systems might otherwise overlook.

For Native communities across the United States, the twentieth century was filled with battles over land that rarely resembled warfare in the conventional sense.

Dams flooded sacred areas.

Roads crossed burial grounds. mining and energy development disrupted culturally important landscapes.