It was “know what you are carrying.”

This is an important distinction in Indigenous education.

Cultural knowledge is not valuable because it allows young people to reenact an earlier century.

It gives them orientation.

It tells them who their relatives are, what obligations they inherit, what stories shaped their nation, and how previous generations survived change.

Medicine Crow could explain this without abstraction because he had lived it.

The war-chief deeds were not museum pieces in his life.

They became meaningful in France and Germany.

Oral history was not a ceremonial performance.

It became scholarship.