Monuments honored fallen soldiers.

Custer became an icon.

Native victory was acknowledged mainly as the event that destroyed his command.

Over time, scholarship and Native advocacy pushed the interpretation toward a broader story.

The battlefield came to recognize Native participants more fully, and a memorial to the Native people who fought there altered the symbolic landscape.

Medicine Crow lived through that transition.

His presence helped make a Crow voice impossible to ignore.

The Crow role in the 1876 campaign was particularly important because it complicated simple moral categories.

Crow scouts worked with the Army while Lakota and Northern Cheyenne forces fought it.

A viewer expecting all Native people to stand on one side of a battle had to confront the reality that tribes had their own alliances, enemies, territorial concerns, and strategies.