Reservations confined tribes to reduced territories.

Government schools attempted to reshape Native children through English-language education and assimilation.

Religious institutions, federal agencies, and local non-Native communities exerted intense pressure on Native families to abandon languages, ceremonies, clothing, political structures, and cultural practices.

Medicine Crow therefore grew up between systems.

At home, elders carried Apsáalooke knowledge.

At school, he encountered institutions built around a different idea of what his future should look like.

The tension could be humiliating.

He later recalled struggling with English as a young student and being treated as though difficulty with a foreign language meant lack of intelligence.

Yet he refused to let early humiliation define him.

By adolescence he had become a strong student and a gifted athlete.