The Importance Of His Master’s Degree

Modern readers may move quickly past the statement that Medicine Crow earned a master’s degree in 1939.

The achievement deserves more attention.

Higher education was still inaccessible to large portions of the American population during the Great Depression.

For Native students, the barriers were multiplied by geography, poverty, discrimination, unequal schooling, and the legacy of federal education policies focused more on assimilation and vocational training than on advanced scholarship.

Medicine Crow’s degree therefore carried both personal and political significance.

He became evidence that Native intellectual life did not need validation from universities, while also demonstrating that Native scholars could master university systems and use them for their own purposes.

His thesis focused on the Crow.

That choice changed the direction of authority.

Instead of an outsider arriving to interpret his people, an Apsáalooke scholar entered the academy and produced analysis rooted in both community knowledge and formal research.