What he did with the authority of that title afterward was equally important.

The Elder At The United Nations

Medicine Crow’s public service eventually carried him into international settings far removed from the ranches and valleys of his childhood.

In 2000, he participated in a United Nations gathering of religious and spiritual leaders.

The image of an Apsáalooke elder whose childhood teachers had been born close to the buffalo-hunting era standing inside a global diplomatic institution captured the scale of historical change he had lived through.

Yet the event was not simply evidence that he had entered the wider world.

Medicine Crow had spent his life bringing his own world with him.

He was a Baptist as well as a carrier of Crow traditions, another combination that outsiders sometimes assumed had to be contradictory.

His religious life, like his military and academic identities, reflected a pattern of selective integration rather than simple replacement.

He did not present himself as an untouched representative of a pre-contact past.