“Joe was a true American hero”, Darren Old Coyote, chairman of the Crow Tribe, told the Billings Gazette.
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Mr. Medicine Crow was the last living person to have heard direct oral testimony from people who were there before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
He was the only surviving Plains war chief. “When you spoke with Joe Medicine Crow, it was impossible not to be inspired”, Montana Senator Jon Tester tweeted, according to Newsweek.
Medicine Crow earned the title of war chief after stealing enemy horses and other exploits as a US solider during World War II. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian award in the United States.
In 1939, he became the first member of his tribe to earn a master’s degree, but following the onslaught of World War II he left the academic world and volunteered for military service.
Obama released a statement Monday following the death of Joseph Medicine Crow, the last surviving war chief of the Crow Tribe in Montana and the first in the tribe to attain a master’s degree.
“Today, Lisa and I join Montanans to pay respect and celebrate the rich life of Dr. Joe Medicine Crow”, Bullock said Sunday afternoon.
In 2015, CBS affiliate KTVQ reports Billings school officials named the new middle school in the Heights “Medicine Crow Middle School”, which is now under construction on the corner of Bench Boulevard and Barret Road.
Medicine Crow told the crowd that he turned around, pointed his finger at the director and told him, “You Hollywood directors are geeks and don’t really want to know the real story, you just want to make this movie your way”. And, in the minutes before a planned attack, he set off a stampede of 50 horses from a Nazi stable, singing a traditional Crow honor song as he rode away.
Montana lawmakers and leaders provided statements on Medicine Crow’s passing on Sunday.
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“Wearing war paint beneath his uniform and a sacred feather beneath his helmet, Joseph Medicine Crow completed the four battlefield deeds that made him the last Crow war chief”.
In his book, Counting Coup, he said: “Warfare was our highest art, but Plains Indian warfare was not about killing”.
Daines will be delivering a speech tomorrow on the Senate floor in honor of Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow.
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But he also embraced the changes that came with the settling of the West and worked to bridge the divide between the cultural traditions of his people and modern society. His voice became familiar to many as the narrator for Native American exhibits in major museums across the country. He added that Crow “was a great man in two worlds”.
