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Crow chief who was 'a warrior and living legend' dies

 
President Barack Obama reaches around the head dress of Chief Joseph Medicine Crow to place a Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck on Aug. 12, 2009, at the White House.
President Barack Obama reaches around the head dress of Chief Joseph Medicine Crow to place a Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck on Aug. 12, 2009, at the White House.
Published April 5, 2016

Joseph Medicine Crow, an American Indian who wore war paint under an Army uniform during World War II, conducting battlefield heroics that made him his tribe's last war chief, and who distinguished himself as a guardian of his people's history, died Sunday at a hospice center in Billings, Mont. He was 102.

In 2009, President Barack Obama presented Chief Medicine Crow with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. The award recognized him as "a warrior and living legend" whose military service, educational achievement and dedication to cultural preservation made him a "symbol of strength and survival."

Chief Medicine Crow once remarked that he had divided his life between "two worlds." One was that of the Crow Nation, the small Northern Plains tribe to which he belonged, located primarily in Montana. The other was the world beyond the reservation, where he was known as an ambassador for American Indians.

He became the first member of his tribe to graduate from college and receive a master's degree, then joined the armed forces and was sent to wartime Europe. An ocean away from his tribal territory, he encountered the opportunity to complete the traditional war deeds, or coups, required for the designation of war chief.

Among those deeds was the capture of an enemy — in his case, German — horse. Chief Medicine Crow was credited with taking 50.

After the war, he became the official historian of the Crow. For more than six decades, he endeavored to preserve the memory of his ancestors, among them his grandfather Whiteman Runs Him, a scout for George Armstrong Custer during the American Indian Wars.

"There is absolutely no one like him left in America, in Indian country," Herman Viola, a curator emeritus of the National Museum of the American Indian, said in an interview.

Chief Medicine Crow grew up with grandparents who had lived before the establishment of reservations. They schooled him in ancient customs, teaching him to run barefoot in the snow and wash himself in frigid river water.

The National Park Service described Chief Medicine Crow, who was 11 when his grandfather Whiteman Runs Him died, as "the last living person with a direct oral history from a participant of the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876," where Custer was killed and his forces overwhelmingly defeated.