Joseph Medicine Crow, the last living Plains Indian war chief and a passionate historian, died on Sunday at age 102.
A member of the Crow tribe, Medicine Crow was an outspoken advocate for his people, whose suffering he witnessed in the wake of the U.S. government’s relegation of American Indian tribes to reservations and the policy of cultural genocide in government-run boarding schools.
“He was my everything,” his son Ronald Medicine Crow told the Billings Gazette. “I don’t think I will be able to fill his boots because he was able to accomplish so much in his history.”