Jim Wolf

09/01/2025

He grew up hearing stories from a man who rode with Custer.By 1939, he became the first Crow to earn a master’s degree — and changed how America saw Native history.
Joe Medicine Crow was born in 1913 on the Crow Reservation in Montana. His childhood was rich with oral tradition — his grandfather was White Man Runs Him, a scout for General Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Those firsthand accounts shaped Joe’s understanding of history in a way textbooks never could.
Determined to bridge two worlds, he pursued higher education. In 1939, he earned a master’s in anthropology from the University of Southern California — a first for his tribe. His thesis explored how European colonization impacted Crow religion, economics, and identity — a bold and rare perspective at the time.
Joe didn’t stop with academia. He went on to become the tribal historian of the Crow Nation, preserving hundreds of oral histories and teaching others the importance of cultural memory. His storytelling was vivid, authentic, and deeply rooted in lived experience.
He later served in WWII, where he completed the traditional four war deeds to become the last recognized Crow war chief — including stealing 50 horses from the N***s. But even with that legend, he called himself a historian first.
His life was a bridge between ancient memory and modern scholarship.
Had you heard about Joe Medicine Crow’s academic legacy before?
Do you think more oral historians deserve a place in mainstream history books

09/01/2025

Chief Lazy Boy was a leader of the South Piegan, a branch of the Blackfeet Nation, during the early 20th century. Despite the name, there was nothing lazy about him. In fact, the name was likely a mistranslation or a humorous nickname given by white officials or settlers, as was common at the time. Among his people, Lazy Boy was a respected warrior, spiritual leader, and a keeper of tradition.
He lived during a time of deep disruption. The buffalo were gone, the land was being fenced off, and Native families were being confined to reservations under federal control. Still, Natives like Lazy Boy held firm to their identity. He was photographed by Roland Reed around 1912 near Glacier National Park, wearing a war bonnet, blanket, and a deep, proud gaze that told the story of survival.

Lazy Boy was a member of the Dove Society, a ceremonial group within the Blackfeet, and according to oral tradition and early newspaper accounts, he once risked his life to recover the body of his fallen brother during a night raid against enemy lodges. That story, passed down and eventually printed in a 1914 article, showed that he was not only brave, but deeply loyal to his kin and people.

Roland Reed, a pictorialist photographer, sought to document Native people in dignified, traditional settings, and his portraits of Lazy Boy became iconic, even appearing in early 20th-century promotional campaigns for the Great Northern Railway. But behind the romanticized imagery was a man who had lived through war, hunger, and the attempted erasure of his people, and still stood tall.

Today, Lazy Boy represents more than a name or a photograph. He’s a reminder that Native people didn’t vanish. They endured. They adapted. And they passed on their stories, in beadwork, in ceremony, and yes, even in a single still photo that captured the quiet power of a man who refused to disappear.

08/31/2025

08/31/2025

Crow Warriors crossing the River
The Crow Tribe, Apsáalooke, “children of the large-beaked bird” have lived in the Yellowstone River Valley for generations. Known for their unmatched horsemanship, warrior societies, and deep spiritual traditions, they defended their homelands with strategy and courage.

Leaders like Chief Plenty Coups and Joe Medicine Crow carried forward a legacy of resilience, through war, diplomacy, and cultural survival

08/30/2025

“Lazy Dog” Cayuse Warrior 1903
The Cayuse people were powerful riders and traders of the Columbia Plateau, masters of horses, swift in battle, and deeply rooted in the lands of present-day northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington. Their life revolved around seasonal migrations for fishing, hunting, and gathering, with salmon and camas at the heart of their sustenance.

In 1855, the Cayuse joined with their neighbors, the Umatilla and Walla Walla, to form the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR).

📍Umatilla Indian Reservation, Oregon
🪶 Cayuse · Umatilla · Walla Walla

08/30/2025

They weren’t one tribe. They were three. And they chose unity over extinction.For centuries, the Maricopa — or Piipaash — lived along the banks of the Gila River in southern Arizona.
But by the early 1800s, drought, war, and displacement threatened their way of life.
Instead of fading, they adapted — and something remarkable happened.
They welcomed others.
Three culturally distinct tribes — the Halchidhoma, Halyikwamai, and Kohuana — joined the Maricopa in a powerful act of alliance.
Together, they became one people under a single name — not by force, but by choice.
These weren’t just political moves.
They were survival strategies, forged in the face of Spanish colonization, intertribal conflict, and environmental change.
Each group brought its own language, customs, and stories — and somehow, they blended into one resilient identity.
The new Maricopa forged a stronghold of culture and resistance in the Sonoran Desert.
They held onto their traditions through farming, community defense, and oral history.
Even as external forces tried to erase them, the Maricopa stood as a living example of unity in diversity.
Their name may have shifted.
But their spirit never did.

Had you heard this story of tribal unity before?
What would history look like if more groups chose merging over erasure?

08/29/2025

Julia Marden (Aquinnah Wampanoag) wearng her full-length turkey feather mantle at the Aquinnah Cultural Center in Massachusetts, 2024.
"Marden gained national recognition with the public unveiling of a spectacular turkey feather mantle—measuring four feet tall, six feet wide, and tailored to her body—at the Aquinnah Wampanoag Powwow in 2023. ... With the production of two rows per day, each requiring approximately two hours, from start to finish the project was completed over the span of a year. Her work constitutes the first—and most historically accurate—close-twine feather mantle created in Aquinnah Wampanoag territory in the past 400 years."

Photo: Aquinnah Cultural Center

08/28/2025

This haunting photograph draws you into the legend of the Apache Kid—born Haskay-bay-nay-ntayl in the 1860s—whose life story reads like a frontier epic soaked in promise, betrayal, and the dust of endless pursuit. Once a trusted scout under the legendary Al Sieber, the Kid straddled the thin line between cultures, fluent in both the warrior code of his White Mountain Apache roots and the rigid command of U.S. military order. But a single act of vengeance—avenging his father’s death—unleashed a storm that shattered his life and turned him from soldier to fugitive.
The gunfire that wounded Sieber in 1887 became the spark that lit the myth. Though it was never certain who pulled the trigger, the Apache Kid was condemned—by court and by public opinion. What followed were years of prison sentences, escapes, wild chases through canyon country, and whispered sightings that stretched from Arizona to the Sierra Madre. With every rumor of a raid or mysterious attack, his legend grew, fed by fear, admiration, and the boundless hunger of the West for outlaws with cause.

Even now, the Apache Kid lingers in the imagination—not just as a man, but as a symbol. He was a product of two worlds at war with themselves: one seeking control, the other survival. His story—woven with truth and tall tale alike—is a haunting portrait of a life shaped by injustice and driven into myth. Some say he died in a dusty canyon in the 1890s; others swear he wandered free into the 1930s, a ghost with a rifle and unfinished business. In either case, the Apache Kid remains one of the West’s most enduring mysteries—a man caught between justice and vengeance, history and legend.

08/27/2025

Black Hawk, on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota - Hidatsa - 1908
{Note: Black Hawk was born in 1848, the son of Prairie Chicken Can Not Swim & Brown Husk. Later, Black Hawk married his 1st wife named Mink, and later married his 2nd wife named Different Cherries. Black Hawk died in 1910.}