Pretty Shield: The Crow Medicine Woman History Forgot

Pretty Shield was born around eighteen fifty-six into the Apsaalooke, the Crow people. She became a medicine woman, and she lived long enough to see the world she had been born into dismantled and replaced. The bison disappeared. The old ceremonies were suppressed. The Crow Nation, which had once ranged across a territory larger than many eastern states, was confined to a reservation that shrank with each successive treaty negotiation. By the time Pretty Shield was in her seventies, the life she had known as a young woman existed primarily in memory.

In nineteen thirty-two, a writer named Frank Bird Linderman sat down with Pretty Shield over a series of sessions and took down her account of that life. She was in her mid-seventies by then, and she spoke through a translator and a system of hand gestures that Linderman had learned over years of working with Plains Indian elders. The book Linderman eventually published, titled Red Mother, is one of the most complete first-person accounts of the reservation period written from a Native woman's perspective. The Montana Historical Society holds the Frank Bird Linderman papers, which include the manuscript and correspondence from those sessions.

Pretty Shield described watching the grief move through the Crow community as the old structures fell. She described the physical and cultural rupture of confinement with a specificity that no outside observer could have provided. She told Linderman: I cannot tell you about the good things of those later days, because there were no good things.

The book was largely out of print for decades. It is back in print now. Pretty Shield Foundation, named for her, supports Crow youth in the Crow Agency community today. Her autobiography is rarely discussed alongside the battle narratives that dominate Little Bighorn literature, though she lived through the reservation period those battles produced.