Thomas Yellowtail

Thomas Yellowtail (March 7, 1903 - November 24, 1993) was a Medicine Man and Sun Dance chief of the Crow tribe for over thirty years prior to his death. Thomas Yellowtail's adult life was dedicated to the adherence to, and preservation of, the Sun Dance religion.

Thomas Yellowtail was born just south of Lodge Grass, Montana, on the Crow Indian reservation. His father's name was Hawk with the Yellow Tail Feathers. It was the practice at the time for the U.S. Government to assign surnames to the Indians as a means of assimilating them into the white culture and to ease record keeping. Thus, the child of Hawk with the Yellow Tail Feathers and his wife was given the last name Yellowtail. In Yellowtail’s younger days, the old, great warriors who participated in the Plains Wars and had lived the traditional nomadic life of their people were still living, although they had been forced onto the reservations. Yellowtail often recalled seeing the old warriors as they sat around the camp fires and performed sacred ceremonies.

The Lodge Grass valley was called the "Valley of the Chiefs" because of all the great war chiefs who lived there in Yellowtail’s early years. When he was only six years old, Yellowtail received a great honor when one of the Crow Nation’s most famous chiefs, Medicine Crow, gave Yellowtail his Indian name, Medicine Rock Chief. Receiving a name from such a famous chief was all the more significant as the name came from Chief Medicine Crow's personal spiritual medicine. Yellowtail’s youth was shaped by these elders who had lived the traditional nomadic life. These “old timers” as Yellowtail called them, taught him to know and to love the traditional spirituality of his ancestors. Yellowtail’s character was shaped by those traditional elders and he often said that it is those same traditional spiritual values which should be at the center of our lives today.

In contrast, the United States Government tried to crush the Indian’s ancestral traditions. Various laws (United States Secretary of the Interior's order of 1884) prohibited many traditional ceremonies, such as the Sun Dance for almost 50 years. During this same time, the reservation children, including Yellowtail, were taken from their homes and forced into government boarding schools. At those boarding schools the children were forbidden to speak their own language, had to wear white man's clothing and cut their hair.

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