Thomas Yellowtail (March 7, 1903 – November 24, 1993) was Sun Dance Chief of the Crow Tribe. Prior to his death, Thomas was a medicine man for over thirty years and dedicated his life to preservation of the Crow Tribe Sun Dance ceremonial traditions.

Early reservation life

Yellowtail was born at the south of Lodge Grass, Montana, on the Crow Indian reservation. His father's name was Hawk with the Yellow Tail Feathers. It was a common practice at the time for the U.S. government to assign surnames to the Indians as a means of assimilating them into white culture and to ease record keeping. Therefore, the child of Hawk with the Yellow Tail Feathers and his wife were given the last name Yellowtail.

In Yellowtail’s youth, warriors who had participated in the Plains Wars and had lived the traditional nomadic life of their people were still living, although they had been forced into the reservations. Yellowtail often recalled seeing old warriors sat around campfires and performing sacred ceremonies.

Spiritual influences

The Lodge Grass valley has been described as an important cultural and historical area for the Crow Nation, associated with prominent leaders and traditional ways of life. When he was six years old, one of the Crow Nation’s chiefs, Medicine Crow, gave Yellowtail his Indian name, Medicine Rock Chief. The name derived from Chief Medicine Crow's personal spiritual medicine, reflecting cultural naming traditions. During this period, United States Government policies restricted many 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. In his youth, the reservation children, including Yellowtail, were forced into government boarding schools. At those boarding schools the children were forbidden to speak their own language, had to wear western clothing, and cut their hair.

During the reservation era, various Christian denominations established churches on or near Native American reservations and actively engaged in missionary efforts among Indigenous communities. On the Crow Reservation, missionary activity led to significant religious influence among families, although the extent of formal assignment to specific churches is not well documented.

Return of the Sun Dance to the Crow Tribe

The Crow tribe did not perform their ancestral Sun Dance during the fifty-year prohibition by the U.S. Government. When the Sun Dance became legal again in 1934, the original Crow Sun Dance was a forgotten memory and could not be resurrected. The Shoshone tribe had periodically performed their ancestral Sun Dance during the prohibition without the knowledge of the bureaucracy in Washington. When the prohibition ended, John Trehero, a Shoshone medicine man, emerged as the preeminent Shoshone Sun Dance chief. The Crow tribe asked John Trehero to help them lead a Sun Dance on the Crow Reservation in the early 1940s. This was the beginning of the revival of the Sun Dance on the Crow Reservation.

Starting in 1943, Yellowtail participated in the annual Sun Dance and monthly prayer meetings. Over the next twenty years, he practiced daily prayer, used the sweat lodge, and went on periodic vision quests.

Medicine Man and Sun Dance Chief

In 1963, John Trehero informed Yellowtail that his Medicine Fathers had instructed him to transfer the authority to run the Crow Sun Dance over to Yellowtail. For the next thirty years, until his death at age 90, Yellowtail served as Crow Sun Dance chief and helped perpetuate the Crow Sun Dance Religion. The Yellowtail served as a Sun Dance chief and medicine man for the Crow tribe until his death in 24 November 1993.

Preserving the old ways

Yellowtail advocated for the study of ancestral spiritual traditions. He referred to these practices as the Sun Dance Religion and considered them a viable spiritual path. Yellowtail advised those seeking his guidance to participate in the Vision Quest, sweat lodge, and Daily Prayer with the Pipe under the direction of a Sun Dance Chief. He encouraged American Indian youth to learn the language of their tribe and to seek out the spiritual leaders who followed the traditional ceremonies of their people. Thomas Yellowtail wrote his autobiography as a means of preserving the ancient spiritual traditions he held sacred for future generations.

Yellowtail was part of a generation that transitioned into a different cultural environment while maintaining traditional practices. He and other leaders worked to preserve the spiritual traditions of the Plains tribes.

Bibliography

  • Yellowtail Crow Medicine Man and Sun Dance Chief, an autobiography as told to Michael Oren Fitzgerald, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8061-2602-7
  • Native Spirit and the Sun Dance Way, by Thomas Yellowtail, World Wisdom 2007.

Film

  • , DVD documentary based on the memoirs of Thomas Yellowtail, 2007, World Wisdom.

Resource materials

  • Companion Book to Native Spirit and the Sun Dance DVD

External links