Crow Nation - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket features a character, Dirk Peters, who is the son of an Upsaroka (Absaroka) mother and a French father.

The cover of the popular music album America, which contained the Top Ten song, "Horse With No Name", featured the three group members sitting on the floor in front of a mural of Eight Crows.

The tribe hosts a large pow wow, rodeo, and parade annually; the 86th Crow Fair was held in Crow Agency from August 17–21, 2006. Called Baasaxpilue (to make much noise), it is the largest and most spectacular of Indian celebrations in the northern Plains. The photographer Elsa Spear Byron photographed the Crow Fair from 1911 to the 1950s.

Angus Young, a Crow elder and historian, and professor at Little Big Horn College, was featured on the 2006 installment of the PBS television series Frontier House.

In the documentary Native Spirit and the Sun Dance Way (2007), Thomas Yellowtail, a Crow medicine man and Sun Dance chief for more than 30 years, describes and explains the ancient Sun Dance ceremony, which is sacred to the Crow tribe. In the 1994 film Legends of the Fall, based on the 1979 novella of the same name by Jim Harrison, actor Gordon Tootoosis spoke Yellowtail's words to examine the preservation of a cultural and spiritual world before the coming of European settlers.

In 2007 Medicine Crow's grandson Joe Medicine Crow appeared on Ken Burns PBS series The War (documentary).

The Crow are the main antagonist in the 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson based on the real-life mountain man John Liver-Eating Johnson who, like in the movie, fought against the Crow earning him the nickname "Crow killer". Liver-Eating Johnson later made allies with the Crow as in the film.