What he left behind was not amenable to storage or concrete.
He left behind a model of resistance that did not require compromise with a system that was committed to destroying what he valued. He demonstrated across thirty years of sustained opposition to U.S. Indian policy that it was possible to say no — to the 1868 Treaty, to the sale of the Black Hills, to the annuity system’s implied domestication — and to mean it, and to maintain that position at personal cost.
He left behind the ceremonial practices that he transmitted to his family and community, and that continue to be practiced by people who carry what he carried. He left behind the understanding of the Sun Dance and the sacred pipe that was central to his own sense of who he was.
He left behind a name that became, in the century after his death, one of the most widely recognized in American history — attached to films, to merchandise, to the kind of image reproduction that he himself began when he sold autographed photographs at the Wild West show. That name has been used in ways he would likely not have recognized or approved of: as a symbol of romantic resistance, as a brand, as shorthand for the generic Noble Savage of popular mythology.
And he left behind descendants. People who carry his DNA, who were told by their mothers and grandmothers who they were, who preserved the family knowledge through generations of disruption and poverty and loss. People like Ernie LaPointe, who spent decades maintaining the claim against skeptics, who watched his family’s knowledge be dismissed as unverifiable, and who then watched a scientist spend fourteen years developing a method to confirm what the family had always known.