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Shortly before he died in 1932, Chief Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Native American Crow tribe, told his story to a white man, Frank B Linderman, a \u2018sign talker\u2019\u2019 who could record Crow history for both their peoples.<\/span><\/p>\n A turn-of-the-20<\/span>th<\/span> century tribal leader might seem an unlikely source of inspiration for modern health and care leaders, struggling to meet targets and deliver efficiencies. Yet we also now find ourselves at an inflection point, a moment where our current systems and structures are failing, where different forms of leadership may be required to help us reinvent ourselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Plenty Coups became the Crow leader in the 1870s, when he was in his late 20s. His story to Linderman describes the exploits of a tribe of nomadic hunters, dreams and rain dances, hunting buffalo and military feats against the Sioux and other tribes.<\/span><\/p>\n Linderman\u2019s account documents the end of a civilisation, as the Crow transitioned to existence on a reservation. \u201cWhen the Buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The philosopher Jonathan Lear argues that this statement can be understood literally. What can \u2018happen\u2019 when all the practices of tribal life \u2013 organised around hunting and warfare \u2013 have been stripped of meaning. After the Great War, Plenty Coups represented Native American soldiers at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Washington. At the end of the ceremony, he took off his war bonnet and placed it on the coffin, before laying his coup stick on top. These totems had no authenticity in the modern world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Yet something did happen. The Crow had a practice for pushing at the limits of their understanding: they encouraged young members of the tribe to go into nature and dream, in isolation and exposed to hardship, before a collective process of sensemaking and storytelling.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As a child in the 1850s, Plenty Coups had set off into the wilderness to do so. His dream, interpreted by elders and iterated over time, captured the tribe\u2019s anxiety about the arrival of European settlers and foresaw the end of their way of life. It also began the process of envisaging a different future. \u201cBy listening as the Chickadee listens, we may escape [defeat] and keep our lands.\u201d (Modern neuroscience is now of course unpicking the <\/span>role of dreaming in creativity<\/span><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n From the mid-1800s, Plenty Coups built an alliance with the US Government in exchange for reserved Crow territories. In the early 1900s, he successfully fought legislation to open these territories to white settlement. He encouraged his people to embrace agriculture. He negotiated the establishment of new schools on Crow lands. \u201cWith what the white man knows, he can oppress us. If we learn what he knows, he can never oppress us again.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Health leaders do not bear the same responsibilities of tribal leaders in 19<\/span>th<\/span> century America. But their choices often determine who lives and who dies. Their courage and creativity \u2013 the presence or the lack of it \u2013 shapes whether people can live good lives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n