He has been dead for more than 121 years now, stabbed in the back by a U.S. soldier during what he thought was a meeting called to halt killing on the American frontier. For the descendants of the famed Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, some degree of peace has arrived since then.

Trust is another matter.

In a case that underscores the generations-old struggle of American Indians trying to reclaim their heritage -- from moccasins to the bones of their ancestors -- Crazy Horse's family has filed a federal lawsuit against tiny Washington College on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

The charge: The college profited handsomely -- and illegally -- by selling a war shirt that may have belonged to the martyred chief.

The case wraps deceit, murder, money and the sale of human remains into one big, sloppy package. It has pitted the New Englandesque, $25,000-a-year college in Chestertown against the Lakota Sioux Indians on dusty reservations on the other side of the country.

The dispute has attracted national attention, led to a government investigation and grown more than a little bitter.

"We don't sell our relatives," said Seth Big Crow Sr., 61, Crazy Horse's great-grandson in South Dakota. "The people at the college, they'll sell anything they can to make money." Washington College officials once displayed the Indian clothing in their library, saying it was a war shirt worn by Crazy Horse. Now they say the shirt never belonged to him and that they were on firm ground, morally and legally, when they sold it.

"The college has not done this lightly," said Bonnie Travieso, chairman of Washington College's legal affairs committee. "We're sensitive to the issues involved with selling Indian relics, or important Indian relics, let's say."

But college officials ignored requests by Crazy Horse's family to examine the shirt to determine whether it was his and instead hired Sotheby's Auction House in New York to sell it.

The shirt fetched $211,000.

It was more than money and the question of ownership, though, that pushed Crazy Horse's family to file the lawsuit earlier this month in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. It was a lack of trust: The Indians see no reason to put faith in an institution like Washington College, wealthy and 90 percent white.

Crazy Horse was killed in 1877 at the age of 34 at Fort Robinson, Neb. He had been under U.S. Army protection when an infantry man lunged at him with a bayonet, plunging it into his back and killing him, while trying to place him under arrest.

In the 1940s, the widow of Capt. George Albee, a frontier scout and winner of the Medal of Honor, donated to Washington College a collection of guns and Indian artifacts, including the tattered buckskin shirt, beaded and with quill-wrapped human hair dangling from its arms. She told college officials her husband had obtained the shirt and that it had belonged to Tasunke Witko, also known as Crazy Horse.

In a note to the college, the widow, Frederica Strong Albee, wrote " if ever it comes to pass that the College decides they don't have a place for my collections, they are to go to [my heirs]."

But in the 1970s, Albee's descendants became upset at how the college was handling the collection and demanded it back. They took back the guns but left the Indian artifacts with the college. (Lawyers for Crazy Horse's family contend the Albee descendants were unaware of the Indian artifacts, but the college says otherwise.)

"We believe any questions surrounding ownership were settled back then," said Travieso, the college's legal chairman. So the shirt remained with the college, where it and other artifacts were placed in a trophy case in the college library.

Word filtered back to Crazy Horse's family, and in 1995 a lawyer for the estate, Robert Gough of River Falls, Wisc., contacted college officials and asked to inspect it.

"That's where we ran into being stonewalled by the college," Gough said.

In 1995, Gough said, he was told by college officials he could not see the shirt because it was being sent out for conservation purposes and would not be returned for some time. In May of the next year, Sotheby's sold the shirt to a buyer it will not identify.

"Sotheby's informed us the shirt did not belong to Crazy Horse," said Travieso, the university attorney. "Knowing that, we felt no obligation to handle things any differently than we did. It was an Indian artifact, but not considered an important one. We expected to get about $50,000 for it."

Crazy Horse's family does not buy that. Why, they ask, was $211,000 paid for the shirt if it was an unimportant artifact? Why were they not allowed to examine it themselves? Why won't the owner of the shirt come forward and let them examine it now?

"Trust them?" said Big Crow, the great-grandson. "There's no way I'm going to take their word for it. The honorable thing would have been for them to get together with us and if it was ours, to return it. Rather than that, they ran with it, sold it and disregarded true ownership to make money off it."

The National Park Service is investigating the sale to determine whether Washington College violated a 1990 law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It requires museums and institutions to make an effort to return important Indian artifacts to their original tribes and to to inform Indian tribes of possessions that may belong to them.

Washington College never did that. College officials say the artifacts in question did not fall under the act.

Further, the service wants to know if the hair on the shirt was from scalpings, as the college once claimed. If it was, the shirt could not have been sold because the transaction would have been considered marketing human remains.

Crazy Horse's family and Indians from other tribes don't trust the park service, either. The service has only one full-time employee overseeing the act. Two outside employees help, but the park service is backlogged in processing claims and fulfilling the legal work to make sure Indians get what belongs to them.

For now, Indians are relying on institutions to voluntarily follow the law. Earlier this week, the Peabody Museum at Harvard completed what experts believe is the largest single return of Indian remains, the bones of nearly 2,000 Pueblo Indians.

All told, institutions have voluntarily published notices of inventories accounting for more than 15,000 human remains and nearly 300,000 funeral objects.

If the park service finds Washington College violated the repatriation act, it could be forced to pay Crazy Horse's family market value for the shirt -- in this case the $211,000. It also could be fined for not informing Indian tribes that it was in possession of their artifacts. The law is unclear whether the shirt would have to be returned.

"This is yet another example of how this country has tried to dispossess this country's peoples of their heritage," said Amanda Burt, a 1993 graduate of the college now working on the Indian's side of the lawsuit as a paralegal in Washington. "One thing that the professors at Washington College taught me was to question things and to appreciate differences and to respect them and never stop asking questions. This flies in the face of that."

The college's attorney said it will seek to have the lawsuit dismissed. "We didn't feel we could give away a valuable asset," Travieso said. "We're a very small college, and the college needs to support its programs and further what it's trying to do, which is to provide a quality liberal arts education.

The 1,100-student college has a $90 million endowment.

As for Crazy Horse's family, Big Crow said generations have lost artifacts, many of which never will be returned.

But the shirt, he said, is a particularly painful loss.

"There's always going to be the feeling that part of my great-grandfather was taken away again as long as the shirt is in the hands of people who look at it only with dollar signs in their eyes," he said. "The ultimate goal would be that the family find some peace in the heart and in the spirit to know that what was taken over 120 years ago has been returned."