ABSTRACT
In the mid-nineteenth century, when she was a child, Buffalo Bird Women of the Hidatsa tribe lived along a bend of the Missouri River named “Like a Fishhook.” As an old woman, she looked back on those faraway times:
I am an old woman now. The buffaloes and black-tail deer are gone, and our Indian ways are almost gone. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I ever lived them.
My little son grew up in the white man’s school. He can read books, and he owns cattle and has a farm. He is a leader among our Hidatsa people, helping teach them to follow the white man’s road.
He is kind to me. We no longer live in an earth lodge, but in a house with chimneys; and my son’s wife cooks by a stove.
But for me I cannot forget our old ways.
Often in the summer I rise at daybreak and steal out to the cornfields; and as I hoe the corn I sing to it, as we did when I was young. No one cares for our corn songs now.
Sometimes at evening I sit, looking out on the Big Missouri. The sun sets, and dusk steals over the water. In the shadows I seem again to see our Indian village, with smoke curling upward from the earth lodges; and in the River’s roar I hear the yells of the warriors, the laughter of little children as of old. It is but an old woman’s dream. Again I see but shadows and hear only the roar of the River: and tears come into my eyes. Our Indian life, I know is gone forever. (Nabokov 1992)
