“Gone
But Not Forgotten: Buffalo Bird Woman Laments the Death of Indian Culture
In this excerpt from her 1921
as-told-to memoirs, Hidatsa tribe member Buffalo Bird woman recalls better days
before the arrival of an overbearing white Christian culture.
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.
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.
From
“Waheenee: An Indian Girl’s Story Told by Herself to Gilbert L. Wilson,” North
Dakota History: Journal of the Northern Plains, vol. 38, nos. 1 & 2
(Winter/Spring 1971). Reprinted in Peter Nabokov, ed., Native American
Testimony (New York: Viking, 1991), 182.
“We
did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and
winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’. Only to the white man was
nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with wild animals
and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were
surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man
from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the
families we loved was it ‘wild’ for us. When the very animals of the forest
began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the ‘Wild West’
began.”
(The
buffalo was central to many of the tribes of west, it was a major food source,
but also provided materials for clothes, shelter, and many of the cultural
rituals)
“Our country is the most beautiful of all.
Its rivers and plains, its mountains and timber lands, where there was always
plenty of meat and berries, attracted other tribes, and they wished to possess
it for their own.
To keep peace our chiefs sent out clans
to the north, east, south and west. They were to tell any who wished to come
into our country that they were welcome. They were told to say, “you may hunt
and gather berries and plums in our country, but when you have all you can
carry you must go back to your own lands. If you do this all will be well. But
if you remain overlong, we will warn you to depart. If you are foolish and do
not listen, your horses will be stolen. And if even this does not start you
homeward, we will attack you and drive you out.
The country belonging to the Crows was
not only beautiful, but it was the very heart of the buffalo range of the
Northwest. It embraced endless plains, high mountains and great rivers, fed by
streams clear as crystal. No other section could compare, especially when it
was untouched by white men.
….When 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. There was little singing anywhere.”
Edward
Goodbird, a Hidatsa, recounts the subtle ways in which Indians managed to
retain small aspects of their culture in the face of white efforts to exorcise
Native-American customs and beliefs.
The time came when we had to forsake
our village at Like-a-fish-hook Bend, for the government wanted the Indians to
become farmers. “ You should take allotments,” our agent would say. “ The big
game is being killed off, and you must plant bigger fields or starve. The
government will give you plows and cattle.”
All
knew that the agent’s words were true, and little by little our village was
broken up. In the summer of my sixteenth year nearly a third of my tribe left
to take up allotments.
We had plenty of land; our
reservation was twice the size of Rhode Island, and our united tribes, with the
Rees who joined us, were less than thirteen hundred souls. Most of the Indians
chose allotments along the Missouri, where the soil was good and drinking water
easy to get. Unallotted lands were to
be sold and the money given to the three tribes.
Forty miles above our village,
the Missouri makes a wide bend around a point called Independence Hill, and
here my father and several of his relatives chose their allotments. The bend
enclosed a wide strip of meadow land, offering hay for our horses. The soil
along the river was rich and in the bottom stood a thick growth of timber.
My father left the village, with my
mother and me, in June. He had a wagon, given him by the agent; this he
unbolted and took over the river piece by piece, in a bull boat; our horses
swam.
We camped at Independence in a
tepee, while we busied ourselves building a cabin. My father cut the logs; they
were notched at the ends, to lock into one another at the corners. A heavier
log, a foot in thickness, made the ridge pole. The roof was of willows and
grass, covered with sods. Cracks between the logs were plastered with clay,
mixed with short grass. The floor was of earth, but we had a stove. We were a month putting up our cabin.
Though my father’s coming to Independence was step toward civilization,
it had one ill effect: it removed me from the good influences of the mission
school, so that for a time I fell back into Indian ways. Winter, also, was not
far off; the season was too late for us to plant corn, and the rations issued
to us every two weeks rarely lasted more than two or three days. To keep our
family in meat, I turned hunter.
There were no buffaloes on the
reservation, but blacktailed deer were plentiful, and in the hills were a good
many antelopes. I had a Winchester rifle, a 40.60 caliber, and I was a good
shot.
To hunt deer, I arose before
daylight and went to the woods along the Missouri. Deer feed much at night, and
as evening came on, they would leave the thick underbrush by the river and go
into the hills to browse on the rich prairie grasses.
From
The Daily Chronicle, Centralia-Chehalis, Washington, September 10, 1979
Gone are the millions of American
buffalo. Their wanton slaughter brought temporary profit and sport. But their
departure opened the North American continent for human development.
The bison known as the plains buffalo in
America well could serve as a national symbol for the concept that human
progress requires environmental alterations, whether in mining ore, building
factories, plowing ground or controlling wild beasts. . .
Domestic animals bred to highest
qualities of dinner-plate tastes and cost-efficiency graze in peace across
America without fear of attack from stampeding buffalo. .
Few should weep over buffalo. America
never would have blossomed to its current status in world leadership unless
buffalo were removed from the land.
As the white civilization pushed
westward from the Allegheny Mountains, vast herds of buffalo were slaughtered
purposely to permit farms to be created, railroads to be built, housewives to
pluck carrots without being trampled. .. The beasts existed for private
enterprise to consume, to clear the land for superior breeds, crops, cities,
human growth and progress.
With some 60 million of the awesome
beasts virtually wiped from the face of North America, human ingenuity and hard
work rapidly converted the Great Plains and rolling hills into modern miracles of
agricultural production, thriving cities, hearty commerce and vigorous
Americans.