Buffalo Bird Girl: A Hidatsa Story

Gr 3–6—In 1921, anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson published Waheenee: An Indian Girl's Story. In it, his narrator, Buffalo Bird Woman, recounted her experiences growing up on the Great Plains of North Dakota in the traditional Hidatsa culture of the late 19th century. In this lovely book, similar in verbal and illustrative caliber to his Black Elk's Vision: A Lakota Story (Abrams, 2010), Nelson takes Wilson's rendering of Buffalo Bird Woman's life and focuses on her childhood in the 1830s and 1840s. A meld of full-color, acrylic paintings, soft black colored-pencil drawings, and both period and contemporary photos re-creates the life of a child on the open prairie. The Hidatsa awareness of the passing seasons, the chores, farming tasks, and hunting practices of the tribe are aligned with the annual rhythm in a prose that is at once informative and rhythmic. Historical events are related, such as the advent of the fur-trading business with its concomitant influx of white traders, the construction of Fort Berthold, wars with the Lakota, and the decimating smallpox epidemic that struck when Buffalo Bird Woman was six, carrying off her mother, brother, and one of her aunts. The tone is at once matter of fact and elegiac, as Buffalo Bird Woman finishes her narrative as an old woman, living on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. A beautiful introduction to a traditional way of life, the book contains a detailed historical afterword and a rich array of back matter. This is a lovely and graceful introduction to a way of life that persists despite cultural obstacles and the march of time.Ann Welton, Grant Elementary School, Tacoma, WA