was born in an earth lodge by the mouth of the Knife River in what is now North Dakota three years afilter the smallpox
A Hidatsa mother and child photographed around 1908 Buffalo Bird Girl would have been carried by her mother and aunts in a similar way y name is Buffalo Bird Woman Waheenee and my people are known as the Hidatsa When I was young they called me Buffalo Bird Girl after the little brown bird that lives on the prairies of the Great Plains This name has brought me for tune for buffalo have a strong heart and the birds of the air have a good spirit In my life I have seen beautiful things and I have lived through hard times When I was six years old a terrible sickness called smallpox set upon my people with a fury The cruel disease first appeared on the Great Plains many years before my birth It arrived with the coming of the white men They did not bring the sickness on purpose but Indians could not fight off this disease they had no immunity to the dreaded evil spirit Smallpox passed some by but sadly it took the lives of many Hidatsa people includ ing my mother my brother and one of my aunts My grandmother and two aunts sur vived They raised me with the same love and kindness as my real
We lived in a village of earth mound lodges on the high bluffs of the Missouri River We called it Like a Fishhook Village for it was built upon a sharp bend One side of our settlement was protected by the mighty river The other side faced the vast open prairie and was fenced off with stout posts a stockade for protection from enemy tribes The aggressive Lakota Indians in particular were constantly trying to steal our horses our supplies of corn and other belongings Our village was the home of two different Indian tribes the Hidatsa and the Mandan We had formed an alliance in order to increase our strength in numbers so we would be less vulnerable to attack Like a Fishhook Village was the center of much activity with people constantly coming and
