“I am an old woman now. The buffalo 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. We no longer live in an earth lodge or teepee, but in a house with chimneys; and my son’s wife cooks by a stove. Often I rise at daybreak and steal out to the cornfields. As I hoe the corn I sing to it as I did when I was young. No one cares for our corn song now. Sometimes at evening I sit, looking out over the river. 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 lodges. But it is an old woman’s dream. Our Indian way of life, I know, is gone forever.” —Buffalo Bird Woman, Hidatsa (taken from a National Forest plaque at the Medicine Wheel)
People in Parks 