By S. D. Nelson
A true childhood: Buffalo Bird Woman, born Hidatsa in 1839, grew up in an earthlodge village on the Missouri River, and near the end of her life told the whole of it to a visitor so none of it would be lost.
Buffalo Bird Girl was a real child. She was born in 1839 into the Hidatsa people, in a village of round earthlodges beside the Missouri River, and she grew up farming — corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers — scaring crows out of the fields, tanning hides, helping her grandmother, learning by watching the women around her. The book moves through the seasons in her own voice: the work, the games, the long days out in the corn. Early on it names the hard thing without dwelling on it. A smallpox sickness the settlers had brought killed both her parents when she was small, and she was raised by her grandmother and her aunts. She lived a long life, and when she was old and afraid her people's ways were slipping out of memory, she sat with a visitor and told him all of it. That telling is the reason any of it survives.
It does the thing a westward-expansion unit needs done first: it puts a settled, farming, plainly home-like Native world on the page before a single wagon shows up. A lot of children arrive assuming the Plains were empty until settlers crossed them, or that Native people were always on the move. Here instead is a girl in a permanent town by a river, with a garden her family has tended for generations, and you meet her as a person about their own age, with chores and a dog and a favorite game. When the covered-wagon books come next, the class has already met someone who was living there.