Waheenee: An Indian Girl's Story (Buffalo Bird Woman‪)‬

I was born in an earth lodge by the mouth of the Knife river, in what is now North Dakota, three years after the smallpox winter.

The Mandans and my tribe, the Hidatsas, had come years before from the Heart river; and they had built the Five Villages, as we called them, on the banks of the Knife, near the place where it enters the Missouri.

Here were bottom lands for our cornfields and cottonwood trees for the beams and posts of our lodges. The dead wood that floated down either river would help keep us in firewood, the old women thought. Getting fuel in a prairie country was not always easy work.

When I was ten days old my mother made a feast and asked an old man named Nothing-but-Water to give me a name. He called me Good Way. “For I pray the gods,” he said, “that our little girl may go through life by a good way; that she may grow up a good woman, not quarreling nor stealing; and that she may have good luck all her days.”

I was a rather sickly child and my father wished after a time to give me a new name. We Indians thought that sickness was from the gods. A child’s name was given him as a kind of prayer. A new name, our medicine men thought, often moved the gods to help a sick or weakly child.

So my father gave me another name, Waheenee-wea, or Buffalo-Bird Woman. In our Hidatsa language, waheenee, means cowbird, or buffalo-bird, as this little brown bird is known in the buffalo country; wea, meaning girl or woman, is often added to a girl’s name that none mistake it for the name of a boy. I do not know why my father chose this name. His gods, I know, were birds; and these, we thought, had much holy power. Perhaps the buffalo-birds had spoken to him in a dream.