Dancers at a powwow on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Photo: Hamner Fotos
The ladies dumped the flour and made dresses out of the sacks
By Victor D. Swallow
Native Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today George Catlin who was a Naturalist traveled West in the 1830s. He was known as an American painter, author and traveler who focused his work on Native Americans and studied 18 tribes. I read one of his writings about his observations of Native Americans. He paid tribute to Native Americans in a writing in part it says, “I love a people who made me welcome to the best that they had, who are honest without laws, who worship God without a Bible, who have no Religious animosities and how I love a people who don’t live for the love of money.” These are the kind of people we Natives come from. Stories I write are stories told to me by my mother and father as to them from relatives who lived from the 1840’s to the 1940’s. I will start with stories about hardships our people endured when the way of life ended and how they survived. Still proud and saying we are Lakota and also human interest stories that focus on trying to be positive and interesting in a negative world. The following story is about my mother’s grandmother her name was Bird All Over and she was born in the late 1840s. She had two brothers, Silas Fills the Pipe and Elias Kills One Hundred. Bird All Over was married to a half breed named Two Buffalo Bulls or Two Bulls or sometimes called him Two Buffaloes and they had six children together; four boys and two girls. Bird All Over married a second time to a man named Brave Heart. Mother never mentioned her or her husband’s having first names. In later years, when my mother’s family went to bed her grandmother Bird All Over would be talking about when they roamed free and that she was born somewhere along Rapid Creek. Mother would stay up trying to hear her stories but would be so tired she would go to sleep for a little while then wake up. When she would wake up my mother said she would still be talking. Mother said she wished she had stayed awake and heard all of her stories. Several stories she remembered was one she told my wife. She said grandmother Bird All Over said when they were issuing rations they got sacks of flour among the rations and didn’t know what it was used for so they dumped out the flour and made dresses out of the sacks.
Read the rest of the story on the Native Sun News Today website: The ladies dumped the flour and made dresses out of the sacks (Victor D. Swallow was born in 1939, Oglala Lakota, U. S. Navy Veteran, 50 year member of Bricklayers Union, Optimistic realist and fair. Victor can be reached at his daughter’s email address at vikkilovestodance@gmail.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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