Buffalo Bird Girl (ca. 1839-1932) was a member of the Hidatsa, a Native American community that lived in permanent villages along the Missouri River on the Great Plains. Like other girls her age, Buffalo Bird Girl learned the ways of her people through watching and listening, and then by doing. She helped plant crops in the spring, tended the fields through the summer, and in autumn joined in the harvest. She learned to prepare animal skins, dry meat, and perform other duties. There was also time for playing games with friends and training her dog. When her family visited the nearby trading post, there were all sorts of fascinating things to see from the white man’s settlements in the East. Award-winning author and artist S. D. Nelson (Standing Rock Sioux) captures the spirit of Buffalo Bird Girl by interweaving the actual words and stories of Buffalo Bird Woman with his artwork and archival photographs. Backmatter includes a history of the Hidatsa and a timeline.

This that I now tell is as I saw my mothers do, or did myself, when I was young. My mothers were industrious women, and our family had always good crops; and I will tell now how the women of my father's family cared for their fields, as I saw them, and helped them. --Buffalo Bird Woman

A young hunter marries a female buffalo in the form of a beautiful maiden, but when his people reject her he must pass several tests before being allowed to join the buffalo nation

Traces the childhood, friendships and dangers experienced by Buffalo Bird Woman, a Hidatsa Indian born in 1839, whose community along the Missouri River in the Dakotas transitioned from hunting to agriculture.

Brave Hearts: Indian Women of the Plains tells the story of Plains Indian women through a series of fascinating vignettes. They are a remarkable group of women – some famous, some obscure. Some were hunters, some were warriors and, in a rare case, one was a chief; some lived extraordinary lives, while others lived more quietly in their lodges. Some were born into traditional families and knew their place in society while others were bi-racial who struggled to find their place in a world conflicted between Indian and white. Some never knew anything but the old, nomadic way of life while others lived-on to suffer through the reservation years. Others were born on the reservation but did their best in difficult times to keep to the old ways. Some never left the reservation while others ventured out into the larger world. All, in their own way, were Plains Indian women.

The Common Core in Grades K–3 is the second in a series of comprehensive tools to tap into the vast flow of recently published books for children and teens, offering recommendations of exemplary titles for use in the classroom. Currency meets authority, brought to you by the editors of the highly regarded review sources School Library Journal and The Horn Book Magazine. This guide includes hundreds of selections for grades K–3 published since 2007 recommended by The Horn Book Magazine. The titles are grouped by subject and complemented by School Library Journal’s “Focus On” columns, which spotlight specific topics across the curriculum. Providing context for the guide, and suggestions on how to use these resources within a standards framework, is an introduction by Common Core experts Mary Ann Cappiello and Myra Zarnowski. These educators provide perspective on the key changes brought by the new standards, including suggestions on designing lessons and two sample plans. Following the introduction, you’ll find a wealth of books, by category. (Note that the guide is Dewey-Decimal based, so you may want to dig around, for example, in “Social Sciences” to find some titles that you might first seek in “History” or “Science.”) Each section includes a listing of the top titles with brief, explicit annotations, and key bibliographic data. “Focus On” articles are appended to appropriate categories to support in-depth curricular development. Each of these articles includes a topic overview and list of current and retrospective resources (including some fiction) and multimedia, enabling educators to respond to the Common Core State Standards call to work across formats.

Originally published: North Haven: Archon Books, 1995.