Show description

Earth Maker, the Creator, the Great Spirit, loved People so much that he wanted them to talk to him always. It happened this way: One day when two hunters were looking for the Buffalo, Earth Maker showed them a young woman, very beautiful, dressed in white, carrying a bundle. One of the hunters said she was a holy woman, but the other had bad thoughts, and as she approached, they were suddenly hidden in a mist. When it lifted the foolish one was just a skeleton. The woman told the other hunter: “Don’t be afraid.

She then left the circle of tipis, and as the People watched, suddenly she was a white Buffalo calf. Her name is Pte San Win, White Buffalo Calf Woman. Earth Maker wondered how else he could help People. “They have to walk a long way looking for the Buffalo herds. It is hard for the children and old people. I will give them a four-legged who will carry Men and Women on his back. People will feel proud to ride him! I will make him like the sky: gentle and sometimes fierce. He will have lightning in his legs and thunder in his hooves; his mane and tail will be like clouds around him, his eyes bright stars.

They will be black and shaggy. ” He spread his robe on the ground. Perhaps he was tired, even lay down and fell asleep, because multitudes and multitudes of Buffaloes came out from underneath the edge of his robe and spread out over the plains, everywhere. Earth Maker thought: “I will make two-legged beings and give them all I have made. ” And so it was that in his wisdom he scraped clay from Grandmother Turtle’s back and worked it in his hands and shaped figures of Man and Woman. He laid them to dry on a bed of sage leaves, and covered them with cottonwood leaves.