Just before Mammedaty's time the s had been brought to their knees in the infamous winter campaigns of the Seventh Cavalry, and their Plains culture.… - N. Scott Momaday

And the journey is an evocation of three things in particular: a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures.

The sun is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god.

Lines for My Daughter

With reverence for the earth you venture
into vague margins of advancing rain
and behold crystals of the sailing sun.

The clouds weave ribbons of shade and eclipse,
rippling on the colors that compose you,
sand, sienna, jade, the speckled turquoise

of mountain skies. And in your supple mind
there are shaped the legends of creation,
and in them you appear as dawn appears,

beautiful in the whispers of the wind,
whole among the soft syllables of myth
and the rhythms of serpentine rivers.

Once more you venture. The long days darken
In the wake of your going, and thunder
Rolls, bearing you across a ridge of dreams.

I follow on the drifts of sweetgrass and smoke,
On a meadow path of pollen I walk,
And hold fast the great gift of your being.