The Memory Between Us

Picture a buffalo hide stretched out before you, covered in spiraling pictographs.

Each drawing marks a year in history – not with battles and treaties, but with the spark of memory: the year of the great corn feast, the winter when stars fell like rain.

These were the winter counts, kept by holy men and storytellers who knew that history lives in the spaces between facts.

A person's age wasn't measured in numbers, but in stories: "I was born in the year of the corn feast" – 1823 to us, but to them, a moment woven into the fabric of tribal memory.

By the 1800s, as buffalo became scarce, the stories migrated to muslin and ledger books, but their power to connect past and present remained.