For playgrounds my little sister and I had the level spaces between the lodges or the ground under the corn stage, in sunny weather; and the big, roomy floor of the earth lodge, if it rained or the weather were chill. We liked, too, to play in the lodge in the hot days of the Cherry moon; for it was cool inside, never hot and stuffy like a white man’s house. In the fall, when the air was frosty, the sun often shone, and we could play in the big yellow sunspot that fell on the floor through the smoke hole.
We liked to play at housekeeping, especially in the warm spring days, when we had returned from winter camp and could again play out-ofdoors. With the help of the neighbors’ children, we fetched long forked sticks. These we stacked like a tepee frame and covered with robes that we borrowed. To this play tent we brought foods and had a feast.
Sometimes little boys joined in our play; and then it was like real housekeeping. We girls chose each a little boy for husband. To my little husband I said, “Old man, get your arrows, and go kill some buffaloes. We are hungry. Go at once!”
My little husband hastened to his mother and told her our needs. She laughed and gave him a boiled buffalo tongue; or perhaps pemmican, dried meat pounded fine and mixed with marrow fat. This and the foods which the other little husbands fetched us, we girls laid on fresh, clean grass that we pulled. Then we sat down to feast, the little girls on one side of the fireplace, the little boys on the other, just as we had seen men and women sit when they feasted. Only there really was no fireplace. We just made believe there was.
In summer, my little sister and I often went to the river for wet clay, which we modeled into figures. There is a smooth, blue clay found in places at the water’s edge, very good for modeling. We liked best to make human figures, man, woman, or little child. We dried them in the shade, else the sun cracked them. I fear they were not very beautiful. When we made a mud man, we had to give him three legs to make him stand up.
I had a doll, woven of rushes, that Turtle made me. It really was not a doll, but a cradle, such as Indian women used for carrying a small child. In winter I had my deer-skin doll, with the beads for eyes. My grandmother had made me a little bed for my dolls. The frame was of willows, and it was covered with gopher skins, tanned and sewed together. In this little bed my sister and I used to put our dollies to sleep.
We had a game of ball much like shinny. It was a woman’s game, but we little girls played it with hooked sticks. We also had a big, soft ball, stuffed with antelope hair, which we would bounce in the air with the foot. The game was to see how long a girl could bounce the ball without letting it touch the ground. Some girls could bounce it more than a hundred times. It was lots of fun.
We coasted in winter, on small sleds made of buffalo ribs; but coasting on the snow was rather for boys and older girls. There was another kind of coaster that we girls liked. A buffalo skin has the hair lying backwards, towards the flanks. I would borrow a skin of my mothers and tie a thong through two of the stake holes at the head or neck, to draw it by. Such a skin made a good coaster even in summer on a steep hillside; for, laid head forward, it slid smoothly over the soft grass.
