We know the things we know because they've been taught to us, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, legend-by-osmosis. The things we don't know are things we've never heard bout - whatever has been left out of the conversation, struck from the record, or simply never even considered. We sometimes have to unlearn these early teachings, or at least learn that some additional facts inhabit the legends we've been passed down like heirlooms, each as solid as a land mass and casting long shadows, just like the Buttes themselves.

a beautiful, untrammeled place

[...] We girls - not one indigenous student among us - received a standing ovation as we gathered at the front of the stage in our costumes, linked arms, and took a grand, ecstatic bow. We were being raised to understand that the world was ours for the taking, because that had long been true, even after the gold dried up, even after the cities burned or failed to be built at all, even after our origin stories were revealed for what they were and we outgrew our costumes and our grandparents and then our parents began to die - heroically or no - even after our memories failed and the stories flew away.