Baby in a Buffalo Stampede

I had my first spiritual/philosophical crisis at about age five, in the grocery store dairy aisle. I remember stopping dead in my tracks and thinking, "how can it possibly be that we are born, we live, and then we die? That can't be all there is to this life thing." I don't remember sharing that question with anyone, and perhaps if I had, someone might have gotten a clue that I was not an average kid. But that isn't how my childhood went. I didn't know anyone who asked deep spiritual questions, and certainly didn't have access to people with ANSWERS to deep philosophical questions and thus became lulled into a spiritual apathy that took me years to wake up from.

My sister and I spent many a weekend afternoon in front of the television. We had the first color t.v. on our block in the early 60's but old movies weren't filmed in color so I have memories of watching black and white westerns on sunny afternoons in Santa Cruz, again, lulled into an apathetic, passive approach to a day off in a beautiful coastal town, just a half a block from the beach; there you could find Kim and I, splayed out on the sofa watching T.V.

I have a very specific memory of a snippet of film, several frames long: an infant native indian baby on the ground in the midst of a buffalo stampede. This memory is so vivid, so profound, that it has taken on archetypal meaning for me, wildly symbolic of the state of grace that we are all born into. I know nothing else about the movie, no plot, no time frame, nothing. But the image of a swaddled baby in the dusty center of a buffalo stampede, wailing and squalling has stayed in my conscious mind all these years. I've always wondered how to find out the name of the film, in order to find out the overall context of this deeply profound spiritual memory from my childhood.

What happened to the baby? I don't recall from the film, but I've always assumed she miraculously survived.