In Lakota memory there’s a winter known as “The year the stars fell.” People woke in the night and the sky was alive. Thousands of streaks of fire crossing the dark. Some believed the world was ending. That winter appears on several Lakota winter counts… the historical records kept by Plains historians. Among the Lakota people, history wasn’t written in books. Each winter a single event was chosen to represent the year. A battle. A harsh season. The arrival of something new. That moment became a symbol painted onto buffalo hide. Over decades the symbols formed a timeline of the people. One of those marks shows falling stars. It refers to the 1833 Leonid meteor storm, when meteors rained across North America so heavily that observers described the sky as “falling.” Lakota historians recorded it. Not as astronomy but more so memory. A year when the sky itself changed. And that small symbol still sits on the hide today… marking the winter the stars fell.