Brave Bull Allard spent much of her younger years with her grandmothers Alice West and Eva Kuntz. As a child, she hauled her family's drinking water by horseback from the Inyan Wakangapi Wakpa (River that Makes the Sacred Stones), the Cannonball River. At its confluence with the Missouri River, there was a whirlpool that created large, spherical sandstone formations, known as Sacred Stones. In the 1950s, this sacred site was destroyed when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged the mouth of the Cannonball River as they finished the Oahe Dam. The dam flooded Brave Bull Allard's land along with 160,000 acres of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and 300,000 acres of the Cheyenne River Reservation. Her family was among numerous Tribal communities along the Missouri River that were forced to relocate to new sites on the plains above the river valley.
