When a six-year-old Kiowa girl, Dolores Hummingbird, arrives at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, she has a difficult time adjusting. She has never before spent one night away from her parents. Renamed "Cries in her Sleep" by the girls in her dorm, Dolores eventually finds companionship and love in the person of an orphaned Irish girl called "Sky Eyes." Both girls are exemplary artist. After graduation, they live and paint in Greenwich Village and receive instruction from Robert Henri of the Ashcan School. But Paris is calling them from across the ocean. The Montmartre of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec is where they feel they truly belong.