Uses of Plants by the Hidatsas of the Northern Plains

2. Plants That Can Be Eaten

one Plants That Are Eaten plants that are eaten 3 Domesticated plants Michael Scullin A book that is, in many respects, an ethnobotanical treatise must, I think, deal with those plants the author or editor considers to be the most important: plants that provided wood and plants that were grown in gardens. Buffalobird-woman and Gilbert Wilson have given us an extraordinarily detailed account of Hidatsa gardening in Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation (1917). But there is more to it than Buffalobird-woman managed to recall or that Wilson was able to record. Therefore the following account includes some of what I have learned over the past thirty years and some of what my wife, Wendy Munson Scullin, and I have learned under conditions as controlled as one can have in a garden such as the Hidatsas maintained. Garden plants played a far more important role in Hidatsa subsistence than did wild plants and had been more significant even before the Hidatsas and their neighbors, the Mandans, arrived in what is known to anthropologists and archaeologists as the Middle Missouri (that part of the Missouri River flowing through North Dakota and South Dakota). Wilson’s dissertation for the Anthropology Department at the University of Minnesota (awarded in 1916 and published in 1917) later was published by the Minnesota Historical Society as Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden (1987), which is still in print and still popular. Although it would seem that just about every possible aspect of gardening was covered in Wilson’s dissertation, it turns out that Wilson failed to ask some questions that would be fairly obvious to a gardener but were not to the Presbyterian minister turned 4 plants that are eaten anthropologist. Many gardeners, but not Buffalobird-woman, would have thought to include things that gardeners are always talking about: the weather, the bugs, the weeds, the yields. But she didn’t. Buffalobird-woman’s memory was suffused with a golden glow that managed to obscure epidemics, wars, droughts, hailstorms , grasshoppers, strong winds, aphids, and assorted “garden variety” plagues that usually leave all-too-vivid memories. In my more than thirty years of growing the garden described by Buffalobird-woman, I have learned a lot that she never discussed . I have been (repeatedly) struck by the almost never-ending problems and the sometimes extraordinary variability of our corn production from year to year (“corn” being used interchangeably with the more correct term, “maize”). My wife and I have measured this variability within a single hill, between hills, within plots, between plots, and in different years. Variability is a constant . Averages provide no more than a reference point and seldom reflect reality. There is virtually no such thing as a “normal” year. During the study that my wife and I carried out from 2001 through 2003, we had no “average year” in south-central Minnesota . All years were below average in rainfall, and that which we did have fell either fortuitously at just the right moment or fell at just the wrong time and contributed to viral and bacterial epidemics in the beans and mold and bacterial spoilage of the corn. Heat was sometimes a problem because corn experiences heat stress that adversely affects yields when temperatures are above 86 degrees (30˚ C). Nevertheless, we were fortunate to have had very good yields because of precipitation at critical times. (See Munson 2004 and Munson Scullin and Scullin 2005 for data and sources.) In 1988 and 1989, which were both years of extremely high temperatures and extreme drought in the Midwest, my demonstration plot on the campus of the university at which I taught produced virtually no corn even though I watered it almost daily. The tassels “fired” (dried out) and produced little pollen because the plants could not pump enough water fast enough from the plants that are eaten 5 roots to the tassels. In contrast, 1993 was a very wet and cool year, with extensive flooding throughout the region. When I harvested in October (rather than in late August or early September as usual) the silk was still green on most ears and the corn was very moist and could not be stored until it was dried down to about the optimal 15 percent moisture. We currently grow four varieties of Northern Flint/Flour corn from seed, which I obtained during the 1970s almost entirely from Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara...