What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village

7. Glimpses of Community Life–Part I

S E V E N GLIMPSES OF COMMUNITY LIFE Part I HE LITTLE RAPIDS DRAMA unfolded slowly,sometimespainfully so, Tas we exposed and, later, came to understand small fragments of the past. It now seems appropriate that in our field notes and site maps and in our speculative conversations, we abbreviated our names for particularly meaningful activity areas as “Act I,” “Act 11,” and so on. As in a play, each “act”presented somethingdistinctiveabout the time, the place, the people, and their activities. Four acts within the Wahpeton occupation area proved to be especially evocative: Act I showed signs of a lodge; Act I1 was a community dump; Act I11 had been a storage or resource processing area; and Act VI may have been a dance area. Act IV, near a possible fur trading post, added another dimension to the drama. Together, they provided vivid scenes of life at Little Rapids and inspired the events of the awl story. Although images of the past first surfaced as we dug in each “act,” the pictures became sharper in the lab as we cleaned, counted, identified , and analyzed the small, broken fragments of past lives. Some of these things implied what people did at Little Rapids; others suggested when they did it. While we found some evidence of settlement at Little Rapids before Europeansarrived in the area-particularly in the excavations nearest to the mounds-most of the things we retrieved dated to the nineteenth century. They appeared to be the remnants of a site occupied by one community for several summers, 94 COMMUNITY LIFE-1 95 rather than a series of occupations by different groups separated by longperiods of time. The archaeologcalrecord confirmswritten reports of a Wahpeton community based at Little Rapids for a time between the early and middle years of the century. Included in the datable European- or American-made goods found in or near the major activity areas were gun parts, glass bottles and beads, metal hardware, buttons, and ceramic dishes (see CHART2). Some of the beads, metal ornaments,and guns were manufacturedspecifically for the fur trade and would have been used by the Dakota residents of the site. Other items such as military buttons and European dishes might have oripally belonged to Euro-American visitors or local fur traders. Since written records document distinctive design changes in these objects over a period of decades, they can be used to estimate the probable dates for the Wahpeton occupation. Though we do not know precisely how long it took European-manufactured goods to reach the Wahpetons through gift or trade, or how long people might have kept the goods before they were lost or discarded, their presence also indicates that the Wahpeton were at Little Rapids from about 1815 to 1850. Most of the datable objects in the assemblage clustered between the 1820s and 1840s. The sample of European ceramicsfound there suggests a likely occupation date, at least of the areas we excavated , as the late 1830s (FIGS. 36, 37). SHADOWS OF A SUMMER LODGE (ACT I) When we began our first field session,five teams of student excavators worked in randomly selectedunits scattered throughout the grid area. Each team encountered nineteenth-century materials in its squarejust a few centimeters underground, although some units produced more than others. I assigned a sixth team to open up a square in another unit that differed markedly from the others. As the two novice excavators carefully removed the sod to expose an earlier living surface about ten centimeters beneath the present one, they came upon a thin layer of black, compacted, somewhat greasy-loolung soil-a marked contrast to the sandy brown soils found at the same depth in the other squares. Over two summer field seasons,crew members slowly opened up twenty-nine contiguous two-meter squares in this area, following the dark zone and searching for some delimiting border or boundary. 96 COMMUNITY LIFE-I CHART 2. Datable Artifacts Datablefragments Dates .fmanufactwe NEAR THE LODGE (ACT I) Essence-of-peppermint bottle Brass serpentine trade-musket Military musket barrel tenon Military musket wedge plate Green faceted glass bead Polished white seed beads side plate Tin-plated military trouser buttons IN THE DUMP (ACT 11) Military musket sear spring Military musket gun sight Brass keyhole escutcheon U.S. Army greatcoat brass button Plain brass button Red-striped white bead NEAR STORAGE AND PROCESSING AREA (ACT 111) Percussion caps Flintlock hammer...