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INTRODUCTION Buffalo Bird Woman, known in Hidatsa as Maxidiwiac, was born about 1839 in an earth lodge along the Knife River in present-day North Dakota. In 1845 her people moved upstream and built Like-a-fishhook village, which they shared with the Mandan and Arikara. There Buffalo Bird Woman grew up to become an expert gardener of the Hidatsa tribe. Using agricultural practices centuries old, she and the women of her family grew corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers in the fertile bottomlands of the Missouri River. In the mid-1880s, U.S. government policies forced the break up of Like-a-fishhook village and the dispersal of Indian families onto individual allotments on the Fort Berthold Reservation, but Hidatsa women continued to grow the vegetables that have provided Midwestern farmers some of their most important crops. In Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden, first published in 1917 as Agriculture ofthe Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation, anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson transcribed in meticulous detail the knowledge given by this consummate gardener. Following an annual round, Buffalo Bird Woman describes field care and preparation , planting, harvesting, processing, and storing of vegetables. In addition, she provides recipes for cooking traditional Hidatsa dishes and recounts songs and ceremonies that were essential to a good harvest. Her first-person narrative provides today's gardener with a guide to an agricultural method free from fertilizers, pesticides , and herbicides. For many white Americans and Europeans, the very idea of farmer-Indians on the Great Plains is unfamiliar. Most people think of Plains Indians as the nomadic tribes who, mounted on horseback and free from agrarian ties to the soil, roamed the Plains in search ofthe buffalo. Hunters and warriors, provident with nature and fiercely resistant to subjugation, tribes like the Dakota, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Blackfeet have come to typify Plains Indian life. In "dime novels," fiction, movies, and history books, these Plains Indians have symbolized not only the drama and romanticism of the Old West, but a disappearing lifeway as well. The nomadic Plains tribes became, in the American mind, the quintessential Indians: standardbearers ofa bygone age, remembered for their noble qualities ofcourage, freedom, and a oneness with nature.! The other kind of Plains Indian is one to whom popular sentiment and to a lesser extent historians have paid far too little attention. These are the Village Indians of the Great Plains, sedentary farming peoples whose ancient lifeways and contributions to history and civilization have gone largely unsung. In the Northern I For a discussion ofthe Plains Indian as a symbol, seeJohn C. Ewers, "The Emergence ofthe Plains Indian as the Symbol ofthe North American Indian," in Smithsonian Institution, AnnualReport, 1964 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1965) 531-44. For perceptions of American Indians during the nineteenth century, see Roy Harvey Pearce, SavagiSm and Civilization: A Study ofthe Indian and the American Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965). xi X11 BUFFALO BIRD WOMAN'S GARDEN Plains, the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara (known now as the Three Affiliated Tribes) were once numerous, powerful, and independent tribes controlling practically the entire Missouri River Valley in what is now North and South Dakota. Their cultural adaptations represent a much more ancient and indigenous Plains Indian tradition than the "typical" cultures of the nomadic Plains tribes, which depended on horses introduced by Euro-Americans. The Hidatsa inherited a cultural legacy that had long withstood the test oftime. Archaeologists have named their lifeway the Plains Village Tradition and traced it back to A.D. 1100 in the Knife River-Heart River region of the Missouri Valley, the historic homeland of the Hidatsa and Mandan.2 The Plains Village lifeway reflects a stable cultural adaptation to specific ecological conditions in the Northern Plains. Agricultural peoples built permanent earthlodge villages where they would not be flooded, on the terraces of the Missouri and its tributaries. From these central communities the people took advantage ofthe opportunities that nature provided. The river channel provided abundant fish, musselshells, and migratory waterfowl. The floodplains and borromlands were used for garden plots and supplied extensive quantities oftimber for building materials and fuel. The valley, with its characteristic gallery forests, offered habitat for a wide range oflarge and small mammals and birds which were hunted by Plains Village peoples. Finally, the upland prairie teemed with bison, which were the major focus of Plains Village hunting parties. Thus the Plains villagers developed a successful and complementary dual economy based on agriculture and hunting which persisted well into historic times (that is, after...

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