and can sometimes influence the complexion of the environment to suit their desires. Everything in the Koyukon world lies partly in the realm beyond the senses, in the realm we would call supernatural.
Gilbert Wilson, Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden
While European and Euro-American conquerors preferred to see all Indians as hunters, in fact, many American Indians were also formidable agriculturalists. Indeed, a whole range of wild plants were domesticated by American Indians, and their legacy is with us today. Maize, most beans, squash (including pumpkins), tomatoes, avocadoes, chocolate, and tobacco – to name just a few – developed from centuries of careful effort by Indians, most of them women, to make wild plants more useful to people. Buffalo Bird Woman was of the Hidatsa people, from the upper Missouri River in what is now North Dakota. Her people lived in this region for centuries before their conquest by the United States. Her reminiscence of cultivating the river bottoms in the latter 1800s is more than just one woman’s personal story. It is testimony to centuries of planting and cultivating on the American continent. Various Native American peoples farmed and hunted along the Missouri River, in the well-watered eastern part of the continent, from southern Maine to Florida, and in the southwest, along the Rio Grande. To make a living by growing corn amidst the Great Plains, where a dry climate and ferocious winters conspire to frustrate even many modern farmers, was no mean feat. Many people lived by a mix of farming, hunting, gathering, and trade. Most appear to have thought about animals in ways similar to the Koyukon of the late twentieth century. Plants also had spiritual powers. Compare Buffalo Bird Woman’s account to the excerpt from Make Prayers to the Raven. The garden is a woman’s world. What conflicts did Hidatsa farmers have with one another? How did they resolve them? How did access to iron tools change Hidatsa farming?
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(Extract from Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians. St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987.)
Soon after they came to Like-a-fishhook bend, the families of my tribe began to clear fields, for gardens, like those they had at Five Villages. Rich black soil was to be found in the timbered bottom lands of the Missouri. Most of the work of clearing was done by the women ….
In old times we Hidatsas never made our gardens on the untimbered, prairie land, because the soil there is too hard and dry. In the bottom lands by the Missouri, the soil is soft and easy to work….
Dispute and Its Settlement
About two years after the first ground was broken in our field, a dispute I remember arose between my mothers and two of their neighbors, Lone Woman and Goes-to-next-timber.
These two women were clearing fields adjoining that of my mothers; … the three fields met at a corner …. [M]y father, to set up claim to his field, had placed marks, one of them in the corner at which met the fields of Lone Woman and Goes-to-next-timber; but while my mothers were busy clearing and digging up the other end of their field, their two neighbors invaded this marked-off corner; Lone Woman had even dug up a small part before she was discovered.
However, when they were shown the mark my father had placed, the two women yielded and accepted payment for any rights they might have.
It was our Indian rule to keep our fields very sacred. We did not like to quarrel about our garden lands. One’s title to a field once set up, no one ever thought of disputing it; for if one were selfish and quarrelsome, and tried to seize land belonging to another, we thought some evil would come upon him, as that some one of his family would die. There is a story of a black bear who got into a pit that was not his own, and had his mind taken away from him for doing so! …
Beginning a Field in Later Times
As I grew up, I learned to work in the garden, as every Hidatsa woman was expected to learn; but iron axes and hoes, bought of the traders, were now used by everybody, and the work of clearing and breaking a new field was less difficult than it had been in our grandfathers’ times. A family had also greater freedom in choosing where they should have their garden, since with iron axes they could more easily cut down any small trees and bushes that might be on the land. However, to avoid having to cut down big trees, a rather open place was usually chosen.
A family, then, having chosen a place for a field, cleared off the ground as much as they could, cutting down small trees and bushes in such way that the trees fell all in one direction. Some of the timber that was fit might be taken home for firewood; the rest was let lie to dry until spring, when it was fired. The object of felling the trees in one direction was to make them cover the ground as much as possible, since firing them softened the soil and left it loose and mellow for planting. We sought always to burn over all the ground, if we could.
Before firing, the family carefully raked off the dry grass and leaves from the edge of the field, and cut down any brush wood. This was done that the fire might not spread to the surrounding timber, nor out on the prairie. Prairie fires and forest fires are even yet not unknown on our reservation.
Planting season having come, the women of the household planted the field in corn. The hills were in rows, and about four feet or a little less apart. They were rather irregularly placed the first year. It was easy to make a hill in the ashes where a brush heap had been fired, or in soil that was free of roots and stumps; but there were many stumps in the field, left over from the previous summer’s clearing. If the planter found a stump stood where a hill should be, she placed the hill on this side [of] the stump or beyond it, no matter how close this brought the hill to the next in the row. Thus, the corn hills did not stand at even distances in the row the first year; but the rows were always kept even and straight.
While the corn was coming up, the women worked at clearing out the roots and smaller stumps between the hills; but a stump of any considerable size was left to rot, especially if it stood midway between two corn hills, where it did not interfere with their cultivation.
My mothers and I used to labor in a similar way to enlarge our fields. With our iron hoes we made hills along the edge of the field and planted corn; then, as we had opportunity, we worked with our hoes between the corn hills to loosen up the soil.
Although our tribe now had iron axes and hoes from the traders, they still used their native made rakes. These were of wood (Figure 1.1), or of the antler of a black-tailed deer (Figure 1.2). It was with such rakes that the edges of a newly opened field were cleaned of leaves for the firing of the brush, in the spring.
Figure 1.1 Drawn from specimen made by Yellow Hair. Length of specimen, following curvature of tines, 36 1/2 inches.
Figure 1.2 Drawn from specimen made by Buffalo Bird Woman. Length of wooden handle, 42 inches; spread of tines of antler, 15 1/2 inches.
Trees in the Garden
Trees were not left standing in the garden, except perhaps one to shade the watchers’ stage. If a tree stood in the field, it shaded the corn; and that on the north side of the tree never grew up strong, and the stalks would be yellow.
Cottonwood trees were apt to grow up in the field, unless the young shoots were plucked up as they appeared ….
The Watchers
The season for watching the fields began early in August when green corn began to come in; for this was the time when the ripening ears were apt to be stolen by horses, or birds, or boys. We did not watch