Iowa Dave's Blog

I continue to enjoy the book I bought last week at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, titled Native American Gardening, by Gilbert L. Wilson.

It features an oral history given by Maxi’diwiac, or Buffalobird-woman, in 1912. She described the efforts of the white government agent who tried to get the Hidatsa people of North Dakota to cultivate and eat potatoes in the early 1870’s.

At first we Hidatsas did not like potatoes, because they smelled so strongly! Sometimes we dug them up and took them into our lodges, but in winter they froze and spoiled.

The government was eager to teach the Indians to raise potatoes; and to get us women to cultivate them, paid as much as two dollars and a half a day for planting them in the plowed field. I remember I was paid that much for planting them.

After three or four years, finding the Indians did not have much taste for potatoes and rather seldom ate them, our agent made a big cache pit—root cellar, you say it was—and bought our potato crop of us.

After this he would issue seed potatoes to us in the spring, and in the fall we would sell our crop to him. Thus, handling potatoes each year, we learned little by little to eat them.

I love this story, appearing on page 119 of the book. It gives a wonderful account of how to change prejudices and traditional practices, slowly but surely. By creating a market for the unwanted potatoes, he eventually managed to invest them with a sense of value in the  minds of the Hidatsas.

The lesson I take from this story is that you have to afford people both time and opportunity to get used to a new idea if you want truly to obtain their acceptance. Cannot rush it. Middle managers of the modern world, take note!

by Gilbert L. Wilson, 2005, Dover Press. Published originally in 1917 by the University of Minnesota

I bought this book at the National Museum of the American Indian, on the Mall in Washington DC. The museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution. The book represents a long-sought treasure of information on native American agriculture and food production.

Longtime readers know my interest in what the Indians grew and ate. I have gleaned enough bits of lore here and there to feed my imagination. But now my knowledge gains weight by a first-hand account in detail from a woman who lived that life.

Gilbert Wilson, a sometime Presbyterian missionary and amateur anthropologist, visited the Hidatsa Indians living on the Knife River at Stanton, ND, during the years 1910-1916. His trips were sponsored by the University of Minnesota. The people whose story he recounts called their community, Like-a-fishook Village.

Wilson made friends among the Hidatsas, including the family of Buffalobird-Woman. By the time he began to interview her, the old ways had already begun to vanish from her people. Modern tools displaced ancient methods. For weeding garden, an iron hoe beats a set of antlers lashed to a stick, so Buffalobird-Woman used a hoe. But she had been born in 1839 and remembered how to use antlers against weeds.

U.Minn published Wilson’s oral history of Buffalobird-Woman’s agricultural know-how in 1917, complete with detailed diagrams of her family’s lodge and food processing infrastructure. It then lay obscure for 90 years, until Dover Press brought it back into print. Thank goodness! Nowhere else have I found such a well written, knowledgeable explanation of the large scale gardening and food preservation methods by which Indian families provided the majority of their annual nutritional needs.

The Hidatsas practiced Three Sisters gardening, growing corn, beans, and squash to provide the bulk of their diet. Fats and protein were augmented by sunflower seeds and whatever game their hunters could procure. It was a system that worked. Consider that Buffalobird-Woman was in her mid-70’s when she taught Wilson the ways of Indian nutrition.

Her lifestyle is not one that any parent would want for a daughter today. It consumed all of her time and effort just to put the daily bread on the table for her family. But do not feel sorry for her. Through these ten dozen pages comes a strong voice clearly proud of her agricultural knowledge and capabilities.

One can beneficially read this book as a how-to manual for self-sufficient food production. There is much more in it, however. As an account of women’s life in an advanced hunter-gatherer society, it gives a deep appreciation for how much our contemporary lifestyle owes to modern food production and processing methods. We would not want to turn back that, particular clock, I am thinking. Certainly, women would not.