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.