Читать книгу Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians - Gilbert Livingstone Wilson - Страница 8

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My great-grandmother, as white men count their kin, was named Atạ´kic, or Soft-white Corn. She adopted a daughter, Mata´tic, or Turtle. Some years after, a daughter was born to Atạ´kic, whom she named Otter.

Turtle and Otter both married. Turtle had a daughter named Ica´wikec, or Corn Sucker;[6] and Otter had three daughters, Want-to-be-a-woman, Red Blossom, and Strikes-many-women, all younger than Corn Sucker.

The smallpox year at Five Villages left Otter’s family with no male members to support them. Turtle and her daughter were then living in Otter’s lodge; and Otter’s daughters, as Indian custom bade, called Corn Sucker their elder sister.

It was a custom of the Hidatsas, that if the eldest sister of a household married, her younger sisters were also given to her husband, as they came of marriageable age. Left without male kin by the smallpox, my grandmother’s family was hard put to it to get meat; and Turtle gladly gave her daughter to my father, Small Ankle, whom she knew to be a good hunter. Otter’s daughters, reckoned as Corn Sucker’s sisters, were given to Small Ankle as they grew up; the eldest, Want-to-be-a-woman, was my mother.

When I was four years old, my tribe and the Mandans came to Like-a-fishhook bend. They came in the spring and camped in tepees, or skin tents. By Butterfly’s winter count, I know they began building earth lodges the next winter. I was too young to remember much of this.

Two years after we came to Like-a-fishhook bend, smallpox again visited my tribe; and my mother, Want-to-be-a-woman, and Corn Sucker, died of it. Red Blossom and Strikes-many-women survived, whom I now called my mothers. Otter and old Turtle lived with us; I was taught to call them my grandmothers.