Читать книгу American Environmental History - Группа авторов - Страница 41

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….