|
In 1916 anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson worked
closely with Buffalobird-woman, a highly respected Hidatsa born in 1839
on the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota, for a study of
the Hidatsas’ uses of local plants. What resulted was a treasure trove
of ethnobotanical information that was buried for more than seventy-five
years in Wilson’s archives, now held jointly by the Minnesota
Historical Society and the American Museum of Natural History in New
York City. Wilson recorded Buffalobird-woman’s insightful and vivid
descriptions of how the nineteenth-century Hidatsa people had gathered,
prepared, and used the plants and wood in their local environment for
food, medicine, smoking, fiber, fuel, dye, toys, rituals, and
construction.
From courtship rituals that took place while
gathering Juneberries, to descriptions of how the women kept young boys
from stealing wild plums as they prepared them for use, to recipes for
preparing and cooking local plants, Uses of Plants by the Hidatsas of the Northern Plains provides valuable details of Hidatsa daily life during the nineteenth century.
Gilbert L. Wilson (1869–1930) was a
well-known anthropologist whose dissertation on Hidatsa agriculture was
published in 1917 and is still available in print today.
Michael Scullin is a codirector of Midwest Ethnohorticulture LLC. His articles have appeared in the journal Plains Anthropologist and in many edited volumes.
"[Uses of Plants by the Hidatsas of the Northern Plains
is] indispensable to anyone interested in Native American life on the
plains; valuable for ethnobiology and Native American studies."—E. N.
Anderson, CHOICE
"Use of Plants by the Hidatsa is an easy, enjoyable read and a unique, valuable source of information on how people used plants."—Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology
“Every
aspect of life is part of this classic ethnology, from acquisition of
food to spirituality to the raising of the four sacred wooden pillars of
a new Earth Lodge. . . . Editor Michael Scullin does a wonderful job of
weaving the many living parts of Buffalobird-woman’s story. . . . The
book’s precision—many specific uses for many plants—is a pleasure to
read. One gets a sense of a people who rose to the challenge of using
what nature provided them to wrest a living from a demanding
environment.”—Bruce Johansen, Jacob J. Isaacson Professor of
Communication and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska
at Omaha and author of The Native Peoples of North America: A History
|
