Arikara Archives - Lewis & Clark Research Database https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/key-figure/arikara/ A digital archive of treaties, documents, artwork, and 360° trail panoramas from the Corps of Discovery Fri, 01 May 2026 13:20:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 The Arikara War of 1823 and the Fur Trade https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/research-articles/the-arikara-war-of-1823-and-the-fur-trade/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:27:42 +0000 https://research.lewisandclarktrust.org/research-articles/the-arikara-war-of-1823-and-the-fur-trade/ An analysis of the 1823 Arikara conflict, which involved several former members of the Corps of Discovery and demonstrated the lasting consequences of Lewis and Clark's diplomacy.

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]]> Nichols examines the 1823 military confrontation between the United States and the Arikara Nation along the upper Missouri River, connecting it to the diplomatic relationships and tensions established during the Lewis and Clark Expedition nearly two decades earlier. The article documents how the expedition’s promises and interventions in intertribal politics contributed to a deterioration of Arikara-American relations that eventually erupted into open conflict when Arikara warriors attacked William Ashley’s fur trading party. Nichols identifies several former expedition members — including Hugh Glass, Edward Rose, and possibly John Collins — who were involved in the 1823 events. The article analyzes Colonel Henry Leavenworth’s punitive expedition against the Arikara villages, its inconclusive outcome, and the broader implications for the Missouri River fur trade. Nichols argues that the 1823 conflict reveals the limitations and consequences of the expedition’s diplomacy, which prioritized American commercial interests over genuine understanding of intertribal dynamics.

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]]> Missouri Speaker on Lewis and Clark Expedition Materials and Methods https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-06140603/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:05 +0000 https://research.lewisandclarktrust.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-06140603/ A recording from the Tent of Many Voices collection.

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]]> and the Buffalo sent you in there and it’s really um soft and flexible when they take it out of buffo so they would just take it peel it off in strands and literally make sewing threads they could make um they use it in thicker quantities to lash tools together would they let it dry first or would they they pull it off as when it’s still wet it still wet or you hopefully soak this and get it soft enough again to okay but we haven’t tried that I’ve tried about everything else but I haven’t tried that one yet so it was used for a variety wind was coming from West so they weren’t able to use the sail too often but uh that would be another way to propel it now there’s a rope up there in the front too they would use that rope to pull that would be the have to walk on the shore there wasn’t much of a Shore there actually I left in the now the Missouri River was not very back then so they were able to do it most places like that but this boat was very very heavy and it was loaded with about 15 so imagine trying to pull something like that up they had about 20 22 guys out there and P on that Ro so to many people walk up the M what they were doing that’s what they do they were walking up carrying their possessions behind on the boat pretty pretty tough guys back there like that it’s just like what yeah canas is it’s like this roof that’s um it’s thin and it looks kind of stringy almost it looks like a radish yeah it almost looks like a radish or some people call it know to yeah yeah that the same thing wild carrot is not the same as K but it looks yeah and so they would tradition of her upbringing within the N Pur tribe and some of her experiences growing up so please welcome Mary tble good afternoon sight with a sighting vein once you got that thing lined up exactly the way you want it to go and again you’re going to have it up on the tripod or up on the shakeup staff and then you’re going to sight through the siding vein and in the sighting veins there are holes and then there’s slits below that so once you’ve got it kind of rough figured out with the holes then you slide your eye down and you line it up with the split and then you get that much better direction as you go along so this team had to move a lot slower yep L and Clark didn’t measure their way all the way across the continent with this kind of accuracy and what what we like to say is that the the public land surveyors are following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark as they’ve gone across the continent now we’ve got Lewis and or we’ve got the public land surveyors the general land office surveyors another name for the same thing kind of filling in the rest of the map L Clark just taken that one route across the continent where now we’re going to say we want to measure out the rest of it and the reason for all of this is to fulfill what Thomas Jefferson had in mind and that is to get as he put it the yman farmer out on the left you have a rough idea how far off Clark were with their rough maps and then fin did miles miles the final map which um gets published in I believe it’s 1814 with the the first set of journals um that yeah that map has been compared with a modern map so it comes out to be about 40 Mi off now you know part of that is the accuracy of the the width of the line I mean a line on a map of that scale you know could be you know 40 Mi wide all by itself so but they’re incredibly accurate and it it really comes from two places one is um this is a replica of Captain Captain Clark’s Compass the one he carried with him we we know it because it’s one of the few pieces that actually survived the ls and Clark um Voyage as they came back to St Louis in 1806 all their equipment that they had left became Surplus government property it was auctioned off oh God but the compass Clark’s Compass was his own personal Compass so he kept that compass and it’s now the original was now expected to get back it’s phenomenal isn’t it in fact that one poster we have we have one at pompy’s Pillar the uh the one at the top there oh yes and it shows a a photo of his uh where he his name nice that’s where leis and three others come out over Lim High Pass they were an advanced part looking for the way across a disappointing day though row after row of mountains yeah yeah okay on the well that in this corner we get from the Mand Indians one of the 12 varieties that they perpetuate from the old store of genetic seed stocks and it’s kind they Grind from formul so you can grind it back and forth just like that you got to work in the kitchen more here you I a Volcan CRA kind of a b fish it has to be we covered this didn’t open quite a while you got one in the shirt origal tail this is a relatively large here check out the in the Joby this is about 300 lb jly bear this is over a th000 so quite a bit of difference does the weight correspond directly to like how tall they stand oh yeah how much mass they did like that what is it Boon and Crocket scale right do they measure the height of them set no it’s this this print that’s rting one does kind of the same things that I are you an archaeologist for the PM then h no story okay there is there are jobs for his history majors not very many I have a degree in history so yeah for 6 years I I was a teacher before that so I I used my degree obviously but you know this is him when he was one of that that party of of four men who first entered Idaho uh with me my blanket is kind of buried underneath my stuff over there he would have had a blanket along also but uh so it’s was like just like a little mini Expedition they took off from the main group kind of thing yes yep set out on foot cuz the bullets were going so slow at that time so he was the guy who carried the provisions that me he was the cook and so he would have had a h sack you know he had 2 lbs of flour about the same of of meal I don’t think he had necessarily any of this stuff but it’s just kind of interesting I just wanted to have it on display anyway is it’s like the hard yeah that time they were calling it biscuit but it’s the same thing it’s whole wheight flour butter and water mix it up roll it out and then bake it and that stuff will keep for a long long time it’s about 14 months old that’s a loaf of sugar oh and what do you do you you shave it off you can shave it off or they have little you pinch some off like that yeah and it has a lot of molasses in it so it’s really much better for you than just plain white sugar and that’s how tea used to come that’s black tea oh wow it’s okay oh sure where do you get this now there’s a company several companies online that sell reenactor supplies all stuff so then what you do is just cut off a piece too sure you can scrape some off or you can cut off a piece and it’s it’s proc it’s chopped very finely so it’s almost more of a powder than it is a leaf and at that time they were issuing a 69 caliber must that’s the big one that’s the big musket ball yes they all handmade so they could be interchangeable no these weren’t these were made by by by Factory it’s called the 1795 contract model it actually was just a copy of a musket that was made in France about 30 years that’s what I mean cuz the French one could take like they could take all the they move the moving Parts on any rifle and change out with another one and like so they did that so like for the core so they all had you know rifle B they could just kind of how it yes and they did have one good gunsmith along them and he had to get Innova a few times to repair guns but he was able to and and so they carried a cartridge box rather than just you know a Powder Horn with with a separate pouch of of balls oh so they have like yeah and you know I don’t know what these look like but a friend of mine made up some cartridges for me it’s just each cartridge was paper and it had just enough powder to to Prim the pan to pour the rest down the barrel and then the ball went down the barrel um that was enough for one round okay so you have to get out your Powder Horn and dump it out you just the end of right right but but here’s the quandry okay now I’m ready to reload but what do I do so this this gives me to a rule that the Army had at that time regulation if you wanted to be in the Army you had to have at least two teeth and they had to be opposite each other you see where I’m headed yeah and then you pour some on that and then you pour the dress down there right Tamp it in with the ram rod and then you’re ready to to shoot around if you were if you were really good you should be able to get off four rounds a minute one every 15 seconds uh and they also had a bayonet though in case uh 15 seconds uh wasn’t enough time that’s the biggest chipmunk I’ve ever seen that’s a big chipmunk you want lunch yeah they were having a hard time you got sear running now I did I proba I didn’t I know I didn’t hit you with anything they would send out Hunters along the shoreline and they could range out in front of the core as they were moving up shootting animals and hang them up and they would actually come along and together and they were only moving 5 to 6 M an hour I mean 5 to 6 miles a day and on the way back they couldn’t do it because they were averaging up to 70 m a day on the way back they got into the current the way they so they couldn’t put Hunters out cuz they run off and leaving down stream so to speak mhm so they actually had to stop three or 4 days at a time send Hunters out and bring in the food and and eat a couple of days jerk the meat and then they get back in the canoes and off up but they were they were not doing too well on the way back that’s whenever Captain uh Lewis got shot is actually one of the hunting trips by the beach of those and we still use these today so they would have put their PL here wouldt soaked put it all in she pressed it together and kept it nice and tight until the plants dried out and when they dried out they had a perfect specimen of the plant that they looked at remember you kids Uncle Ryan got you one of those you have that little plant press with piece of wood terrible uh back side right there on the this is the back away from that’s the back side because uh wood never I that backbody told anything my uncle always told yeah pretty old bottom around mixure of mercury you know the stuff in thermometers that goes up and down to tell you the temperature and jalop which is a plant root and it’s held together with breadcrumbs as a binding agor and if you’re given one of Dr Rush’s pills you’d have to hurry to the bathroom because in less than 10 minutes you’d be cleared out to the extent that just liquid’s coming out also to make you go to the bathroom they have salt peter and if they’re out of salt peter they could give you gunpowder because salt Peter’s one of the ingredients in gunpowder what is that what’s that sponge thing well it’s just a sponge for cleaning wounds now do you have sponges at home yeah Is this different yeah how’s it different because it’s all at holes has like holes what are the sponges like that you have at home they’re like they’re rough they have holes in them they like and they’re Square you see what you have are artificial sponges that they make out of plastics this is a real sponge it used to live at the bottom of the sea little microbes and bacteria would swim by and get caught up in all the nooks and crannies and it would eat them this used to be a living animal this doesn’t have any eyes you ever see an animal without eyes you have what um and I hauled this out and it was overcast and I said to the students what can I do with oh you make a fire I one of it’s overcat it’s it’s easier to get a flashlamp oh oh good good good now from North Dakota you get to say Chic now this woman had a child and think things really didn’t change a whole lot in child they put light cord on it yeah changed a lot in the grass there huh in the grass in the grass that’s my coffee cup oh coffee my coffee funny looking coffee cup isn’t it then I can put it on my belt here and I got my coffee cup handy when next time I want made out of a some kind of out of a buffalo horn buffalo horn this what is that blue what’s that blue stuff what do you think that blue stuff is huh what do you think yeah if I took if I wanted to make a nice long straight Str line see I would take this string and I would lay it on there like that listen listen like that hang on the end of itang on right on the end of it hold it hang on hang on real tight hold down here hold it down there you see real tight my truck is is wet you see the line e

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]]> Gerard Baker on Partnership, Tribal Voices, and the Bicentennial Legacy https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-09240605/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:56 +0000 https://research.lewisandclarktrust.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-09240605/ A recording from the Tent of Many Voices collection.

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]]> ccle of State advisers a group of of people that were very crucial to uh getting these venues set up in all of the different states that Core 2 traveled so Karen seberg is going to represent kosa thank you um I apologize for my voice we could call it stress or laryngitis or I don’t know what but uh I’m here anyway first of all I just want to say I’m humbled in the extreme um I’m sitting in front of all of these tribal Representatives these Sovereign Nations and a family that I just really met maybe a week ago Discovery Expedition all of the speakers and all the wonderful people that are here circle of State advisors have been working for about six or seven years to try to make this something exciting and meaning F in the states and I think there’s only one other uh State advisor here Keith Peterson will you stand up please from Idaho Keith should be standing up here because he actually was a chair of our group and I wasn’t so I feel humbled by that too I think the thing I want to talk about is partnership you’ve heard about it the whole to the whole night and you’re going to hear about it until this is over this is partnership um um watching last weekend in my town Core 2 with the BLM and I didn’t know Steve was Reclamation I thought he was the guy that wanted the Bison tongue and he did cook it and I did eat it and it was really pretty good but he told me we needed to get bison tongue because probably it wasn’t the season for beaver tail but to see these agencies work together was incredible um working with Kevin and Wanda and um even Dwayne if he’s out there we only had one city worker that kind of shook this group up but but I do want to talk about that the communities our communities in all of our states particularly the small communities like ours and even smaller who would never have had the opportunity to hear nations from across the Trail never had the opportunity to hear the speakers that some of you that live in Washington or Oregon or North Dakota or Montana Idaho get to hear all the time the fact that we all were able to hear you and to learn and to understand and then finally that we became part of the family too I just cannot say enough to thank Discovery Expedition all of the federal agencies the Nations and particularly C to family thank you thank you Karen uh Gerard Baker is now the superintendent of Mount Rushmore and I think Gerard has for at least some of us has been uh the spiritual leader for this effort and before I ask him to come up I just want to again express my personal thanks for your leadership and your vision ladies and gentlemen Gerard Baker they put me thank you very much um first thing I want to do is I want to acknowledge uh um a drum that I’ve been hearing all my life and and with my relatives I still listen to them and they’ve been to a lot of our events over the past years and that’s the Mander singer I want to acknowledge my relatives up here you know this journey for a lot of us have started many different ways uh some of it started reading history books some of it has started sitting in logous listening to the elders a long time ago some of it has started maybe on the trail as you walk on a trail and and discover what they discovered and when when also discover what the American Indians already knew there’s a lot of Partners here and and there’s a lot of people that we need to thank and I think they’ve been thanked over and over again this whole time we’ve been here in St Louis which is a marvelous City and there’s a lot of people who in many ways are not with us but in spirit they are some of the ones that start it some of the ones that backed Us in the way of family and I know that they are all here with us this was a Incredible Journey To Remember and it was it was an incredible journey to start another Incredible Journey and what I mean by that is that this took Partnerships first and foremost most as I mentioned when we started this thing years ago that’s I’m kind of feeling old now uh not as old as Otis half moon no but you know but and so what what we talked about this for a long long time many different tribes coming together arguing sometimes and but usually and almost always coming out with a sense of responsibility not for us per se but for the future Generations this journey we’re on and we’re going to continue on as we all said I think we’ve all thought and have all felt many times around that it’s a journey that would open many doors for one thing I’ve encourage people all the time to many times get off that boat and be in those Villages or be in those Banks when the Lewis and Clark exibition came around that corner now one of the one of the peoples that can help us do that and did help us do that are the tribal people and my heart and my hat and everything I just I I feel so great and so good that I really do believe that this time around it was an American Indian story you know I’ve been in a park service now for 29 years and I’ve had many different interesting assignments and I want to brag on these folks in Gray and green I want to brag on these folks in blue that helped us that were partners with us when we first started and continued in our still today I’ve heard so many compliments from American Indian people along this trail of how good these folks were to them and how they treat them with respect how they played their games and how they lost I think but I think that in itself open doors forever everybody in his place everybody who had who maybe is not here along long his Trail has stories now just like the Lewis and Clark explorers did originally and just like them many many many Indian tribes did after they left the villages and it takes it truly does take a group of people to get along and it truly does take a group of people to argue sometimes to challenge each other but come out shining and I’m not talking about your head either man this there are people that helped us out and we first started with this years ago and I don’t have time and and I wish I could mention everybody that helped helped us and I’m talking especially with cor 2 in your early days we have people that are here today they’ll recognize and mainly from a lot of things he’s done one of the original people that were in the office when I got to Omaha Nebraska as a superintendent and as Mr Dick Williams if I can have that mountain man stand up there are other folks of course that helped us out came out later on but I want to mention particular the from the American Indian liaison because we went through a lot back in those days we went through many many tribes I tried to keep up with Otis Half Moon and I could not do it half of the time he would go around and try to start fights and and I’d have to solve those darn things but Otis is an outstanding individual he’s an outstanding human being and he’s an outstanding Ranger and he was an outstanding American Indian lay on Otis thank you we have we have many stories about how we would drive around the west coast and and doing work Ernie by the way we were actually driving around and visiting with tribes many many stories about that the other we have in the audience is is a friend that I met on the trail actually and eventually got to hire him a direct descendant of from a from a family that was given clup that’s Mr Dick bash and there’s one that is not here right now because he’s working for me right now and he’s working and and as Mr Daryl Martin he’s he’s the guy you seen that little sports car and I talked to Daryl the other day as I was coming down here and I said darl if there’s one thing that you would want to say what would it be and I think it’s the same thing that every one of us want to say and will will say I hope and is that is to keep this dream alive this Bicentennial is over but the doors are open to the future I want to say for the first time in the history of this nation and long overdue has we as federal agencies really opened those doors to the American Indian nations to give them a chance to tell their story no matter what it is to tell their story and that’s what we talked about and we dreamed about when we first started this tent of many voices but it takes the tribes to keep doing what you’re doing and it especially takes the federal agencies and I challenge you from now on no matter where you go to open those doors because it’s going to be easy to say well we haven’t got the budget it’s going to be easy to say we haven’t got the Personnel it’s going to be easy to say all these different things why we can’t do some but those are excuses that that that we can’t live with this door is open we are bringing tribes and where they are teaching us about who they are where they’ve been and where we’re going to go to the Future that’s a tent to many voices and if you look around this this area today it truly is many many voices in here we have some outstanding managers and Steve Adams that came in and brought all you guys back safe Lewis and Clark we in that whole journey we lost what I heard today three where’s Cliff Snider three we lost one blackf the other one lived you said you guys didn’t lose anybody I don’t think right if you did you’re not going to tell us I know that man but again it’s such an honor to from from sitting and and and thinking about this long time ago and it’s such a great joy to see the American Indian tribes involved first and foremost and again I encourage you to never let this go away I keep saying that I truly truly mean it and as we go along our trail of life now never forget your experiences and always challenge yourself and I know these ladies and gentlemen that are on this trail with this exhibit I believe we’re challenged every day we create some great friendships we brought some people in that we knew from long time ago and I one of those guys that I brought in from my early almost childhood was a guy by name of Mr Jeff Olsen and to he was a Pio there he is I knew Jeff when he was a sports writer and I can’t hardly talk to him because he’s now in the Washington office so as but again folks to conclude I just want to thank you it’s it’s it’s it’s really tough to stop talking it really is but I will I promise but keep it going keep the doors is open and my heart and my prayer is go out to the American Indians that are here today because I know you struggled to come on board because what I thought what you thought I believe in many cases is that you weren’t going to tell that story we weren’t going to allow it as federal agencies for one but I hope we prove to you that we have allowed it and we encourage it because all the stories that we have never forget the past as my grandfathers used to always tell me never forget the past don’t let it go because by knowing the past we can do better for the future so again I want to thank everybody for for making a dream come true literally the last thing I want to tell you is I got to give a little boost for my new park I’m at Mt Rushmore and I’ll be happy to say that two out of those four now have braids thank you Gerard Gerard was representing the circle of tribal advisers and we wanted to uh share with you something that uh we shared with Amy mosset and Sammy Meadows the other night uh during a different ceremony what uh Gerard is holding it’s a piece of the tent of many voices with a picture on the top and a Core 2 pin and we’re going to make sure that each Coda representative receives one of these frame pieces of the tent so that hopefully it will keep the tent in your memory uh also we presented uh an arrow head that we we have made that’s uh to the circle of tribal advisers for their exemplary support of the core of discovery too and Sammy or Bobby Connor we as a family uh it’s good analogy for those of you who know us well um the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial the circle of tribal advisors the circle of State advisors the National Park Service all of the federal agencies we’re like a family we fight and then we get up and work together and we put all those things behind us and so tonight it’s my privilege to announce some names on the National Council and the circle of tribal advisers and all of our partners would like to present these gifts and I would like to say to you that because these are family gifts these are personal and I’m going to step in front of the camera and say these are personal gifts I was a Fed for 13 years I know the rules these are personal gifts and if for any reason your agency doesn’t believe that hang it in your office but these our personal gifts I’d like to first ask Steve Adams and Gerard Baker to step up here and the reason I want to call these two to your attention is we fought to have no censorship of tribal messages but somebody on the other side had to defend that right and that opportunity and these are the two men that made it possible for tribes to speak more than 400 tribal speakers more than 400 representatives of native Sovereign Nations spoke in this tent of many voices over the last three years in nine months those 400 plus tribal Representatives reached hundreds of thousand thousands of people because of core of Discovery 2 thank you I’m going to NE next ask somebody that you probably didn’t see on the trail very often to come up here but boy if there was paperwork to find or things to get ironed out Betty Boo saved us many times thank you thank you this next lady we lost somewhere between Albuquerque and Houston I think I’m not sure but she found her way back in her Park Service Unit uniform Pat Jones Thank You Pat this next guy he was uh as as Gerard mentioned he was a sports writer but for those of you who’ve ever seen when the national Lewis and Clark exhibit traveled to from St Louis to Portland and Denver and Philadelphia we had and as well at the University of Virginia when the bicentennial started there were some fabulous photographs of the Northern Lights of the White Cliffs of Wei Prairie all of those photographs were donated to us by Jeff Olsen this next guy for those of you who know that the National Council voted tribal involvement the number one priority well that wouldn’t go very far without money and Dick Williams you helped us make tribal involvement real please come up thank you you’re so welcome if any of you are old enough to remember George and Gracie Burns well Gerard would have been nothing without Otis there Otis Halfmoon was there telling Gerard how to pronounce saga’s name in many tribal communities where Gerard wanted to insist she was Ida Otis this next guy needs an Arrow Shirt um because most of the time we were looking for him with a problem and he was supposed to solve it for us no matter what town he was in wherever we were bash this is a personal one Diane malakin and Alan Pinkham are presented a Beed bolo personally to Mr bash for those of you who were hosts to Core 2 you know that we must have been as sites evaluated 15 times well the first person who came and evaluated us to see if our parking lots were big enough was this lady and I think she probably is the way that we ended up staying on the calendar but the negotiations for who got Core 2 was Carol MC Bryant’s problem from the get-go now I said as a family we fight boy did we fight with this guy but it was worth it everything was better because we got everything worked out Kevin chryler I don’t know how we would have done what we did without these people and I’m going to call them up Warren Casper Angela Bates and latata Miller for those of you who don’t know

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]]> Matt Schanandore: Mandan Flute Music and History https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-09230606/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:56 +0000 https://research.lewisandclarktrust.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-09230606/ A recording from the Tent of Many Voices collection.

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]]> welcome to the ten mini voices and the core Discovery 2 I’d like to give you a little bit of history on us and how coming to St Louis really is the culmination of something spectacular the core Discovery to is the bicentennial commemoration of the Lewis and Clark expedition it’s a bunch of big words to say 200 years ago Lewis and Clark and the members of the Expedition left the East Coast came to St Louis in 180 4 they left St Louis to find an all water route to the Pacific Ocean and then in 1806 they made their Hasty return what took him almost a year and a half to get to the get to the Pacific Ocean took them just about six months to return and so we’ve been on this six-month Journey since about late February early March of this year where we too started on the Pacific Ocean and have been making our Trek back to St Louis and so we’ve been going by land where Lewis and Clark went by water we’ve been visiting different American Indian reservations and Nations we’ve interacted with dozens of communities and this weekend is the finale this is where this traveling National Park the only one of its kind reaches its conclusion and so this is our final presentation today in the Ten of many voices and I would like to tell you that the tent of many voices is exactly what it’s named for this tent has has allowed several different historians reenactors musicians lawyers American Indian Nation members all walks of life have come through to include dogs have come through this tenam many voices to tell about some aspect of the Lewis and Clark expedition and so our final for our final presentation this afternoon you’re going to have a fantastic treat Matt he is going to give you some music and history of the Mandan Nation he’s a fantastic flute player so please Welcome Matt shann Andor for e well um thank you for coming out here today my my final performance here in the the tent of many voices um as she said my name is Matt shanor and I’m a enrolled member from the fort birth old um community and reservation um my ancestry goes back to the mandans and hadat of people um coming out of the Missouri Valley area in North Dakota and I also have a descendant of the Onida tribe from Wisconsin that’s kind of where the shannondorf shann andoa in that song that we all know shann andoa but um today though I’ve come here to to play a little bit of the flute music as well as talk to you a little bit about the Mand Dan some stories that um I was told from my grandmother growing up and um before we get started here though talking about the Mandan College give you a little bit of background on it though the mandans were Lewis and Clark met them when they went up the Missouri River in 1804 and just before about 20 year time period before Lewis and Clark came up the river the mandans were actually living south of where um Lewis and Clark met them and this area of the Missouri River was a a very large area of the Missouri River where the Mandan lived and they numbered in the thousands there was almost 15,000 man den living in this area just up to about the 1780s and so these are massive communities that lived in this area and that’s kind of the the history that I I speak about is that time period just before LS and Clark came up the river here and um there’s a there’s a village that we have up there a state park in North Dakota called The honestl Village and it’s a Mandan Village site and there we tell the story of the Mandan people and I’ve been telling that story for a number of years and I’ll relate back to that a little bit later here but um the Manan culture though nothing was ever written down and so with that everything was passed on orally oral Traditions oral stories oral histories the language passed on and so with that it’s a key part of the mandang culture and the tradition of many Native cultures that their history be passed on orally to the upcoming generations and I think that’s such an important part to learn from all these stories and cultures that have come together for the Lewis and Clark Journey here um the stories multiple Stories being told about Lewis and Clark as they travel all the way to the Pacific coast and came back through this area those same stories we can learn from they have been passed on for multiple Generations but there is a set of stories though that I want to begin with and these are called creation stories and and in the Mandan culture the the there’s there stories that talk about how everything came to be the the river the trees the sky the birds the people themselves in NOA how they became how they came to be where they were those were all considered creation stories and and the flute itself also has a creation story and that story talks about how this instrument this this sound how it became part of the Mandan culture here so I want to begin with that story here for you today but this story though it starts out with a warrior and he set it out he set out to find U food for his family this this strong Warrior was tracking the game along the the river banked areas and in North Dakota we have large forested areas of cottonwood trees these really tall trees that that grow and this Warrior was down in this wooded area along the river and he was tracking the game and while this Warrior this young Warrior he got turned around in this forest and he really didn’t know which way he wanted to get out and and Nightfall was coming too so it became dark so this Warrior beded down for the night and this Warrior he laid beside one of these massive cottonwood trees and he he listened to all the night sounds that you hear the the owls The Crickets the wind blowing blowing through the leaves of these trees and it was a very calming sound listening to all these night sounds as they came together well there was a sound that came about that this Warrior had never heard before it was a Eerie ghostly sound that blew through these leaves but that Warrior he listened to that sound as it blew through this forest and that Warrior fell asleep listening to that sound well in a dream this Warrior had he saw a red-headed woodpecker and this bird told this Warrior follow me follow me follow me so that Warrior when he woke the next morning he gathered up all his belongings and started to find his way out of this wooded area as this Warrior was moving through this this Forest along the river he spotted that woodpecker perched in the trees in front of him and he stared at that bird that bird stared back at that Warrior and slowly that Warrior dropped everything that he had as he stared that stared at bird well that woodpecker flew off the branch and that that Warrior followed him as fast as he could through the forest and this woodpecker LED this Warrior out to an open Prairie and standing alone was this cedar tree and as this Warrior approached this tree it was he noticed it was very old and the top branches begun to die off and as he got closer he realized that there was light glistening through these these branches on the top of this tree that woodpecker had pecked holes in all those top branches of that tree well that Warrior as he stood there list or looking at this tree a gust of wind blew across the Prairie and he made that same sound he had heard the night before so that Warrior he climbed the tree took a branch off and went back to his village and there he sat for many days and he he fiddled with this branch and trying to make that sound he had heard he became frustrated with it so the the warrior left the village he went up to a hill topped area overlooking the river and there he cried for a vision on how to make that sound that he’ heard well on the fourth night of his journey there this this woodpecker again came to this war and he changed into the the form of a man it was the creator and in this man’s hands he held a cedar branch and with bone tools this man showed that Warrior how to make his first flute play his first song well when that man left that Warrior went out to find that tree again and he in the shade of that tree he took a branch from that tree and with bone tools he carved his very first flute and learned his first song and dedicated that song to that woodpecker that bird that had inspired him to to to learn this music and to find out more about this sound that he’ heard well when that Warrior had learned his song he went back to his village he gathered everyone into the plaza of this Village and he stood up in front of them all and this was very brave for this Warrior to do because in the Mandan traditions and and many of the the native Traditions you don’t you didn’t speak up to your elders you always listen to your elders because they always had something wise to tell you a story to tell you but this Warrior this young Warrior had a story to tell the people of his village and so he sat everyone down and he stood up and he told them the story about the Woodpecker told them the story about the flute he showed them his flute that he had made and he played his song for them the so that Warrior he played the song for the people of the village and they were all stunned as this sound echoed through the Village area and this Warrior he stood up and kind of walked away because his crowd was quiet and this Warrior started to make his way away from the crowd an elder gentleman stood up and congratulated this warrior with praise on this new sound he had brought to the village and one by one the people of the village began to stand up and congratulate this Warrior and praise again on how to how the sound had echoed through the village and how it brought his story to life that he had told and so that Warrior went out and he found other Warriors in the village and he gathered them and pulled them aside he gave a piece of that that cedar tree and with bone tools he showed them how to make their own fluts and told them to go out to the surroundings around them and find inspiration for their songs so that they too could teach this to their sons and teach this to their grandsons so that the story of the flute and the flute players and makers would always be part of the Manan culture so that’s the creation story of how the flute came to be as um part of the Mandan and this the story is very similar to many Native cultures around the the the United States area here as well a as a as well as around the country or World in fact you see wooden fluts like this in in most cultures around the world and that same type of story of the Creator giving them this instrument is very common between that now in the archaeological and historical references of the flute we find the first um indications of flutes in these cultures in the Northern Plains area here coming around in around 1200 ad with the finding of Eagle bone whistles and those gradually progressed into wood and and Cedar being a very sacred wood but it was also very soft and so could be easily be carved with with bone tools and and be held together as well this one here as well as this one are Cedar and you’re going to notice there’s quite a bit different tone in them and sound compared to the other fluts that are just um um different types of hardwood that you’d find as well I’ll explain a little bit more uh later on that but the next song that I want to play for you here though is uh my first food song and the story for this song um this song’s called Eagle dreams and my grandmother her name was Eagle pum woman and she was a three4 mixture of Mandan and Hada and she was raised up at Fort berl by her grandmother and her grandmother had done many of the the traditional Manda and Hada um gardening techniques and and and told her many stories when she was growing up before she went off to boarding school um at age six and so when I was growing up as a child I was told a lot of these stories not as a child we didn’t um myself and my brothers we we didn’t want to we never wanted to sit down for a long period of time you know we wanted to run around play have fun watch some TV and so the really only time that my grandmother ever had a chance to really tell us these stories was when we were tied to a chair getting our hair cut by her she used to cut her hair and so she would tell us these stories and and they weren’t stories about so and so knows so and so and and these are your relatives cuz she would tell us those stories but the stories that really that are in my memory of her are uh the stories that talk about the the life styles in these Villages there’s no pictures of these Villages besides paintings that we have from Catlin and bobber and that’s that’s after the time period of smallpox but there was one there was a time Peri when the mandin were a huge community and so these stories would give images in my head of of these massive Villages along the river and these Gardens that spread along the river as well well as I Grew Older I began working at our our state park and I started learning more and more about my Heritage but the thing that really inspired me was our um our village there The honestant Village the the homes of the Mandan the Earth lodges that are there were um really bad off they had been standing for 50 60 years there and my grandmother thought it was a very U bad representation of the Mandan Nation she would call it these decaying homes falling apart and um collapsing in on themselves and so she she fought with other other Mandan elders and and trying to get awareness to this Village and to get um money put aside to restore it back to its um to tell the mam story well um a month before she passed away she found out that the the federal government would get give the organization there $1.9 million to restore this Village and and so when I started in 1999 I got to see all of her dreams come true and today you can go there and see these lodges see the stuff in them and hear the story of the mandam people and that’s one of the greatest things I think of her dream was that the story of the mam people is being told to thousands of visitors as they come through this park and so that really inspired me during that time to learn about my ancestry which I I knew a little bit about but not a lot and when I was doing that I came across the the flute and the instruments that were part of these Villages and so that really stood out for me so this song Here is called Eagle dreams e oh e for now um getting to the Mandan living along these Villages here these um these massive Villages they said there was about 15,000 people strong that lived along these Villages and the mandans were gardeners they farmed the flood Plains of this Missouri River out here and they had massive Gardens and in these Gardens the M grew corn and beans and squash and sunflower and this was the money for the mandans this made them a wealthy tribe along the Missouri cuz this was their trade item the mandans and hadat that area were the center of trade for the Northern Great Plains tribes from all over would come in to to meet with the mandans and trade for their crops and so during the summertime these women were down tending to the gardens and my grandma was me would always mention it about these these Gardens and and the women down there that they were the backbone of the the Mandan tribe in the in the Villages because of this food that they had and so you have to imagine though thousands of women down along these flood planes and um I can just imagine in your head you can probably imagine two sitting up on the the the valley overlooking this and hearing these women down there because the women would sing to their crops during the day because in the Mandan belief everything has a spirit this River out here has a spirit the corn the beans the squash everything has a spirit it’s it’s a living um creature thing and so it has that spirit that needs to be nurtured and so those women would sing songs religious songs these were prayerful songs to this Garden to grow strong and healthy and so thousands of women down along these Plains you could hear these voices echoing and spreading along this um Missouri River here the the valley the garden areas and you can imagine the sound the feeling that you’d get from that type so this next song Here is called watching the corn e e e now there was um in these V villes though that the men also contributed to the village and as I said this food this this this these gardens made these Villages very very wealthy and so the men needed to protect these Villages and so you had Warriors the men that were defended these Villages from enemies coming in as well as they went out and hunted and brought meat into the village as well as game that they could use all parts of the Bison for all different types of tools and useful things in the village nothing ever went to waste but um something came through this area that these men these strong Warriors the Mandan Nation could not fend off and what that was was small pox coming into these Villages here and it’s made its way all the way up into the northern Great Plains and it affected the mandans just like it affected Nations and civilizations all around the world that same disease affected the mandans and for the M as I’ve been telling you is their their culture was passed on orally to the upcoming generations and so with that he must like my program out there he can hear me um but with the Mandan Nation everything passed on story so as these people died off in large numbers stories began to die off with them and were lost forever and one of the the areas of these Villages of the population of the village that was affected the the worst were the elders because of they weren’t able they weren’t strong enough to fight that disease I mean you could survive from small pucks but uh rare PE rare numbers ever did survive that disease and it was usually the the strong and healthy individuals so some Elders would die and in those stories if they hadn’t told or passed on that information that would go with them and when my grandmother was alive she’d always when when um friends up on uh reservation or or even siblings of her hers when they would die or pass on she’d always say there was a great wealth of knowledge that was lost there and um when she passed away I felt the same way I felt there was a loss of knowledge I didn’t know everything that I should have known before she had left and she often times compared it to a set of encyclopedias burning up and you couldn’t access that information and we don’t really use encyclopedias today but imagine if your internet cord got cut and you couldn’t search the internet you had that same loss that you you were lost you didn’t have that information and so this next song Here is called a grandparents farewell is because these Elders of these Villages were the most respected people in the whole village you never I was taught growing up as as a child you never you never looked your elders in the eye and so you always looked away and you always listened to them if they had something to say you never talked while they were talking and so they were very well respected because of the the wisdom that they had and the knowledge that they had had from these Villages so next song again it’s called a grandparents farewell for while as this disease went through the village Warriors these strong Warriors that would protect them from enemies coming into the tribe gathered around and these Warriors would gather around often times around a drum and for the Mandan culture and in many cultures around the world a drum is one of the most sacred instruments that can be part of that Village the drum is never left unattended it’s all there’s prayers for the drum there’s even tobacco offered to the drum and because it’s it mimics the most the first sound we hear as a child in the womb of our mother we hear that heartbeat that beat of life as some may call it and that drum really represents that represents that that beat that keeps life going and so these Warriors would gather around this drum and they’d sing songs and these songs were were prayerful songs they were powerful medicine wed off these evil spirits that had come into the village and that’s really what they thought that disease was was evil spirits coming to this Village so this next song here you’ll hear those Warriors and those voices coming together n d we’ll have um a couple last songs here for you this next song Here is called the The Rebirth of a nation and and for the mandans as I studied their history after small pox and after Lewis and Clark came through this area um they were they suffered through small poox again with that with that same disease and for the mandans in 50 years the mandans had gone from this massive tribe 15,000 down to less than a thousand people 50 years and so you can imagine what stories what songs what traditions were lost during that time period but in any sense myself being here today and many of the the Mand descendants that are are here at this celebration all around us speaking and telling their story that theyve been told about the Mandan us descendants being here is rep a representative of the mandans overcoming those obstacles stles Through Time overcoming that and the reason that they were able to overcome that is because the stories those simple stories that were told to the children as they were growing up to the teenagers as they started to learn their ways around the village those simple Stories being told to each generation has been able to have the M Dan still around today and make sure that those stories are still around and that still happens today those stories are still being passed on just like I tell told you story here today myself passing that story on to you those stories are continually being passed on to the upcoming Generations so as long as this River out here is Flowing the mandans will always have a presence along this River here so this next song Here is called The Rebirth of a Nation turn the CD up a little bit oh e the e I have um One Last Song here to close with this song Here is called A Warrior’s spirit and this is really because the Mandan tradition in in many Native Traditions we’re always remembering our ancestors right here with this this Festival here this this celebration we’re remembering the ancestors the people that came up this River the the tribes that lived here the tribes that met Lewis and Clark all those ancestors all those stories we remember them and that’s very key in in in in passing on those stories and so when when my family gets together and I go out and give a tour of our our village I’m always remembering my ancestors my grandmother even remembering those stories those people that come before us and it’s the same with all you folks here as well uh remembering where You’ have come from your ancestors and so this next song I want you to close your eyes and and think of uh stories you may have been told by your grandparents grandmother grandfather stories that you were told if you have grandchildren what stories are do you want to tell them for them to pass on to their kids and their grandchildren as well you’re remembering those stories and in turn you’re remembering those ancestors that have come so this last song is here called a warrior spirit all right well I I thank you for coming out here today and and taking in the the celebration here make sure you take in everything around here today but uh thanks for listening to me and spending some time here in the the tent with me we have just a minute or two if you have a question or two for Matt and if you don’t have any questions or you do um I have a a couple gentlemen up at U my reservation before birth at make them for me I I’m learning how to make them it just it’s a really hard artwork to work with so I haven’t really got it down path yet so hopefully sometime I’ll get it down but right now I have a couple gentlemen that flute makers up there that make my great uncle was a uh a flute maker for the Mandan was your shirt actually this one’s new I just I I had it just for this this so I haven’t washed it yet so you’ll have to ask my mother on that one though if there are no other questions then we thank you very much for attending the different programs here today and we’ll be open again tomorrow from 9 until 5: thank you and have a good evening

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]]> Ladonna Brave Bull Allard on Lakota Relations and History https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-08250602/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:54 +0000 https://research.lewisandclarktrust.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-08250602/ A recording from the Tent of Many Voices collection.

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]]> many voices in core of Discovery to um we are a multi-agency exhibit sponsored by many different federal agencies you can see many of them on the banner here in front of you um we are managed by the National Park Service and we’ve been on the road since 2003 we kicked off in 2003 at monachello Virginia and we spent about three years total making our way out to the Pacific Ocean where we ended up in that area last year our last stop I think was Vancouver Washington last year and this is our final year we’re making our way back to St Louis where our final venue will be uh the 25th of September in St Louis it’s been a very interesting Journey for us obviously it’s been a lot easier on us than it was on LS and Clark we’ve been staying in motel throughout our journey but if you look here in the tenini voices it’s exactly that it’s a place for people to come from different backgrounds to talk about the impacts of the Lewis and Clark expedition on them also and in addition to that we do have a kill booat display over to my left directly behind us a National Guard set up as well our exhibit tent is to my right and we also have Steve Morehouse and a Dugout canoe to my left and we have an American Indian table directly behind the tenam Min voices so I encourage everyone to experience all that we have to offer here at core Discovery too and without any further Ado I’m going to introduce you now to our next presenter it’s good to see her back in the tent again I’ve not seen Lonna in a couple years but anyhow I’d like to introduce you today to Ladonna bra bull Allard and she is from Standing Rock so please help me make Ladonna welcome he hter wash day good morning everyone I want to tell you a little bit about myself before I start I’m from stany Rock Sue tribe for people who don’t know that is the home of cting bull and um I found that everybody can connect us when we say Sitting Bull we are four bands and if you know the separation between the Lota doota Nation we are H and CAD H Papa and black feet ihun and CAD are y originally come from the Jamestown Valley over by Jamestown North Dakota Allendale North Dakota and then the hook Papa and black feet who I’ll go into a little background as we we get into the presentation are Lota the reason why I tell you to four bands people forget that there’s a distinction between lot Dakota and nakot and T to lump us into one group as Su and we all know we’re all different so now to me my name is Lonna Brave Allard in my country you have to give your lineal just scent before you start talking to people you have to know who you are I am the daughter of Frank Brave who’s the son of Claude brael who’s the son of John brael who’s the son of Tatanka otia who’s the son of of Ula everybody should know their lineal descents I am also uh a Descent of the German Russians that came to this country my grandma was Eva coun whose father was Frank coun who came over from Odessa my grandmother was born in Odessa and that’s as far as I can go because I guess my grand my great-grandfather was an orphan that came on the boat so that’s a little bit about who I am I come from stany Rock we have 2.3 million Acres where the fourth largest landbased tribe in the United States we are a unique and that my tribe has always been considered isolationist we’ve kept to oursel for many generations not that’s what my presentation’s about the concept that we’re all related comes from my nation the Dakota Nation we say that every day in our prayers our way of life we’re related to everything around us so we’re related to you we’re related to the trees we’re related to the animals we have a relationship with everything around us but in time and Memorial we have all intermarried with the tribes so you may have Mandan over here Hera Rick R them crows there’s always been intermarriage between the tribes first and foremost one of our tribal laws is you can’t marry anybody you’re related to that’s your 302nd cousin related to your in-laws over there so it gets really hard because if you can’t marry anybody in your bands or Clans you have to go to other nations to marry our relationships are interconnected between marriage adoption and trade agreements adoption that’s one of our sacred rights as theota people lot people we call it hunka that means that this gentleman and me have been conversing we made friends I really like him and so I ask him will you be my brother we have a hunka ceremony he be comes my brother when you’re hunka that means more than blood that means you become a relative through God and nobody can break that Alliance so we as Indian people tend to adopt a lot of people still today I have two brothers who are Japanese I have one brother who’s Jewish he lives in Hawaii I kind of figure I adopt one from Hawaii they’ll take me over there but we still do the adoption C ceremonies the other thing is in our country you know when the contact came and United States came I think they kind of messed up things for people at least for my people because the men always had more than one wife you had as many wives as you can take care of so some of our men had six to seven wives which for me you know one of the keys is they always married sisters or cousins of the sisters so all your sisters would be in one home my husband said that wouldn’t work today cuz my sisters are too crazy they wouldn’t want to be married to my sisters but anyway that that was the General concept of of the families the other thing we did as tribes uh we have our tribal beliefs about maturity and men and women so women they make arrangements for marriage 13 14 15 years old men the average age for them to get married is 30 we truly believe that that’s about the time an average male can mature for a family isn’t that terrible there tribal Traditions but the reason for that age was because a male had to do x amount of things before he could acquire a wife he had to show that he was a good Hunter he had to show that he was able to take care of a home he had to show that he could take care of multiple wives he had to have some standing so in order to do that he had to get out there and build up all this stuff before he could take a wife so you just didn’t say oh that girl’s cute over there you had to have all these things before you can go to her parents and ask for her but men wanted wives so what did they do they went to other nations and they stole women so and you guys all heard the story of sakuya they stole women so when you come to a tribe all of them are mixed because the women came from all different tribes that’s just part of our culture this I’m going to say look cuz I say gets fast sometime everybody says what our Dakota way our our family structures are different so all my father’s brothers are my dads and I call them Father alala they take all the activities requirements the same as my father so they can get after us they can give us guidance we spend time with them when I was growing up it was my uncle who took me to the movies because he was my dad my father is still there but all of my uncles are still there too and those are my dads on the other hand all my father’s sisters are my aunties they take atie roles they get you gifts and help you in your life and stuff my mom’s sisters are my moms and we treat them as our mothers my mother’s brothers are my uncles so when you go through that kind of kinship you’ll find that you’ll be related it to everybody then all my cousins are my brothers and sisters so when you come to Indian country and they say oh well that’s my dad I thought that was your dad well no that’s my dad too all your grandparents brothers and sisters are your grandparents so now you can see how large this Tios this family structure is because everybody’s related and then if you’re not related you’ll accidentally come into the camp and you’re new you’re from a different tribe somebody will come up and adopt you right away to make you a relation it’s the center of our life first and foremost rule is respect your relatives second rule you’re related to everybody and if you’re not related you will be related it’s the way we controlled our societies our camps our government everything it gave us structure now I want to talk to you about how far our people went this man was out in Ohio he is Dakota he fought in the War of 1812 he was the son of red Thunder they now reside on the Spirit Lake reservation one of the BR British agents took red Thunder wife I mean red Thunder sister as a wife and so now we claim relationship with a man named Dixon who fought in the War of 1812 so just by this we know that we have relatives in Ohio and wherever the Dixon family is whether they know they’re related to us or not this is where we collected all of our arikara blood of course the Lota Dakota people don’t like to claim a rra but we have AA blood you go back to this long history of of um Lewis and Clark what did Lewis and Clark do when they were going home they took two chiefs with them white coyote and eagle feathers eagle feathers was from my area on the Grand River what happened was when they were in Washington or St Louis I’m not quite sure where eagle feathers died he got very sick and he died over there on the way back they stopped in the camp to tell the the people that their Chief died Chief gray eyes and I always kind of think of it’s kind of like a misinterpretation because when these people were talking to the Indian people they’d have a french guy who interpreted to AR rra guy who interpreted to Mandan you know and so you go through and I’m not quite sure how they understood that but they thought that oh these guys killed our chief they attacked a man named Inon PRI and white coyote who was on the boat at that time and they end up going all the way back to St Louis white coyote was finally brought home by a man named Manuel Lisa safely well in this whole process along with the the inter Wars that started happening between the uh Lota and the Rara Colonel leworth well Ashley party came up and the raras attacked them Colonel leworth said haha these people can’t get away with this he met the Lota Nation down in Pier made an agreement with them that they would attack the riara from the land Le worth from the water it’s a big long story so I’m making it really short um with that process the Lota came in they attacked on our winter counts you can see two cornstalks as as a reminder of the event for us because all the Lota filled their horses with corn because the Ricos had huge huge Gardens corn and they also took women it is that time that most of the the tribes had era blood case in point cing Bull’s father took one of their R wives Sitting Bull’s half brother was named crazy dog he was half AA people forget these little tidbits in history Sitting Bull also took an ARA wife uh no I I’ll tell you a little bit about about them re they they for a long time have been enemies of our people so we go back and forth and tease about them that’s why I think it’s important to make sure people know that we intermarried with them and a lot of us have re blood not me per se but a lot of people on stany Rock because the re they um originated from this nation called Pon you ever heard of the pony a long time ago the pony used to do a ritual called The Morning Star ritual where they would sacrifice a female to the Morning Star they are the only nation that we know of that did human sacrifices in North America and my people we declared them not human and I know if Pon reads this so they’ll be upset but we declared them non-human we didn’t look at them as human beings cuz we couldn’t see anybody who do that would be human second they had the tendency of coming up and stealing our young girls for the sacrifice so we have a long history of of War so the the two bands in the pon e Nation got into an argument one of the Bands refused to acknowledge the human sacrifice and they broke up off and they started coming north and they became the era as they started North they were down Missouri Kansas coming up as they came further up they were on the Missouri River by the time Lewis and Clark came the era were camped on the ground River after 1823 and you can ask the riok this is part of their history too we ran them off the land and we took the land from them along with the women and of course you know stany rocku tribe is named after a rock and The Rock we claim is an arikara woman who sat down with the baby on her back and turned to stone so we have a lot of history with this tribe and we have a lot of intermarriage this year man was Harry chin he has a a great history he dressed up like Uncle Sam when North Dakota had their welcome to statehood and it says because he did that is the reason why he died right after the parade he fell over dead so Superstition with our people they said reason why he did that is cu he dressed like Uncle Sam but with him he and his family all married into the Dakota tribe he was brought up to help the theota plant corn from the Rian Nation you uh I don’t know how many have been up at new town where you were um got to see the gardens up there the three affiliated tribes since time in Memorial have been great gardeners they built great Gardens they had fields of gardens and so they brought these people down into staning rock to show the Lakota how to D how to plant Gardens how to plant corn so that’s how this man came down became a chief family intermarried all there and you got to understand there’s a difference between Lota and Dakota The Dakotas over in the Jamestown Valley planted Gardens they had huge Gardens the Lota were primarily Buffalo and did not plant Gardens so there’s a big distinction you can tell even today the lotas primarily are not Fish Eaters and will not eat any type of fish but the dtas eat fish just small um things that we have in the tribes the pictures I’m showing you are historic pictures of staning rock this is the boarding school at for8 this is also a a picture of the the old store and that was the River Bottom there about three days ago I met the the daughter she’s 80 some years old whose father owned that store so it’s pretty neat but anyway these are just some some uh people from our reservation who have a Ric Rob blood that came from the Battle of 1823 the leworth battle we also have Mandan blood and so I have the list of people’s names in here who have Mandan um one of the things that we always talk about is is the small pox epidemic you know and the Mand ANS suffered extreme extreme Devastation from the smallpox by the time Lewis and Clark came across my country on the Cannonball River the Mandan Villages were already decimated there by 1904 where I live not too far from my home is a remnants of an old Mandan Village and it was a huge village there must have been a thousand people in that Village it was gone by the time L and Clark came through they log it in their Diaries but you have to remember the French the French had already been living in The Villages 20 years by the time leis and Clark came up the river they said where’ this Hatchet come from the French have already been trading in there in fact by the time Lewis and Clark came the Dakota Lota nakota people already had an alliance with the British and formed an alliance with them we had a small alliance with the Spanish and we had a huge alliance with the French the French men started coming down in the late 1600s into the dtas these Frenchmen all had Indian wives just to give you kind of a background about these people that by the time lwis and Clark came down there were already mixed BL children in the camps these are some more um of the people who are descendants see the bottom line my grandma that’s me my grandmother my great great grandma married bloody knife’s son as you know bloody knife was kuster’s Scout at the Little Big Horn they say we killed him there he was half Sue and half a Rika and also a remnant of the battle of of um 1823 my grandmother married and so today we have land from elbow Woods which is under the water so it doesn’t make any difference but this is our link although they had no children this is our link to the Rick Roth these are some of the scouts for kuster we had Dakota Scouts and we had re Scouts with kuster and the reason why I’m showing you this is just to show you the interplay between between the Nations today we can go through and Trace all of our lineage to each one of these nations I myself is iuna and CAD from the yank San from the esante are Dakota hun Papa black feet and oala from the Lota Nation because my grandmothers all come from all these different bands each person who who knows their lineage can tell you this and so even today I have relatives in the Crow Nation I have relatives in the Navajo Nation I have relatives that three affiliate and I have relatives who are chipas my husband’s a chipa by the way that’s the only relationship I claim with them but when we talk about we’re all related in any country when you come through and you’re new you walk up to person say who’s your family and you bicker back and forth and you’ll say oh well I know your cousin here so everybody talks about how they’re related even today so when I go to California to the euro Nation I’ll say this is who I am and they’ll tell me who they are then they’ll tell me who they know in my country and we’ll see how we’re related everything we do is controlled by relations I I I don’t find that in a lot of a a lot of today’s culture we’re back in the schools right now and that’s what I do I talk about relationships with the kids who are you related to so that they can carry on this tradition as family structures go you all know that as grandparents and I’m a grandmother and I’m very proud if somebody told me how great it was to be a grandma would have been that first before a mom all grandparents rais raised their firstborn grandchild I was raised by my grandmother and my husband was raised by his grandmother we are both firstborn we rais our granddaughter Mak chant Z our Sky heart yellow um and she’s seven years old turned seven last week her parents are still there in a part of her life as my parents were a part of my life but our grandparents raise us the reason for that is through that first born we are taught lineage we are taught history we are culture and we are taught how everybody is related to each other and then we are responsible for telling all the cousins all the siblings and everybody else that comes after us those networks are still in place in the tribe it it is how we keep and do our best to keep our cultures alive and they say that raising your grandchildren keeps you young I don’t know if that’s true but I think I’m pretty young I have seven grandchildren Now relationships I think that if we spent more time paying attention to our relationships we’d be better people if we became related to everybody and we respected our relatives it would help the social world not only that if we continued to understand our relationship to these beautiful cottonwood trees to this ground we walk on to the animals we see we would have a better world it is just my own opinion to have a relationship with everything around us just like each of you we are now related we have met each other so when I see you someplace else I can say hi I remember you we are now related I think it’s a a concept that comes from my people that I really really want to observe to go into the future um this is me I’m one of the uh advisers for the tri uh circle of tribal advisers for Lewis and Clark I am on the Lewis and Clark Governor’s Advisory board for the state of North Dakota I’m director of Tourism for the stany rock suit tribe I’m the marketing manager for the alliance of tribal tourism Advocates and I own Tatanka otia historic tours and traditional food cooking on stany rock and I compile all the history for tribe and one of the things I love is history and so I can tell you that there were two brothers in 1450 who came across the prair and came to a place called Spirit Lake which is now called Devil’s Lake and at that time they sat down and they fasted and they had a dream there and these two brothers in their dream told them that they would form two Nations one brother stayed one brother went West the one brother formed the mountain Crow people the other brother formed the hiat nation did you know that did you know that these two nations were formed in North Dakota did you know that time in Memorial a long long time ago the Mandan were the mother tribe of the Lota Dakota nakota nation and they broke off and today the Dakota nation is the mother tribe of the Lota nation and nation and the hunk Papa that Pride on my reservation that are from sitting Bulls people well they have a mixed Heritage they started off as ogas and about 1500s they fought the Omaha and they got into a big old fight over a war prize that they got from the Omaha and they got mad at each other so one group split and headed up north they became the Hun Papa Nation but they were so mad at their Brethren tribe here that when they got up here they held the first hunka ceremony adoption ceremony that we know where they adopted a whole nation was a Cheyenne Nation and the hunk Papa Nation had a hunka and they adopted and intermarried with each other so everybody who is hunk Papa has shyenne blood and then in the 1500s middle 15 beginning 1600s they declared war on the Pine Ridge or the aalas and the brues the burnt thighs it’s logged in our winter CS as the first Civil War among our Nations and they went to war with their allies the Cheyenne and the ihun the yank people and they fought the ogas and brues and these people stayed mad at each other for a long time it was until after Lewis and Clark came and the influx of the Trading Post started coming and stuff that they actually talked to each other they actually finally baned together and made an intertribal trop truth in about 1850 cuz 1851 they sat down they signed the fort larmy Treaty of 1851 then from there they stayed together as a nation these are all tribal histories that we have that I don’t think outside people get to hear our little inter Wars and our battles of course you know we’ve always always fought the crow always they always been our enemy still today we still have trouble and because we know where they come from we know who they are for centuries isn’t that terrible the shon’s entered into an agreement agement with us about 1860 before that they were further um West they were in the mountains uh Montana Utah uh Wyoming in that area and there’s a a strict line at the Big Horn mountains where we claim our territory and then these are the other tribes’ territories and so about in the 1860s we formed a an alliance we signed a treat treat I guess they would say with the Shon because the Shon fought with us at the Little Big Horn these alliances are still alive today the Cheyenne the Shashi and the Arapaho we have Tribal um alliances with them that are still honored today so I can go into Northern Cheyenne reservation say I’m from s Rock and people come and feed me and take care of me and stuff because that Alliance is still there we still are enemies with the cow so that doesn’t happen when you go into Crow country just joking I have Crow relatives these days knowing your history is important to me knowing the history of North Dakota is important to me North Dakota I always kind of view both North Dakota and South Dakota as as a place where a lot of history began on Stanny Rock who knew Jim Bridger started his career at the age of 17 there who knew jebadiah Smith first signed on with the Ashley fur trading company and started his career these guys were all in the Battle of of 1823 some of them were with Ashley who knew that Hugh Grant I mean Hugh glass was uh attacked by a grizzly bear on stany rock and crawled 200 miles north to be saved I always say on my reservation we have a lot of history and of course today we know all the stories sakuya died there at Fort Manuel Lisa December 21st 1812 we had the lmh high shishoni come down and and acknowledge that she died there and took her spirit home we also know all the other stories and we agree with all the stories Indian Country we always say they say so that we know that we’re not saying anybody else’s stories are different than ours we just acknowledge them all because we have Sitting Bull and there are all kinds of stories about Sitting Bull that I have to go through every day cuz Sitting Bull died where he was born many castes was a Cheyenne camp where cting bull was born cting Bull’s father also had a Cheyenne wife it’s kind of funny when you go through all the wives and stuff and who they are and where they came from and how they came to be we have a man who was named Red Hill and Red Hill he rode clear over to the banks of Wisconsin on the Lake Michigan and he stole himself a wife we don’t know where she came from what nation she was all we know she had red hair and green eyes and red hell you know was brother to Sitting Bull’s father and his son was Chief no two horns and they talk about this redheaded woman who is the mother of all of these people and we still have that story but we don’t know what nation she came from we just know that she was taken on the banks of Lake Michigan so you never know we may be related to all of you too if you have redhead women in your family relationships you never really know I always tell people you know for me I am a mixed blood my grandma was Russian German she was a redheaded woman too we always have these redheaded women coming and so I’ve learned to be very proud of my loota doota noota history I’m also proud of my German history I’m also proud of each nation that I come from so if you guys have any more questions or anything I I can talk and talk so I always have to watch myself I have a microphone so please if you raise your hand I’ll bring the microphone around to you how do treaties affect our between the the Indian nation and and the and the US government what what were the major problems with that the treaties are the supreme law of the land they still stand today they will continue to stand until the United States crumbles if the United States tries to disin vow the treaties they have to disin vow every treaty they ever made with any Nation we are in the US Constitution and until you change the US Constitution you cannot I mean you you can change your treaties every president who’s came in including the present one has said how do we get rid of these Indians and these treaties and found out they cannot they in wind us within their legal system so that they cannot cannot get rid of the trees we still hold fast to our treaties 1851 and 1868 we treat we teach them to our children we teach them to our tribes in our tribal office every employee must go through treaty training and we have a Treaty Organization we have a seat in the United Nations the Lakota Nation the Mohawk nation and Navajo Nations have seat seats in the United Nation treaties are very important to us even today and yes we’ve heard they’re broken they’re no longer no they’re good they tell us our land base and they tell us see when our relatives sign those treaties I always think wow what intelligent people they said you could have this land but you pay this much not in millions billions or Etc you pay education for our children for time and Memorial you pay health care for our people you pay um for our resources they wrote those in the treaties can you imagine what those people were thinking about how they thought of us those years ago so that today we get payment for the land that people live on through these treaties oh by the way United States never gave us anything first person who says we don’t pay taxes needs to come pay my taxes I have to pay taxes every year hoping drop a payment I mean a income level so I wouldn’t have to pay taxes only tax we don’t pay is land tax and because that’s the United States government holds our land in trust and the United States will not tax thems other than that we pay every tax every other individual in the United States pays you have a question up here just a refresher for me uh you said that the ARA came from the Panka and it and pon pon excuse me and but they denied the human sacrifice that’s the difference between the two so the era did not do sacrifice thank you yeah well I had a question about Young mothers because you mentioned that mothers young mothers were married early where did did they end up having older husbands yes okay in today’s society we we notice a lot of very young Native American Mothers how how do those relationships follow out within the tribe I guess that’s a good question we’re we’re dealing with today’s society and our old tribal customs and I’ve I’ve been asked this question so I had to look at my own history thinking about where do we fit into the new society and their ages um we don’t have teenage Hood in our our cultures you become a woman when you you ministrate you’re a woman you become a man when you do your deeds and go through your ceremonies you’re a man and so we don’t have this middle middle age so I started looking at all my grandmother I have to say my my daughter married at 16 which I objected to but nobody listens to me I married at 15 my mother married at 15 my grandmother married at 16 my great grandma married at 14 my great great grandmother married at 13 and I thought well how does that relate to today because today we have different views of how things are done so I started studying about why is this and I thought oh my you know how it is to raise a teenage girl from now on I’m arranging marriages for my granddaughter right now and I’m getting her married right away just joking oh maybe I’ve had four four people I picked out already um it was it was the way the culture is today we have a lot of young women I always wonder if if some of those things still are ingrained in us because we live in a different Society now and and it’s really hard to adapt to the new Society rules for us we have had contact for 125 years only and so for us adapting is still hard although we know how to use internet when you when you say country uh in your presentation what does this country mean to you you say uh the the country and so forth and then there United States ver the country what does that mean in relationship to each first and foremost I belong to my nation lota doota Kota Nation our land base extends from the Big Horn mountains to the Plat River to the har River to the Missouri River that is still our Aboriginal land there has never been officially land claims to take that claim away we still have treaty rights to all that area that is my nation my nation still meets once a year the Lota doota nakota Nation meets on every one of the reservations and North Dakota South Dakota Montana Nebraska and three Canadian provinces it travels to discuss my nation’s uh problems and things that we are doing second in 1924 we became US citizens so second I’m a United States citizen third my country has always been my country that’s just the bottom line my family has been here since time in Memorial some of the uh before this I used to work with historic preservation so some of the arch olcal sites we have found up to 9,000 years here on the Missouri River I guess I still had a question in terms of of relationships and it would maybe be related to multiple wives how then are children adopted into these families when when there are multiple fathers involved I mean multiple wives well I’m thinking more often of multiple fathers oh you know one one one young woman has children from three different fathers for example how how do they fit into the family structure in terms of knowing your family history you’re talking in today’s culture uhhuh grandparents it’s the grandparents that we have time for about one more question if someone has another question well if anybody I welcome you to come down and visit my country I’ll give you a tour I really enjoy talking about my people thank you once again how about a round of applause for Lonna thank you so much for coming out today e for

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]]> Amy Moss on Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Plant Use https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-m07120503ted/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:53 +0000 https://research.lewisandclarktrust.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-m07120503ted/ A recording from the Tent of Many Voices collection.

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]]> good afternoon everyone welcome to the tent of many voices and the core of Discovery 2 we are a traveling exhibit that’s following the same time frame and path that L and Clark did 200 years ago and our goal is to visit communities and reservations across the Lucen Clark Trail educating people about all different aspects of the Expedition we have our exhibit tent over here where you can take an audio tour we have replicas of the keelboat the perogue and the dogout we are also joined by our federal partners with the BLM Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service as well as the Montana air National Guard so please join all of their booths as well the tent of many voices was a place designed for people of many different professional backgrounds and cultures to come and share with us their knowledge and wisdom as it relates to the Lewis and Clark expedition so I’m very happy to introduce Amy Moss is a member of the three affiliated tribes in North Dakota and she is going to be talking to us about Prairie plant use so let’s all welcome Amy mosset thank you thank you thanks it’s so it’s so nice to be out here it’s so nice and warm um I’m um I’m going to spend about the next 35 minutes maybe talking about uh plant use that um is specific to our tribes in North Dakota um she mentioned that that I am from the three affiliated tribes and the three affiliated tribes in North Dakota are the Mandan kazza and arikara and of course for all of you who who know this Lewis and Clark history um from beginning to end uh Lewis and Clark encountered the arikara in Northern South Dakota on the Missouri River about just over about 200 years ago um they encountered the Mandan in October of of 1804 on the um Missouri River still but it was right in the center of North Dakota about 1 hour north of uh present day bismar North Dakota and then 7 miles up the river on The Knife River uh Lewis and Clark encountered the hiza I am not a Rara I am Mandan and hiza and I am specifically n Mandan which are the Mandan who live on the west side of the Missouri River and I am specifically a hiza the tribe that the really actually the the Aza are the first people who lived in North Dakota uh we preceded the mandans we preceded everybody and the AA of course it was a village named for us um and we moved around but our last real permanent Village in North Dakota was on The Knife River on the South Bank of The Knife River and that um interestingly enough is the village that sagaia lived in with her French uh fur trading husband to S sharbono and that was the village she left from to join the Lewis and Clark expedition and that was the village that um she returned to in August of 1806 when Lewis and Clark came back through what is now North Dakota and then proceeded on their on the journey back down to South Dakota I mean South Dakota St Louis yeah they did go back through South Dakota um how could they forget South Dakota especially on the journey up um today I want to talk about plants and how we use plants and really how and and this is really um specific to all tribes that we lived with the Earth’s abundance because the Earth provided abundance to all of us and we shared in that and um in in the short time that I have I want to talk about how we use plants for everyday use how we Ed plants for um to supplement our gardening how we use plants for food and then how we used plants just for our um Dwelling Places probably the most important plant well like I can’t say the most important plants because all of the plants were important am I hitting the right button here oh okay this is a village that was painted by uh George Catlin in the 1830s and this Village is aad this is the village on the South Bank of The Knife River and if you went into an earth Lodge Village you would see these massive structures these are our Earth lodges we did not live in tepes we were not a nomadic tribe the Mandan and the hiza and the arikara were agricultural people and we actually farmed the land on the Northern Plains about as far north as you could farm and we farmed successfully and tomorrow afternoon at 5:00 I’m going to do a program on traditional Mandan and hiza gardening and um but these Earth lodges they’re they’re not very impressive from a distance I don’t think they are they’re not really impressive until you get inside of them and then you see the structures and you see these massive gigantic Cottonwood logs that were used to build these Earth lodges and the the interior of the earth Lodge um the the Earth the logs were so gigantic there were the men would bring the logs in and they would help set up the four uh Corner posts in the in in the interior of the lodge and then the women brought in the rest of the logs and basically built the built the villages with the Earth with Cottonwood logs and the reason I wanted to mention this is because Cottonwood was really important to us it provided uh fuel for the fires there was a huge fire pit in the center of the earth Lodge it provided um feed for the horses and these Earth Lodge structures were large enough that in the winter time very often or in the summertime we would bring the horses or the best horse that we owned that we did not want taken from our by our enemies and we would actually bring them inside the lodge and there was in some of the larger lodges um right in the interior of the lodge there would be a little Corral place where the where the horse might may have been kept overnight because um we were enemies with the Sue and we always took each other’s horses I mean that’s what the men did and uh horses were a very valuable animal to um to all of our tribes so anyway the the cottonwoods were really important because they provided our home they provided the fuel to keep the fires uh burning so we could cook our food um warm up The Lodges it does get rather chilly over there in North Dakota on the Northern Plains um I know that William Clark recorded on January 10th in 1805 I think the temperature dropped to 40 below but I think it only registered 40 below in his journals because that’s as far um as the temperature would drop I mean it only went to 40 below and uh I know that this January 10th in 2005 it was 49 Below in New Town North Dakota and that was the regular air temperature so it could very well have been much colder than 40 below when Lewis and Clark spent the winter with us but um at one time there were many Cottonwood logs that line the trees but after the steamboats came up the river we lost a lot of the cottonwoods because they were all chopped down they needed many many Cottonwood logs to keep their um fires burning in those boats okay Cottonwood Cottonwood is a very important tree there were other trees and and we used trees shrubs grasses Roots um all these things and I’ll very quickly talk about some of the other trees I was just visiting with this gentleman here about this basket and because we were agricultural we had you know burden baskets and and these are called burden baskets for a reason they were there was a lot of work done with these baskets and they were used to carry into the garden to bring in the crops they were used when we went out onto the Prairie and um picked berries or uh dug turnips and so on but with this burden basket this is a hia burden basket and the this is made from a couple of trees the this one isn’t this is a commercial bird basket we do have we do have the original baskets but they’re pretty fragile and you can’t haul them around but the original burden baskets were taken um the peach Leaf Willow is usually what we use to um for the frame and um the willow was also used for frames for bull boats and that of course was our our our water vessel out there on the river if we needed to cross the Missouri River or cross The Knife River or travel back and forth any short distance um I don’t think you’d really want to travel too far in a bull booat I mean they generally didn’t leak but you know eventually that hide would get soggy if you leave it in in the water long enough the um the woven part of this basket is made from the inside of the bark of of Green Ash the Green Ash tree and Green Ash of course you know is a really hard wood and so Green Ash was also used with the branches of a green ash tree we also used those uh branches or the sticks for the handles on our hose and this is of course my garden ho um for my traditional Garden program my garden hole um that I use in my real traditional Garden I think I got from Menards or Kmart or Walmart or someplace like that but um but uh the the Green Ash is what we used for a lot of our garden implements we also used a Green Ash for the scapula the Buffalo shoulder blade hole and ALS Al for the digging stick because Green Ash is a very hard wood all of the other trees are are they they’re kind of in between the tree and the shrub category are like the uh choke cherry trees Choke Cherry is a very important plant because in August this plant provided us with food and we would dry choke cherries and make uh Choke Cherry patties we would eat the choke cherries and they were I mean they’re very healthy berries they the choke cherries are also used for medicine choke cherries are um the the berries themselves the juice from The Choke Cherry is a medicine that you would use to keep your blood healthy the the branch of a choke cherry tree a green choke cherry tree is a plant that you would use if you had a stomach ailment there are a lot of different uh ways you would use a lot of uh different sections of plants but all of these plants out here did many things provided us with many different kinds of things juneberries were another tree because they provide a real succulent kind of um Berry and June berries people also call them service berries or Saskatoon and the only problem we ever we had with juneberries is that the frost would usually get them in the spring but um whenever we had juneberries it was great because what we would do with juneberries is take the June berries very often dry them make them into Patties or else the other thing we would do with juneberries is we would grind them up with corn yellow flour corn and then we would take the Buffalo Tallow or the Tallow from the fat on a buffalo kidney and then melt it just a little bit just enough not a whole lot but just enough to hold this thing together and then we would press and I didn’t bring one with me this is a turnup of course but we would make these little balls about this big they were we call them now we call them corn balls but the men would take them out hunting and if you had this little ball of ground corn and ground juneberries and a little bit of Buffalo Tallow you could go out onto the Prairie and you could hunt all day and if you ate that it would keep you um kind of energized sort of like these power bars that we eat nowadays when we do the marathon runs and the six mile road races but it’s real similar to that so we had our power bars or power balls or whatever you want to call them back then too so the so we have so food food was was one of the things that the Prairie provided us with um through the trees and the and the different shrubs and we had many different kinds of berries besides choke cherries juneberries um plums we had grapes wild raspberries all along the river we had many different kinds of tea that grew along the river and people always asked all what did you drink and generally we drank tea but then of course we always drank soup too because that was one of the things we cooked more than anything was soup from our vegetable gardens um with um let’s see in the springtime you know after we planted our Gardens we would go out onto the Prairie and then start uh reaping the different Roots uh one of one of the roots that we still dig up today is the turnup and I’m not sure when these ripen out here I know I saw some of these yesterday up north of Great Falls and um last week I went out onto the Prairie and I dug some tups and and they were still ripe and maybe it was because we had so much rain but Maryweather Lewis mentioned on the journey up the river that um sagaia had dug some roots and they called it a white Apple um and this is also called tipson and bread root and a lot of different kinds of things like that but we we just call it a turnup now um in hiza we call it aish AI is how you would say this in hiza if your name was turnup your name of course then would be aish but um this is like a potato it’s like a a combination between a potato and a turnup and um a rudaba maybe the taste of it but it does have a taste and it has it doesn’t taste that bad you have to you have to dig it at the right time of the year and so by the time I think Lewis mentioned he didn’t care for the taste of it it probably had already started to get a little Woody and The Taste was sort of going out of it this this plant was really important because we would dig uh a lot of these turnips and then we would peel them and braid them and this is a turnup and this is actually only part of my turnup braid which finally broke because I drug it around with me for so long and this really was quite a long braid and it’s um if you know how to French braid hair you can French braid corn and you can French braid turnips and you can I shouldn’t say French braid they might think tant sharbono taught us this but he really didn’t um it’s just a braid it’s just a long braid and this this is what we did to all of our food we dried everything that’s all you could do with it you dry it it and then you reconstitute it when you put it in your clay pot and cook it inside the earth Lodge and so um of course we had um that was food let’s move on to another Village here this is um this is just another example of of um this is actually on a slant Mandan Village South of Mandan North Dakota and the only reason I put this slide up here is because I had a hiza village on there and I wanted to have a Mandan Village too and this is a replicated Mandan Village you can visit this Village today there are only five Earth lodges here but outside the Earth Lodge you see those scaffolds there th those that’s all Cottonwood and the scaffolds are up high and on the scaffolds is usually where we dried everything and this is part of my garden program too but all of the Corn and everything that we dried was would be hanging on those scaffolds this this is B balm and you see this growing all over the place but you can make a glue from this plant and you’ll have to pardon my slides I I can take pictures and I can do PowerPoint but when I had to put them together I’m really H I’m still working on making my pictures the right sizes so um this is this is used as a glue and I think somebody told me that we actually use some of this glue inside of our um our pots the clay pots that we made this is not a very good photograph but this is an antihistamine this is is gumweed and this is that real sticky really strong smelling flower that that uh grows a lot on the sides of the ditches you can smell it when you walk through it but if you had poison ivy if you had Poison Ivy and you steeped gumweed in water and poured on your poison ivy that would work better than anything and I’m not recommending that you do any of this but I have used a lot of these plants and I still I mean there’s a reason that you know we knew about these plants and they actually do work and so if you are way out in the wilderness and you have no antihistamines with you whatsoever and you forgot your cadil clear and all of that stuff and you could steep this in water never never boil any plants because um when you boil a plant it can become toxic but you could Steep gumweed and you would actually have something that would sort of help you um with your um poison ivy but the best you know the best medicine is always prevention and you should always know what poison ivy looks like and don’t walk through it unless you take singular every day then you can walk through poison ivy um my slides turned out I’m not sure what happened with my camera but this is yl and people grow yo in their yards but yl grows abundantly out there on the Prairie this medicine is for ears this is for earaches it’s a earache medicine um this is um my chop this off too this is the the whole picture is just very nice if I could get it on here this is uh yellow or Prairie cone flour and a lot of times people confuse cone flour because there’s purple Prairie cone flour yellow Prairie cone flour and purple cone flour and the only reason I showed this is because this is this medicine was used for rattlesnake bites and we we have you know a lot of rattlesnakes out in the prairie and uh rattlesnake bites can be deadly but this was all this was used to treat um rattlesnake bites this is Golden Rod and I and I decided it’s okay if I chop the tops of this flower off because they haven’t bloomed anyway and um the top of this flower is yellow and usually in August Golden Rod will Bloom but you know you recognize Golden Rod it grows abundantly all over the place and Golden Rod is used for your complexion and you know when people had any kind of skin ailment this again was a plant that we would Steep and then people would make puses or different kinds of things treatments um usually puses were the treatments we used and then you would put the um gum weed not gumweed but golden rod on your skin and this would really keep your skin clear this is uh yaka this is a yaka plant and the root of this plant is uh soapy some of these plants are actually called soapweed or in some some instances you see this is called soapweed if you took the root of this plant and you sort of peeled off that really Barky or the fuzzy stuff on the outside of it and swish this around in water this you’ll you’ll Suds up the water I have not tried this but I’ve been meaning to because as I get older I notice when I comb my hair you know that pile of hairl on the floor just kept keeps getting thicker and somebody told me that soapweed in addition to being a soap and really a shampoo will actually thicken your hair now I’m not guaranteeing this but um you know it’s worth a try I know I’m going to try it but it’s um it’s good for your hair and if you shampoo your hair with yaka and I know that people have actually made shampoos with yaka in it but this is supposedly um a plant that you might want to try if you want to thicken your hair this of course is one of the most powerful plants on the Prairie and this grows in abundance this Grows All Over the prairie in North Dakota and it’s called purple cone flower and it is illegal to pick this plant on any reservation lands on any public land or or any state land in the state of North Dakota and the first um organization or the first entity in North Dakota that outlawed the the picking of this plant was the three affiliated tribes in North Dakota because about 10 years ago there were pharmaceutical companies that were paying young kids $28 a pound um to go out and pick this flower and they didn’t know whose land was whose and they were just going out there digging this stuff up but this is a powerful plant purple cone flower is is an antibiotic it is uh it’s an antihistamine it’s an analgesic this plant was used for everything if you have a toothache or if you have any pain anywhere in your mouth if you take the root of this plant and you put it in your mouth your mouth will be instantly numb it’s h it’s a it’s a it’s an anesthetic purple cone flow is used today people buy purple cornflour to um as a preventative medicine to to to boost your immune system and we used this plant always um we and people still use this plant today they still make it into a tea but you can buy purple cornflour um over the counter of course and and with with all of the Herbal Remedies and all these different kinds of medicines though it’s always important to remember um to consult with the doctor before you use any of these medicines because we’re all our our our systems are all different and so you have to be real careful about using uh plants purple cone flower is also used for snake bite and there’s just another picture of a of of the purple cone flower this is um you know I I just had this most beautiful picture of this beautiful yellow flower but it got chopped off and it’s it’s there in my computer but I couldn’t get it into that little screen I tried everything um but uh I W I was thinking yesterday I took this picture just yesterday and and I have some other pictures of uh of um these beautiful flowering cactus plants and you know one of the things I think that Maryweather Lewis liked the least or one of the things he complained about the most was prickly pear cactus and I guess I don’t blame Mary weather Lewis for not really seeing the beauty in that yellow flower so it’s okay if I chopped it off because he had so much so much trouble with that prickly pear cactus and I was out there taking pictures yesterday and I had one little one little Thorn um that I nail in you know and I was wearing really thick denim jeans but um just a little not even a quarter of an inch thorn in my leg but you can imagine stepping in this Cactus and it it can penetrate your moccasins um it it’s just it’s it’s really ter it’s a terrible plant it breaks off these those um you know those little spines on there are real dry and they break off inside your skin and before you know it then you’re having all kinds of skin ailments but um this was this and the gats um we had it all yesterday on that walk out to the Sulfur Springs but we also had um 45 SPF sunblock and we had um off the real powerful kind that was kind of nice scented and um so the and we also had an umbrella and uh we took all of that out onto the trail so it made it a little um more comfortable on the walk out there but I really did feel for Maryweather Lewis you know he’s not my favorite hero of the Lewis and Clark expedition but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him yesterday as I was walking back from the Sulfur Springs and of course the Sulfur Springs um that’s the place where sagaia nearly died and I often wonder you know how this how this uh history related to her would be interpreted today if she had died here in Montana you know that I think that would have been a real interesting story because she almost died at those Sulfur Springs or near that Sulfur Spring north of Great Falls um let’s see I think this might be my last slide yeah we’ll just leave that last slide up there in memory of Mary with Lewis um um you know when people travel out into the PLS in North Dakota you know a lot of times people will look around and they’ll talk about the Prairie and the plains up there in North Dakota is being so empty and they’ll look around and they they they talk about how treeless It is Well we did have we did have trees along the river at one time uh cottonwood trees in great abundance but the Prairie is really quite a treeless place and I think a lot of people today even today would walk out onto the Prairie and they’d look around and they’d say there’s nothing out here but for all of us who’ve lived there forever on the plains not just in recent years but for thousands and thousands of years I know I know that my ancestors who were living at all of those Villages all along the Missouri River all the way throughout um the central part of North Dakota and further south of there I know that when they walked out onto the Prairie or if they needed something whether if it was for food or for the home or to care for the children or to uh for ceremonial uses if they needed anything they would walk out onto the Prairie and they would look about the Prairie and they would never think gosh there’s nothing out here I know that when my ancestors walked out onto the plains they would look out there and they would say everything everything we need to survive it’s all out there and one of the things that that our ancestors did much a I think a much better job job of than we do today is they learned how to share those resources and they they learned how to use it with respect and the reason I’m showing all of these plants here on on photo by a photograph is because you don’t need to pick these plants you don’t need to go out and take these plants from the Prairie and you never take anything living off the Earth unless you need it unless you are going to use it and I do have I do have some plants with me me we do have I do have these plants we do use turnips we do use white sage for ceremonial use but every time you go out and you take something from the earth you need to leave something there something of yours something of your yours you leave it out there and if it’s only a prayer then that’s good enough but you never take anything living off the Earth unless you can give something back in return I want to thank you so much for um being here this afternoon and if you have any questions about um how we use plants or the Mandan and the hiza in North Dakota I have just a couple minutes here to answer any questions you might have anybody have any questions we got plenty of time to field some questions you first sir you said your Society was agricultural base did you actually Farm or did you harvest I mean did you go out just to pick or did you grow fields of plants we we grew um grew uh Fields very large fields and actually that’s one that’s our agricultural lifestyle is really what caused people to come to our part of North Dakota or it is North Dakota now to trade with us and we we engaged in international trade because of women’s work and the women were the farmers and the women of the Mandan tribe and we really the hiza were became agricultural too but the hiza really adopted a lot of the farming techniques and that whole um um the whole whole society the whole Agricultural Society from the mandans but the mandans planted 13 different varieties of corn and I’ll have a lot of those varieties here tomorrow today we still plant all of these um varieties of corn not because we need to but because it’s important for us to teach our grandchildren and our daughters how to plant these but we had blue yellow red white flower corn we had Flint we had sweet corn we planted several different uh varieties of beans different varieties of squashes and different um and we had sunflowers and then later from the um like from the arikara and some of the tribes that lived lower on the Missouri River we uh planted or we we uh traded for some of their watermelon uh seeds but it was it’s real difficult to grow melons up on the Northern Plains but yes we farmed and it was it was the abundance or the surplus of our crop that we used as one of the most important items of trade in in the Mandan Society and then in the hiza the most important item of trade there was probably the Knife River Flint you know the Flint that was used for the knives and weapons and and all of that so yes we did we did Harvest and then just like every other tribe we went out onto the Plains and along the river and harvested the roots and the berries and the tea and all of the other edible plants and all of the plants that we used for ceremonial purposes and we also I mean there was there was also there were also plants out there that you could use for fresh fragrance you know perfume like wild bergamont it’s also called Horse Mint and I I for the life of me cannot figure out why anybody would use that for perfume because if you have any of you ever walked into uh a field or like a patch of wild bergamont it smells I mean this is why I’m sure they call it Horsemen it smells like horses sweaty horses when you take that saddle off a horse and you go to brush it you know and the horses have this sweaty smell that’s what wild bergamont smells like when you walk into the patch now not and and I would think and somebody would want to wear that or no and uh but not nearby you will also find lavender hiss up now that’s perfume and that it smells beautiful it’s so fragrant I think we have another question here you uh on the uh yellow cone flour you said it was a rattlesnake uh uh remedy did they take take it internally or as a pus most of some of the things were taken internally but with a lot of the things we would use a pus for the the rattlesnake bite medicine that was usually an external application and the other thing too that that helped with medicine and doctors are going back more and more and in using um this kind along with therapy is prayer and I mean I think a lot of your doctors today they recommend that because your state of mind is probably one of the most important elements of healing and so prayer and and you know the way you’re feeling your your whole state of mind is just so very critical in the whole healing process and so I think that’s the reason why prayer in all cultures has been just such an important part of doctoring somebody or healing another question back here is the purple cone flower related to what we call eonia today yes yes it is the um uh eonia and gustola is the wild plant and I think uh eonia peria is the domesticated eonia that you can plant which um doesn’t the the domesticated the peria doesn’t have such a deep Brit and it’s easier to harvest but the angustifolia that grows out in the wild has a really really deep Brit okay I’ll show you could you tell us how you stored your uh corn and your your food like for year round can where did we store it or how how did we store it we would we would store the corn we would have corn braids hanging in the earth Lodge and different places within the Earth Lodge and it’s real dry on the Prairie especially in Western North Dakota it’s real dry uh you’ll you’ll you’ll see I think archaeologically that our none of our ancestors ever really lived in the West in eastern North Dakota because it’s a flood plane um but of course today our highest population is in eastern North Dakota but it’s it’s very dry and so it’s easy to to dry corn in real dry weather real Aid I mean Aid climates and then we had cash pits we had these gigantic really tall um underground we they’d be like root cellers and they were bell-shaped and they were so deep um for me I would need a real tall ladder to get down into that cash pit but the cash pit was hollowed out and and the core tried to you know sort of replicate this as they were up here but they didn’t seal their cash pit and their stuff got all wet or they discovered that on the way coming back through Montana but we had these huge bell-shaped cash pits which would be similar to The Root Cellar except they were lined they were lined with prairie grass and they were they were lined with Clay of course and then they were lined with prairie grass and then we put the corn in certain sections and then the beans and squash all of the stuff once it’s dried completely you can store in the cash pits and will it’ll just last there forever and the reason we put the cash pits out onto the Prairie is because everybody knew where we lived we were permanent and so the all of our enemies knew that we had a huge food supply and we had to put the cash pits out onto the Prairie and then and then Mark them in a certain way so that we all kept track of our own cash pit and then when we needed food then we would go out and and get it out there but the the key there was to keep everything completely dry or to get it as dry as you could before you put it in the cash pit and even in recent years there have been cash pits that were Unearthed or that fell through you know when the movement of the river and the the the banks would cave in and the cash pit would be exposed and there have been seeds that were taken out of that cash pit that we’re regrown so it’s um it’s amazing how how long that food uh would would stay would would keep any other questions for Amy oh one over here couple there’s some really good questions you mentioned that the women did the farming what did the men do the women did all the work the women the women tilled the soil I’ll talk about gardening tomorrow I’m going to talk about women’s work tomorrow so you women you got to come back and hear this you men you probably won’t want to hear this um but the women the women uh they they built the homes they maintained the homes they owned the homes they built all the tools or they constructed all the tools that went into the garden the women har or they they they planted the crops they harvested them all summer long they took care of a garden a huge these were massive Gardens the women took care of the children children they taught the children uh when you were born you were born into your mother’s society and you live the way of your mother your entire life that’s where you got your identity the women engaged in trade the women owned horses the women um really helped to sustain the culture the women in the Mandan tribe grew corn to the extent that there was such a surplus that people came from many many tribes first even enemy tribes and then later explorers the British the French and the Americans came in and traded with the Indians that was all a result of women’s work and people always say well what did the men do and I always say the men did Sports just like today nothing has changed the men went out riding horses and they went hunting and I’m just kidding the men worked the men helped the women the men protected the women the men were the Warriors and our tribes were living in a war society and we had enemy tribes we had Allied tribes and I we’re talking about you know really some magnificent Warriors that would descend Upon Our Villages and they could wipe out and burn an entire Village and and so the men protected the village they protected the Homeland they hunted for the uh Buffalo and those Buffalo can you imagine trying to trying to bring down a buffalo a bison they’re gigantic animals trying to bring one of those things down with a bow and an Arrow but you know we use like The Crow and the surrounds and buffalo jumps that’s a lot easier to get a buffalo that way but of course once they kill the animal then the women of course again did all the work and you know took the hide made a bull booat took the meat dried it took the hides tanned it made their husbands real fancy ceremonial robes like you see these men wearing on all these Mandan pictures out there you think those guys made those outfits no the women did the women and and when you think about the how much work the women did and how long it takes to do the garden and yet to have time to do that kind of quill work because most of the work on these robes is not really bead work it’s all quill work parkpine quill bird quill and beautiful designs and even the baskets the the baskets had beautiful designs in them the the pottery had had really nice designs on them and so the women the women worked really hard thanks for that question good question the women tan the hides how tan I’ve heard they chewed them but they couldn’t chew a whole Buffalo hide oh no wouldn’t have any teeth left no that would that would be no with with Buffalo um with hide tanning you would take the brain from the animal and from whatever animal that you um brought back whether if it was a deer or an antelope or a buffalo you would take the brain from that animal and the Brain from that animal is the is all you the only brain you would need to tan the whole TI hide you you need your own brain too but you you need that you’d mix there’s a mixture of um the the brain and then some oil and then you scrape you scrape all the hair off the hide unless you wanted a hairon hide and then I think that would be even more difficult I’m not sure just handling a buffalo hide because they’re heavy I fleshed a buffalo hide with my um my 12-year-old daughter and it took us all afternoon to do that and we had I I had an electric drill so I made my own frame and I had a deck out in the back and I have running water with a hose and um this was a huge a gigantic Buffalo hide and it it was only a 2-year-old Buffalo and um we had Chicago Cutlery and we didn’t use we didn’t use a flint knife scraper but when you but when the women you know they would flesh they would flesh the hide with Flint knife scraper and then they would scrape the hair off the hide with the elkh horn that had a um a flint knife blade attached to it scrape all the hair off and then you rub that brain and uh oil mixture into the hide after it’s all washed and stretched out and then you that that’s what softens the hide it’s a real long process you also have to do a lot of stretching and pulling a hide back and uh forth usually you have like your favorite tree with real rough bark to stretch it out you have to break down the fiber in that hide and then you uh when it’s all done and you have this beautiful white hide and I I have I have hide that I’m bringing with me for my program tomorrow because you can see the white hide once it’s done it’s so soft you can sew through it it’s so soft but when you take that white hide and then you smoke it on a fire then it it it turns brown but it doesn’t just turn brown when you when you take that white hide and you you you smoke it over a fire you’re waterproofing the hide and you’re also completing the chemical process of tanning a hide and it takes you know it takes a long time it takes about three days to do um a a burden basket it takes about a couple days three days to do a um some pottery couple of days to do pottery and it takes a few days to do a buffalo hide so you can do a deer hide in one day I mean today you could you could brain tan a deer hide in a day but um that’s working non-stop and the women you know they generally had a lot of other things that they had to do while they were doing this work so yes women women worked really hard but um that’s the way life was in all the tribal cultures any other questions I thought I saw another hand yep yeah I got a couple questions uh first the what kind of tools do they have cut down those big uh cottonwood trees and the other is uh where did all these vegetable seeds originally or originate from the corn seed originated I think in South America and corn originated as a grass and some of the the bean seeds originated on the Prairie and they continued to grow the bean seeds and with the sunflowers a lot of the the seeds originated as wild plants and then over the years they contined to be planted or once they’re domesticated once you domesticate a seed I think you’re able to um to grow it and it just becomes more hearty and it gets bigger the more you plant it and the um the better technology that you have each time you plant whatever it is you’re growing is going to just get bigger and better um i’ I’ve experienced that because our corn that we grow it’s the same seed that used to grow in 6in cobs now gets to be 12 Ines long so there it you know over time the but this corn came as far as I know corn came from South America from South American tribes and a lot of people you know there’s a big argument the araras say they gave the Mandan corn and the Mandan say they gave the iara corn and the hoder know that we got the corn from the Mandan but um it’s uh it’s it’s it’s it’s very old it’s hundreds and hundreds of years old and I do know that you know this is way before my time because the Mandan have been planting corn along the Missouri River for the last 1,000 years and a thousand years ago we were at the border of Nebraska and South Dakota and we were far the m Dan were farming there question up front here just so everyone can hear are there any Legends in the Mand hadat about about Nordic U inclusion uh you hear these stories about the blue-eyed mandans and and that there were possibly Scandinavian people that got over into that area you know that’s your people are there in your people about that we you know there’s this legend about the um the Welch that came over from you know around 1100 or something like that but that didn’t come from our that’s not a legend from our culture that’s a legend from Welch culture and there there actually are Welch people um or people in Wales who have contacted our tribe and asked how they could get enrolled with the Mandan tribe and there are um people from yeah there are people from Wales who have come to North Dakota just to visit the mandans because they really believe that story but it is a myth and the blueeyed mandans is also a myth by 1738 although in 1738 when vendry v um lendry came down from France not France but from Canada and he came down uh I think on foot he didn’t have horses in that first trip when he came in but he mentioned fair skinned mandans and I think that I think that in the Mandan tribe I think that there was some um deficiency in our color um the hormones or the pigment in our skin I think there was some I think there was something there some genetic um deficiency perhaps that affected the pigment in our skin and our hair because the mands didn’t have blue eyes and they didn’t have blonde hair there were mandans who had sort of grayish colored hair and grayish colored eyes and and kind of lighter lighter complected skin but usually by August that would all be taken care of and they’d be really dark again but it didn’t come from the Welch it it I think it was a genetic trait all right we have time for one more question SC right here I’m interested in it in your basket process uh is there a certain time of year that you have to harvest the wood that you use or is it part of some bigger part of your maintenance of your culture the um with the burden baskets there was a certain time there’s there was really a certain time of the year that that we did everything when for example is soon as the water broke up on the Missouri River it was time to go out and garden and as soon as the geese flew back that was another sign that it was time to garden and but as soon as the water broke up on the river you would assume that the ground is starting to thaw and so then it would be time to to go out on and and do the gardening but um with the usually it’s around April or Mar March or April that you’re supposed to go out and get the trees and what you want to do is you want to get the the BART from the inside of the tree before the sap runs through the tree that was that was the time of the year um well well yeah we would use the tree for firewood probably to any well with a basket you wouldn’t cut a big tree down for a basket you would cut a small tree and the the trees that the willow if you if you if you see how Willow grows Willow Willow grows kind of like weeds and um along the rivers we would get you see a lot of Sandbar Willow now but this Peach leap or this the willow that we used originally in the baskets is really difficult to find after the dam was built and a lot of the um the land was inundated we just we don’t really find that tree anymore even but yeah you would use everything you wouldn’t waste anything with um with a sweat you know when you had a sweat in the earth Lodge and after you burn the Rocks so many times you take the Rock and you use that rock over for something else because it crumbles and it becomes real um crumbly and you could use it in the pottery because that rock has been burned so many times and and for some reason it helped pots when you put them together and it would help to keep them from cracking when you fired the pot and I’ll bring some pots over here tomorrow so yeah we we used a lot of things over and over again or sort of recycled in every way that we could so as not to be wasteful and again you know when you go out and and take a treat to make yourself a basket you would you know offer a prayer and and uh you know you wouldn’t be wasteful or take a great big tree if you only needed a small one to make your basket all right let’s thank Amy mosset for joining us today thank you uh as she said a couple times Amy will be back tomorrow at 5:00 to talk about traditional Mandan and hza gardening so please join us back uh tomorrow at 5: and what oh and granddaughter gets to help her with the gardening program so uh we’re going to continue with our programming for the DayDay for the day uh at the top of the hour we’re going to have a program entitled grizzly bears and the human spirit with Denise pingaro and the US Forest Service so please join us back here in about 10 minutes for our next program thank you and have a good day

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]]> Dakota Goodhouse on Universal Languages and Plains Indian History https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-08030604/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:52 +0000 https://research.lewisandclarktrust.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-08030604/ A recording from the Tent of Many Voices collection.

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]]> to the ten and many voices how is everyone doing today good I’m glad to hear you’re in good spirits it’s great to be here in my city let me introduce our next speaker we have Dakota good house who is a national park ranger from Knife River Indian village which is in Stanton North Dakota if you have not yet been there I do encourage you folks to take a trip over there out of the state to North Dakota that is allegedly where lisis and Clark met sagaa along their Journey she came from an Indian village around the area we’ll ask dcoa to uh go into depth about that a little bit more but for right now he’s going to be talking about the universal language on the planes and let’s give him a nice warm welcome here in the the town of my city give them a round of applause and with saying that we’ll turn it over to Dakota thank you all right well first thing I’d like to say is uh is in the hza language I thank you and I greet you is uh I work at the enemy Village so I should know their language also at Knife River there are the mandans and they would greet you like as a as a man would greet people I would Sayes so I thank you you’ve made me feel good it’s warm day today and I’m glad you folks have come out anyways uh my presentation is about universal language and we have three of them earlier today some of you might have seen uh sign language right has anyone seen that today yeah some nodding heads some heads rattling out there right all right well um I’ll be doing a little bit of that but the other two languages are art and this is one form of our universal language um and it’s a man’s language so when you talk about uh art amongst our Plains Indian people we have two of them just like many of us also have two dialects in our languages men speak a way and women speak another right yeah it seems odd and you can always tell when a man has been taught by his grandma or by his mom when he speaks Lota or any of our languages back home cuz you can tell he’s been raised by a woman and you can tell if a girls talks like a man so if anyone watches Dances with Wolves go back check it out he actually talks like a woman yeah anyways uh it was interesting you can understand him though if you speak Lota anyways so this is a man’s language this is intended to be it’s just practical it’s intended to be looked at it’s intended to be read easily um a few examples up here that I know all of you could relate to and just know what it is is this one right here right basketall well this type of painting is called a winter count in my language we call that w w we’re keeping a track of the winters counting them off so anyways each one of these pictures represents a year one significant event took place a couple years back what do you suppose this standing there we go this guy knows he yeah Standing Rock Warriors took State title back in North Dakota yeah um we have a couple other things even a year before that there was a uh a large we called it a large star passed across the northern part of the sky if anyone saw that a couple years back that would would be hail Bop that Comet anyone see that yeah see it uh these events are are known uh through Indian Country it pleases me that when uh another Nation can look up here and see and recognize these too like uh like uh my my Mii my Mandan Elder my Mandan Uncle he looked up here and he was looking at this and he said oh I know what these are and he was going off oh that was that year L LA Joe died that down down in Standing Rock that’s a year couple years back when for the first time in about 150 years all of the bands of Lakota got together and met for the first time at Washington DC all of our bands and all of our all of our tribes were represented there uh what else do we got here he recognized this one 1988 the Eiffel Tower you might be wondering what’s that up there well Eiffel Tower is up there because um that year the French acknowledged American Indians efforts during World War II so we fought that war to in fact they they recognize some of our native code talkers and you’ve heard of The Da the Navajo code talkers they really get a lot of press they really they should be getting a lot of credit right yeah but uh a little known story is that during World War I there were Lota code talkers too and we have here some uh Lota involvement during World War I in fact back where I’m from the first North Theoden to die was from my reservation and and there was uh six languages used as as a weapon during World War I lot beanan and there were at least 13 languages used during World War II Lota again being it so anyways it’s really neat um some of my my my relatives and other tribes can look at this especially back home so you folks out here even if we had other nations represented they might not get some of these but this one here is pretty big news what’s that it looks like a foot exactly L it’s conven just as it should be intended it’s big it’s Bigfoot actually cuz that was that year back in uh 1974 or 1976 we saw Bigfoot on Standing Rock has anyone seen Bigfoot only one other person besides me here I likeed yeah in fact this made such big news that NBC CBS ABC all these major news networks they came to Standing Rock to look for bigfoot now here’s what happened cuz I I like to say that Bigfoot talks L yeah he speaks he speaks l so anyways um there’s some people were washing dishes after the day and this woman was just talking to her husband right I’m trying to find out which family this was anyways The Story Goes she was talking taking care of those dishes you know you know I my hands are kind of can’t I can can someone help me with my hands and you know she’s doing dishes right she’s asking for some help asking for a hand anyways all and then she hears hears someone talk back to her and she says Mees you know like I just said that you know cuz she heard back to her being talked back to her someone asking her the same thing daku NAU will you know can you give me a hand or where’s your hands or something like this anyway so she said you know nich okay you know I just said this again anyway she turns around she looks up from she’s doing the dishes there and uh here’s this big figure looking in at her and that figure was talking Lota back at her so anyways I Bigfoot if you hear him say how how how like she hey there’re my friend my relative because he he like to say he talks lot anyways that’s just something for you we keep track of things here that uh some of them of a very serious nature some of them very humorous nature too like Bigfoot uh want to jump around here real quick and then I want to get to the meat of my program um this one too this is the year before George kuster got it right we’re not so far from that anyways um some of my people served as Scouts under him too so we you know uh it’s funny thing funny thing that year that’s another presentation in itself but he had Lota Scouts who uh left from Fort Lincoln with him to to go fight anyways the year before that happened we say that was a year we had a good time if anyone can I know this is this is big but you can’t might you might not be able to see all the images back there but this is a uh it’s a whiskey barrel yeah that’s the year we had a good time now this uh I throw this in here because even when I’m showing this to my my native relatives I want them to look at it and say Hey you know there’s this is a year we actually practiced some uh some self-control we made that barrel of whiskey last the entire winter yeah see it kind of breaks that stereotype back 100 150 years ago that uh you know a drunk Indian no many of us practiced self-control so anyway that’s the year we had a good time there’s nothing to be ashamed of I tell my native people that we had good times back then today we just call them kigers no hey yeah anyways uh this winter count it goes back to um about 9001 I have some um events up here that go back that far some of them are of a mythological nature um my ancestors winter count started with a long time ago a spirit woman came to us and we say in Lota long time ago winteral AI this White Buffalo Calf Woman came to us that’s when she brought a covenant to us with a higher power so if we want a date for that you go to another winter count I actually brought it with me today too the first time I remembered to bring it ever since I worked at these guys but it’s found in this book picture writing of the American Indian that event that I pointed out up there in this book you can look it up it took place at 9001 a so it’s a Baptista good winter count so we have history that goes back real long ways but unfortunately many of some of many of some of our native people we just you know even my own my own colleagues my some of my own people my age it’s very sad some of us never heard of winter counts and here that’s our own history you know anyways but we’re recovering it and I think you know not too soon or not too late either anyways uh so that’s one one language it’s a language it’s uh it’s uh practical it’s meant to be read and interpreted as such another way and unfortunately I don’t have it with me but I’m sure you’ve seen them they’re called par fleshes has anyone seen them or heard of them a par flesh is like a folded in painted Rawhide box yeah you seen them all right and you just put whatever you want inside there whatever is most cherished uh or whatever you value the most you stick them in this box right anyways um if you look at those par fleshes I like to say that’s the perfect example of how women think you know because even our in our native culture we have the two dialects but you really see how they think and we put that down on those par fleshes you know I see they’re symmetrical for one they’re balanced they’re they’re uh and I think well uh you really have to look at them to interpret what the use might be for if the if the shape might indicate uh what it’s used for or what tribe it belongs ons to or who it belongs to and and what they use it for you can get a lot out of a par flesh and uh I think well that’s that’s uh that’s kind of how women talk right men really have to sit and really think of what did she say yeah that’s what those parlers are like too so no no bashing here it’s just a it’s just a really really is a part of our culture anyways the other universal language is called singing or a song Everybody sings right yeah and and you have vocables too even in English we have these things called vocables uh one of the most ones I I hear a lot is during Christmas when when you hear fall la la right goes with one of those Christmas songs yeah see we have we have songs too that have just things in them doesn’t have to be a word right so the funny thing that cracks me up is when our non native relatives come to our pow and they think we’re we’re just singing hey yaah hey yaah right oh well they come and sing with us yeah it could be just that too but it’s a vocable anyways that third language you can tell by the Cadence of a song or how it’s sung CU we all have flag songs and when a native hears a flag song at a Pawa where there’s inner tribals hundreds of other tribes there they all know they all get up they all get up they all stand and they know a memorial song too you know it’s just slower they’re singing the honors if you know that person’s name oh you know you take your hat off and you pay them some respect so anyways the song I want to share with you is another type of song and this would be known by other tribes other tribes women those Mandan hsas even a crow out this way and Cheyenne too they would hear these songs and they would know oh boy I know who is singing it oh that Sue boy is singing it he must want a wife yeah this one takes place along the Missouri River and uh you folks like that River I I really find it a beautiful River but one time before we cross the river and this contradicts what my own makota people say cuz we say we’ve always been here but you ask these other tribes out here they’ll tell you that we forced them and pushed them and fought them just to say we could we were always here but anyways we didn’t even even cross this River here this Missouri and that would be along South Dakota side until maybe 1740 so we’re not always here but this song takes place when one of our young men crossed the Missouri River right and he went to go gather some some Furs some meat he went to gather some gifts CU he was going to present them to a girl he really liked a young woman and uh he was courting her a long time ago a man did not buy a wife he assembled all of these gifts so that when he went to her parents if they approved they see they look at all these gifts and they they know this is a good man because he’s going to take care of our daughter he’s not buying a wife he’s he he he’s showing it’s it’s providing proof that he’s going to get her food he’s going to take care of her so if they approve of that and they look at their daughter too they arrange marriages they might even let him let him marry her daughter you know without her consenting but often times too we’d have consenting marriages so this song involves a young man doing just that Gathering materials crossing the river in a springtime no less and we warned him no don’t go across that River firstly toas live over there the enemies the strangers and uh still went across the river and here the Ice broke up and a long time ago we believ there’s a dragon that lived in the water in the springtime that Dragon came to life came through and broke that ice so we believe that man was over there across the river and Missouri river is dangerous now some of you might have heard of of accidents people have in a river even today back then it was was dangerous unpredictable no dams back then anyway so we did not want him to swimming back so we hollered across you know just stay over there wait for a time when you can come back so he still goes out there and he’s still doing his Gathering his his uh Gathering gifts anyways he comes to the River’s Edge one day and he starts singing iic day tonic so and all of the blue he hears someone singing back to him and here it’s that girl across the river she’s singing back to him so this universal language she couldn’t hear the word being so far away but she made it out one day the wind carried the words and here I’ll tell you in English it was uh she sang back to him is what it was as a words uh no matter how far you travel no matter how far you travel over this Earth You may go about no matter how far I will wait for you my mother approves right that’s really important some of you guys out there right yeah must really like your in-laws they really quiet no right I’ll stop so anyways we have that third universal language that song so I’m not saying we can all understand each other but we hear some songs and we we can know them by by their Cadence or by or or just by OB observing if that person stands or or if that man is singing Because I’ve seen it happen where a guy was singing serenading a woman you know it does it still happens anyways um the rest of my presentation I wanted to share something else with you folks and that was the horse um when did the horse come back to North America anyone have a guess out there oh by the Spanish right right yeah about 1520 the horse came back yeah why do I say came back reintroduced as a horse used to be here and we could argue and say oh Paleo Indians my ancestors they hunted that horse to Extinction killed it off it’s possible um another argument I’ve heard was the weather changed so drastically the horse couldn’t adap and so it died off I mean that’s possible too who knows we don’t know really anyways when that horse came back to North America it wouldn’t be until maybe the late 1600 1682 to 1690 to that Indians actually got horses why the big gap firstly we have to look at where the horse came from when the Spanish brought the horse over we have to look at the society the horse horse came out of who owned the horse in fuel Europe someone tell me land owners right landlords Church hierarchy Nobles right people who had a stake people who had the right to have a say how their countries run yeah kind of like today right I like to have a say that’s why I vote anyways yeah that’s for those non voters out there no anyways uh so this horse is a symbol it’s a status symbol right you need to control it because if you let the Indians get it two things will change and that’s hunting and warfare and we saw this horse for what it was many of us didn’t didn’t didn’t know what it was we saw a man on a horse and we thought oh it’s one person it’s one being and then many of us many are southern relatives they saw a man get off and they oh it’s two right it’s two so we saw this animal many of us have words like tashunka it’s like a big dog or he shunka like it must be like an elk dog or a uhh what’s another one shunka W that one is uh like a sacred dog anyway the implication is that it’s big something big and sacred big sacred animal um we never saw these things before then one day our relatives in the southwest the peblo had a Revolt you might wonder what is that history down there have anything to do with up here well it really does a lot anyways in 1680 they had a Revolt they got tired of being converted enslaved you know call it what you will and they picked one day to revolt the publo Revolt of 1680 in those Spanish journals they write Indians got the horses Indians took us by surprise I don’t speak Spanish my wife does so she was telling me so anyway yeah so Indians finally got horses within one dozen years we see the horse on the Great Plains in 1692 not just here in this area this Yellowstone Powder River area up into Alberta too how do I know this winter counts sure sure these very two winter counts I have with me today copies of them and they’re inside here with text and bibliography too so 1692 according to the bare winter count that’s in here and in 1706 almost as soon as the horses appeared on the planes according to the Batista good winter count my people go and we borrow some horses from other tribes yeah that’s too bad some of our our Crow relatives aren here today they could tell you how we would borrow each other’s horses ma’am oh Liberate the horse okay yeah all these words listen to yeah yeah we had some run-ins with them too he’s an all right guy though anyways uh yeah so 1706 we saw horse stealing take place now many of our many of our native relatives will many of our elders will tell you too you ask any tribe about this issue they have all their stories about it um and my people are no different we like to say we’re The Originators of this one thing and that’s counting coup right anyone heard of that out here yeah where you touch the enemy don’t even have to kill an enemy just touch the enemy right this one act of war is actually has everything to do do with the horse before that horse in the dog days we when we’re on foot and the enemy was 10 miles away well that’s a that’s 10 miles is is really far if you’re on foot you know you might make war but if you’re on horse 10 miles you could uh enemy could come within within the hour yeah so anyways uh how did this counting coup come to be according to Batista good there there came a day when the enemy came into our camp while our men were away and they were out hunting these in our camp we leave behind our elders our our women our children those boys who are on the verge of becoming men that they stay behind you know maintain the village keep it clean repair you know all kinds of stuff anyways some of our women are are out Gathering some berries right just picking some berries probably this time of year because it’s August Buffalo berries are ready to be picked so they’re out there picking these berries here comes the enemy and in their minds you have to think is when you have a state of of War right things happen killing kidnapping rape even you know according to bti uh uh John K Bearer The Winter count I have there you know we annihilated an entire band of people you know we say children are so sacred to us but we killed not just their Warriors of this we chosan people there a tribe that don’t even exist you don’t even hear about them anymore we killed them to the last person all that happened on the planes too so our women are thinking that this is the same time period our women are thinking you know death you know rape murder you know kidnap and their minds are going through all these things what’s going to happen to my children what’s going to happen to my husband what’s going to happen to my brothers my sisters enemy comes in they get off their horse and you expect something to happen while they push them just push them and here they all start laughing enemy starts laughing haha you know and then they get back on their horses and run off same time period here um enemy also comes into our camp according to Batista good and he’s carrying a lance now my people have been called PR kns before I never would have believed it unless I unless I read it from our own account I I would just chalk it up oh the the French you know how they elaborate right they’re they’re saying that we’re Knights and we’re all this and all that well a man crafted a lance and came in on his horse and he was coming into the camp and we all look out you know our sentries are calling out you know you know uh toah the enemies coming coming you know making everyone take to arms so everyone comes out of their Lodge they’re getting ready to for a fight here’s just one man and he has that Lance and we’re all looking at him D daku de you know what’s that you know I don’t know you know and he rides through the village and goes right out and we all stand around you know what just happened we don’t know the next year this man comes into our camp again with the Lance oh this time he actually touches someone he gets a he he touches a boy and he rides off and this combined with those enemies touching our women and pushing him and laughing you know to me that’s an indication with the appearance of the horse this is when we begin to count CP and it didn’t it’s not a Lota origin either so my Lota relative you know I don’t mean to offend them if they ever hear this or ever see this recording I don’t mean to offend them it’s just this is how it is how it appear to me with our own histories yeah so I I challenged my relatives one day I said if you disagree with me make one yeah it was it was a very quiet audience too I don’t think they were expecting some of the things I had to share anyways uh getting back to this horse the other thing that appeared at the same time on the planes in 1706 that same year as horse doing took place the gun appeared metal trade goods appeared on the Missouri River most historians will use Pierre lavendre now there’s nothing wrong with that come on right if you’re a historian use more than one source I always like to use that with historians too yeah so anyways verify your fact before the French came out here go to many different winter counts and you’ll see there were trade items out here the gun metal knives magnifying glasses now the worth of a metal knife a trade knife was equal to a horse right up there so my Mandan relatives they know who brought them the horse and I know when so I share that with him any at every opportunity because they many of us too use non-native resources for history there’s nothing wrong with that well let’s let’s put our histories right together with it we can actually come up with some earlier dates and we can verify lavendre right see if the French are right anyways though hope there’s no French out there hey no no it wouldn’t be the Spanish because my people the lot on my father’s side I’m ihana Dakota we’ve been getting our trade goods from the French French and the English since 1635 at at where where we know Chicago is today makan 1635 we’ve been getting our trade goods since then yeah from English and French not the Spanish um um me we’re getting into another subject here though but the Spanish came up the Missouri River too our our Southern relatives like to say oh we protected you you Northern Indians from this from The Conquistadors I think well come on you guys did pretty good they still came up the river and that was in the 1790s as soon as they came up the river here comes the English so um where I’m at Knife River where I where I work at that’s actually the cut off point when we look at Lewis and Clark’s journals they didn’t use uh I’m sure they ma they did their own cartography but they used um John Evans and Pier dorian’s notes and maps all the way up to that point they only mapped half the journey after Knife River to to Fort clat up anyways I think well we give him a little too credit a little too much credit anyways though um getting back to the horse here because we have all kinds of horse stealing events um my people we were left out of the trade any type of trade where I’m from those mandans Hadas and Aras with their Earth Lodge Villages they were rich and Powerful fortified villages we did not want to attack them but when the horse and the gun came we saw those two things and they need it to be controlled it’s this time period that makes me think of the horse as as Horses of mass destruction yeah seriously we need to control it because what if they get it what if they get those things it’s going to upset our balance right it’s going to upset how we live right yeah see our Lota people our native people we really think alike like like everyone else today we have to control it can’t let those enemies get it right yeah anyway so so 1700s saw the horse um our economy changed too we were Traders but our native people say oh we’re horse cultures and I think well that’s true we are but uh more than that we’re horse economy so all those horse stealing events throughout the early 1700s just filled with horse stealing because we had to control our economy was that horse stealing it’s horses made us hunt and War better we need to control it anyways uh I want to draw some quick parallels here for you folks and then uh and then I’ll take some questions but our our American Revolution what was that conflict about someone tell me Freedom what’s that oh okay okay all all right no other guesses that man well yeah control is part of it yeah um we all pay taxes right yeah taxes stamps um whatever yeah there’s other things too but uh when you get hit hard in the pocket you take notice of things right yeah you like paying $3 a gallon only one guy does okay yeah all no yeah anyways yeah when you when you get hit hard in the pocket it makes you take notice so we make war yeah and then freedom and and freedom of press freedom to to bear arms those are secondary reasons you know we all pay income tax here right who pays income tax that’s something our founding fathers would frown on seriously anyways so what else do we got here um a Civil War what was that conflict about slavery okay well we could say it became an issue of slavery after after Abraham Lincoln’s second term what’s that sir states rights okay so we have the early 1800s that’s beginning to diversify its economy for our United States right weren’t expecting this type of lecture today yeah so you have people on the North who kind of leaning towards industrialization right yeah and you have the South that’s still Agricultural and so you have people who who have these economic differences and sure slavery is a part of it was a part of it well you have people who think differently about money they balance it differently they spend it differently they just budget everything differently and today we call those Democrats and Republicans right no no Jabs to anyone no no I’m just saying it’s a historical fact come on anyways though so uh during the 1830s you see a change and how our dollar is backed we see the decline of the fur trade um our dollar is backed by gold right yeah so this draws me to a conclusion now because in the 1800s you have so much of our of our Indian history documented with a lot of conflict and so everything leading up to the Civil War is kind of our since we’re having this Divergent economy it it really is all money it’s all money um what am I trying to say here the the Plains Indian Wars took place during our gold and silver rushes because our dollar was backed by gold and during a depressed economy you need to acquire that resource to stimulate it right yeah I’ll stop with with this history right here anything else is modern so anyways we have just a few few minutes here I’d be I’d be really glad to take some questions please raise your hand if you have a question I’ll come by with the microphone so you can be heard do you have any questions for Dakota good house yes any time in that upper part of that drawing that that yellow group appears is that a gathering of many nations everyone this right here yeah this right here is is one of of the mythological events that takes place a long time ago we say there’s no set date to this but this is where our our spirits come from we believe um from the heavens above like the um the Milky Way we call it the Milky Way today but if we go back to the old Hebrew text of it if we study Aramaic in Hebrew it’s actually called the Breath of God the holy Breath of God we know it also as the the Breath of God the holy Road the spirit Road it’s almost literally word for word translation but that’s where we believe our our spirits come from and that’s where we’re going to go back to you see it see something to that effect further up here right here yeah yeah this is when um we had a meeting to decide about what to do with the horses and guns so this is around around 1735 1740 or no 1635 1640 say uh the uh Jesuits came to meet with us back in 1640 good question oh we have a yeah right here now is the spirit male in the earth is Mother you mean that’s how we regard it m like uh like the great spirit well that would be uh generally above being a male or female yeah but we have a word for the sky and that’s tunila or dka and those have masculine applications uh the Earth is generally regarded un Mak Maki or unima grandmother Earth but generally yeah that’s true that the Earth is regarded as in the feminine and the sky is masculine but uh but this one mystery this one creator that moved everything uh that is regarded as being just above above being masculine or feminine okay one more here we go uh on your calendar up there do you have a year for when uh say small small pox was introduced to your tribe oh yeah yeah we have uh some small pox uh there was uh measles that struck us before the year Lewis and Clark came out in 1803 um there’s one more up here um and this one right here I was really surprised because Mandan hadat say they don’t have winter counts however they have real powerful oral history and they say in the mid 1700s they were struck by small pox well there was no French out here to to verify that fact and then when I Came Upon This entry of of small pox in 1755 I want to say I’ll have to chook these winter counts out here was in 1750s that we saw small pox strike and I think you know they’re they’re they’re accurate for oral tradition and just to give you folks a quick example and that’s that game telephone where someone Whispers in your ear right at the end usually it’s something different and that’s a bad example of oral history here’s the good example the way it should be someone is repeating the same thing over and over for five minutes in that same game and making sure that person hears it right that person tells the next one for five minutes and they’re going to hear it right and so everyone takes five minutes the game is going to last a long time but at the end it’s going to come back almost the exact same as how it started with these Mandan and Hada oral Traditions I found they have compacted um five years so their oral tradition is about 195 years for about 200 years it’s really accurate very accurate but some good questions here nothing else sir over here chance for a last question in and then cuz we want to give everyone a chance to uh see your winter count and get a little closer view of that there were many uh tribes all all over the states here in Canada did they all have a religion of some type or was it the same one oh I guess we uh we all I don’t want to speak for every other tribe but we all acknowledge one Creator and it depends on who you’re talking to and I I feel I can say this with some confidence you’re asking a theology major um so anyways uh there’s some of us who are uh who you might call polytheists and um the Hada 100 years ago would say that they were polytheists they believed in one more than one but I can’t say that today because you talk to some and they do acknowledge only one but you talk to another tribe like Den the naval and I don’t want to speak for them either but to to me when I hear them acknowledge sacred ones it’s singular and plural at once there’s people out there that are above us and there’s one but ones it’s almost like the the sacred mystery of the of the Holy Trinity if you want to talk if you want to equate it like that but uh no there is no one set religion uh I would say that our beliefs are flexible enough that I will not I will I will I I don’t tell you how to live your life according to whatever beliefs I I cherish we all value certain beliefs like generosity respect fortitude patience kindness goodness gentleness it can look those things up too in in the in Ecclesiastes anyways how we execute those is different our native people value generosity how do we carry this out usually with the giveaway so I I I I can’t honestly answer your question I I hope I was able to kind of answer it there so I see you nod in your head all right all right um good questions here and I would like to invite everyone up to have a look if you want of my winter count I wish to end our presentation by just adding for for for your own frame of Minds that uh our native people when it comes to thinking a certain way we just say it differently we actually have a lot of the same impulses as anyone else and this this is one proof of it it’s a Lota proof of it I can’t speak for any other tribe but this is a this is a way that that we all think alike anyways in my language we say pilo I thank you very much in the Mandan language goes you I thank you and hza M I thank you so uh I appreciate your time thanks for coming out on this warm day um again anyone come on up check it out look through my books here awesome thank you very much Dakota ladies and gentlemen Dakota good house will be up here to explain his winter cow so we invite you guys to come on up if you’re interested in having a little closer look at this he’ll explain it to you coming up at the top of the hour we do have another program called the risky return with it’s all about of Louis of Clark being and on the Yellowstone River what we’re doing here today and that’s given by our very own park ranger Laura Clifford so please stay tuned that’s our last program of the day thank you

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]]> Pete John and Tom Fredericks on Mandan rodeo and ranching https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-08180603/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:48 +0000 https://research.lewisandclarktrust.org/tent-voices/tent-of-many-voices-08180603/ A recording from the Tent of Many Voices collection.

The post Pete John and Tom Fredericks on Mandan rodeo and ranching appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

]]> afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the core Discovery 2 and the Ten of Min voices and true to its name the ten of many voices lends itself to allow a lot of different presenters to come in and present different aspects of the Louis and Clark expedition and things that have happened since the Lewis and Clark expedition so this is the bicentennial commemoration 200 years since Lewis and Clark and the members of the Expedition passed through here and so every hour we have a different presenter and this afternoon we have Pete John and Tom Fredericks so I’m going to let them identify who they are so Pete raise your hand John raise your hand and Tom there you go and there are Mandan Hada they’re going to speak with us this afternoon about horses Cowboys and Indians and just to give you some affiliation on the end down here these are ranchers from Twin butes and this gentleman right here keeps him out of trouble he’s an attorney from Colorado so please welcome the Frederick brothers and their presentation thank you uh she left one out we’re members of three affiliated tribes it’s Mand and riov my mother was raised by the ri and she’s uh we actually are Mandan hia but we were raised by my mom was raised by the R so we claimed them too um our theme is uh Cowboys Indians and Rodeo and mine is uh I’m going to do one on Indian Rodeo so I’m I’m an Indian and I’m I’ve been rodeoing and I rode all my life so I’m going to talk about that talk about kind of myself I don’t want I don’t believe to be any better than anybody else but God given me a gift in Rodeo and so it sound like I’m bragging but I’m not I’m just telling you how it is it’s the way it was and my I’m I’m a member of three affiliated tribes like I told you but I also have an Indian name and my name my Indian name is charge and Eagle I get that name through through my Mandan culture it’s uh my grandfather’s name was uh Charlie Grant Char excuse me Charlie Burr and he was uh charge and Eagle was a brother to to forbears one of our Indian chiefs anyway to make it get along with the story I I started rodeo with uh with kids on in round Elwood Woods back in the early days in the ‘ 50s and I uh we went we used to go to little rodeos around the reservation there different places like the Chase had had Arena and up in uh in the Joe and charging had an arena we had about four Arenas on the reservation and we just go to each one of those and the practice like early April and that’s kind of how I got my start and in 1953 my my cousin Billy Hall Jr and esy Thornton Senior and Angus Fox qualified for the National High School Rodeo out of bua and we went to TOA and and I went to saddle Bron riding and and uh and Angus won the bearback riding and uh ese won the bull riding till we got to enter the the National High School rodo in which was held in Rapid City South Dakota in 1953 and in 1953 we had to send our applications down to the uh codo secretary at the National High School Rodeo in in Rapid City so es and Billy were give me that we uh from Alba woods they lived there in Alba Woods I lived up by twin be I rode a bus the school see so so I sent my uh application in from Halliday from the bank there in Halliday and they they sent theirs and we had to get our our our applications notorized and when we got down to the rodeo we we drove all the way down there in 53 and all there was was gravel roads all the way and we got down there and and Esley and and Jake weren’t even entered they threw their entry out because they weren’t notorized and I was the only one that left they left in it but I had me in the B riding instead of Saddle Bron riding so I was in be back in saddle and uh and I uh went back and checked the Bulls right away and they were sure enough big bulls and over I I like I was a freshman in high school so I was pretty worried about that I tried to get out of it and they said no we take you out of the see my specialty was bearback anyway but they had me in that one my other event was saddle Bron but they didn’t have me in that they had me in bull riding so I I pleaded with them and tried to get them to take me out they wouldn’t do it they didn’t you if you take you out of one you’re out of it completely they said so I stayed in and I got on my first bearback horse there at the Nationals and uh we only got one cuz there were so many contestants from all over the country in United States in Canada and uh and so Jake Billy Hall Jr and esby Thorn Senor they helped me down on my horse and when I got down on my horse I was I was pretty nervous cuz the horse they told me was around the help the shoot help and the producer said that horse never ridden before I don’t I didn’t know whe they were trying to scare me or just so I was pretty worried he was sure enough he’s a shoot fighter and he CLA on the front of the shoot you know and I and of course es he got right up there and he and I uh I remember could hear my uh Spurs jingling so scared I was and and luck would have when the horse jumped out of there he was I don’t know the Lord must have been on my side that day I made a good ride and I went to the lead in the bearback riding and held the lead all the way through in one the National High School bearback riding Championship I was pretty happy and the three of us we pulled our money and went to kuster South Dakota we thought we’d needed some money to get back on we just had enough entry to enter or either go back home so they wanted to ride these other my cousins and my uh my best friend there he with my uh he was engaged to uh my first cousin Audrey Hall so so we all were together you know we went over to the Custer and and sure enough Esty got into saddle Bron and bearback and I entered the bearback and saddle Bron and Jake one rode bearback enter beack and and uh we we didn’t have very good horses EST and and sure enough Jake W second in the bearback r and it was only one header there too so so he had enough money to get us home Jak call so we we came back home Jak call Jak Hall yeah bil Hall Jake calls name and then uh then I went we went to uh another one in high school I went to the National High School Rodeo and and when I was a senior year the in 54 it was too far away it way down in Texas somewhere so so I didn’t even bother to go but I did go to the one in uh Nebraska wasn’t too far away so at 55 I went to it and uh Angus qualified for it too Jess’s brother Angus and uh we got down there and sure enough we had a pretty good team together North Dakota team there was a Don rain from Hein and I had a horse that I pulled down there and uh before went my uh my old my old horse trailer was so beat up it looked pretty shabby so my sister and my mother they fixed it up and my mom made me a good shirt but she had to put the the buttons on the wrong side but I didn’t make any difference I got down there and uh and uh we were entered in the right events we made sure everything was right this time around 55 and and uh came to the last horse and I had a bear back and a saddle Bron and I was in a steer wring and I pulled pull my horse down there I got from my brother buzz and I split split that horse we we bought him out a New Mexico my brother was in uh Lo Cru is going to school down there working on his degree and so I haul I pulled him down there with dad’s car and I remember I drove halfway down there and I got tired so I just pulled into some farmyard somebody’s farm along the road it pretty close but I but close to the trees and so I let my horse eat I had a little hayong for him and I slept in the back of the car I was by myself too then I got up the next morning drove on into Harris Nebraska then we got to the rodeo there like I was saying I was in the bear back and saddle Bron so I rode my bearb and and I run my run my steer and then in in the end we were uh neck and neck for the all around it was my one of my teammates saddle a saddle Bron rer Angus fo right behind me was between me and him for the all around of course we all wanted to win the all round cuz they gave a big horse trail away you know in all the prizes end of all around and so I uh I come out uh third in the bearback and third in the steer wrestling and Don rain won the steer wrestling with a five flat I was 53 and then somebody moved me down to third 5’2 but he won the steer resting and I won the saddle Bron riding and I also won third in the bearback riding so that gave me the allaround so he did get the trailer so I just left my old funny horse trailer sit there loaded BW up in a new new horse trailer brought him home and uh we got home and then that following winter uh 1955 we had an old guy uh back in the old days they had a uh little little little paper there twin buts they call it uh USSR and and the editor was John star senior and he seen all our publicity that we were getting see I I not only won that but my my my my first cousin Joe chase was also in college down in Texas in Oklahoma and he won the SLE Bron ring in 52 and 53 so we were getting all that publicity so he dubbed that the home of the Champions so twin bu is known as home of the Champions that we had three national championships no five national championships between the two of us he had two in sad Bron and I had I had a bearback title in 53 in a allaround and 55 in a saddle Bron so we had five national championships so we it was it was debed home of the Champions after that so they got a sign on when if they ever go there well they’ll see that anyway they went on through that and then I went into college and I had a pretty fair career in college and I I I got to hurry along now cuz I get my brothers here’s got to they get 15 minutes it’s already 20 minutes he had even got out of college yet well to make a a long story short my mom told me she said whenever you do something good son and my dad said the same thing they were do together and they said when you do something good you will give it back to whomever you you got it from try to give something back so I went through college and I was doing pretty good in college so I transferred up to Dickenson and I thought well we don’t have a a Dickinson College Rodeo team so I brought brought my articles in corporation from from down New Mexico where my brother was I went with him my first year so my second year I went to 1958 I went to Dickinson State teachers college and I organized the rodeo team there and so I I was doing what my mom said to do and I was also helping myself to be close to home in Rodeo in college and I ended up having a pretty fair I never did win a world championship National Championship in college but I was runner up in 58 57 to the allaround and then into into a I graduated out of the college ranks and and went into NFR National Finals Rodeo of the professional Rodeo Association they made us all you know if you got so far along in Rodeo while you had to give by a card and that was kind of the rule of some if you it wouldn’t let you ENT these rodos you had a PRCA card they had their old own Association so we so I went to then I through the NFR I uh they go by the top 15 to go to the finals so they keep track of your points they got a point system called R Springs most you know how that works anyway uh I I qualified in two events in 61 actually didn’t qualify in the saddle Bron in 61 but I didn’t want to make to actually make two events cuz they we knew I knew that they had to all this rank stock down there and they and I found out that we had to get get on two head a day on the weekends and it was just over 5 days of course now they got stretched over 10 days but then then I went ahead and rode in that and I was uh I I was ranked uh e going in in the bearback riding and when I came out of the finals in Dallas Texas in 19th 61 I was ranked fourth I ended up fourth for the world got beat out by 15500 no 3500 Points each dollar of counselor point point $3,500 during the past summer of 61 I had a horse stop on on me at Cheyenne in the finals and one that stopped on me at Cenas in that that particular year they wouldn’t give you any reviv under any circumstances so I launched out on that that probably cost me maybe you know a championship anyway I went to to the professional Rodeo then I went into Indian Rodeo after that I was kind of through with that so I went back into the Indian and and while I was in my professional career I went to a rodeo Indian Rodeo in Gallup New Mexico and gosh uh I was really saddened by the way the indans were treated especially the rodeo guys you know they just weren’t treated right I didn’t think so I I thought to myself I’m going to I’m going to pick up this deal and see if I can straighten it out so I got were the right guys I knew the guys I rodeoed with that was on the in the uh they were on the board of directors so I I got them to pass a ruling that they wouldn’t they could let the Indian Rodeo be managed and helped with professional PRCA stock and officials so I got that portion done and then went into the Indian Indian Rodeo stuff we developed our our all our or organizations throughout the United States and Canada and we have I think let’s see 13 associations and they’re all for themselves each one but we take the top two of the National Finals rodal so we we deed the international final rodeo and it exists today as our finals are in uh St Louis they in San San Carlos San Carlos Arizona at the San at the uh Gold Casino golden golden Gold Casino yeah it’s a gold uh a gold it’s a Gold Casino the uh Arizona paches there and uh in Arizona anyway so it’s on the 19th to the 23rd if anybody wants to go good Rodeo mountain with that I’ll let uh I’ll better end it so my brothers won’t kill me here thank you bad ending well I guess I’m I’m up next and uh I’ll try to kind of hurry through this uh so uh grandma what G to get back on schedule here since Pete took a lot of time uh I’m I’m John Fredericks Jr and I’m a member of the fre Affiliated tribes here I grw up on reservation and uh ranched all my life in the Twin Beth area in some in the west segment area and my Indian name was given to me by my grandfather Pete coffee it’s uba which means he said best he could uh explain was the shin of the Buffalo some people just call it ankle you know but anyway that was that was the engine name I got it came from my uh Uncle Wilford medicon Stone who was killed in action in World War II so I kind of cherish the name because that when I was about 14 years old I was on what we call the big lease Round Up Northwest of McGregor Camp the big lease was leased and run by a few large non-indian ranchers and was separated from the Indian operators by a drift fence that had four wires he went North and South just west of my Uncle Jim Hall’s Ranch and on North by Spring bues and over into the independence country now that I’ve sort of located us I was repping for my dad John Frederick senior with my sister Bine about this time El Woods was having a fair in Rodeo at the old Fairgrounds that was located about 1 mile south of elow woods so I told Bo my sister that I would take the Catt we picked up of my dad’s and take them by the ranch she would stay and finish the Roundup and end up at a Kennedy’s she she knew the a Kennedy family real well could could depend on them to take her horse uh back home or whoever she wanted she would stay and finish U as I was wanted to go to the fair and enter the rodeo so I had it East leading my horses and pushing the cow ahead past McGregor camp and down moccas to my Uncle Jim Hall’s camp and finally to my dad’s Ranch my dad was pleaded for my performance so when I asked him if I had go to the fair he said go to go ahead I changed horses and headed for the fair about 20 M 21 miles east I got in a bear back riding I recall the horse was wild and nervous as I was I I called for the horse and when they opened the gate I was really going to make a showing for myself I spurred at the horse’s neck while he was still in the shoot and the horse ducked under my leg lucky for me he gave me a time to regroup and get my leg back on the side of his neck so I could spur him out as he left the shoot it didn’t do much good however because a few jumps out of there he left me hanging in the air and then to that good old Sandy lone that flourished in our River bottoms as I drug myself out of the dirt brushed my jeans off I could hear the band playing sort of made me feel better I had my first bear back BR course behind me and the band was playing even though I bucked off the good part of it was I had a couple of uncles playing in the band Charles Hubert Senor and Arthur Manan along with Floyd Monclair and others the important thing we had a at the fair that we had a a place for the band and we had a our own band that that played the music uh and they done a good job these early events I just spoke about set the pace for me as a cowboy in professional Rodeo as well as ranch cowboy when being a cowboy really meant something to those of us that were in in it because being a ranching Cowboy meant had to get up at daylight get on while snorty horses on those cold fall mornings even if they bucked you were expected to take them all out of Tak it all out of them by the time you rode in to Camp that evening put up Hay all summer with horses until the first snowfall then ride on roundups even if it meant freezing your face to get your cattle together so you could feed them the hay you put up during the summer now I want to talk about our own early day ranchers and why ranching was so successful on a fort perol Indian Reservation the year of 1934 our tribe adopted and accepted the reorganization acts which provided for a constitution that included a corporate structure or the ability to set up a corporation most of our Indian men folks were warriors that were used to hunting Buffalo that were in abundance during that time prior to that time to provide a total living for their families and rode good horses to protect their families against the enemy tribes that they fought in the early days so the lifestyle of being a Rancher and raising cattle with horses to do the work with our Indian men will took to this new life they elected a tribal council to run the government of the tribe and they got busy working with a beer of indan Affairs together they secured a federal Charter to do business on the fort biral Indian Reservation the three tribes involved to uh were the three tribes that we that now are part of this reservation the Mandan had on RI off together they talked the Bureau of Indian Affairs into providing them with an agent to work with them in developing and using their resources thus the fort beral livestock Association was born after sending up board of directors and getting their agent on board they met with all the families of the reservation and decided with the assistance of their new agent just how they were going to run things at this point in our time we sort of had a three branch government the Bureau of Indian Affairs provided the law and order the council was our executive branch in our association with this was the Congress so to speak anyway it worked real well for for us at the time working together our people establish the following system through the use of their corporation they set up a repayment program any male or female over the age of 18 could secure cattle in 10 head increments provided they had a camp and hay for the cattle I believe early on it was capped at 50 head back in those days that was pretty good that was a pretty good bunch of cattle many of our better ranchers increased their herds to 100 and better some contracted with large meat companies and ran yearlings in larger numbers the best mother cows were purchased originally from this program and with good Bulls our indan ranchers became noted for good cattle 32 people and even bought bll from them then we set up the bull program the board of of direct the the board and the Agents purchased some very good bulls for their operators which developed into some outstanding cow hers on the red reservation the association purchased the Bulls and kept them and fed them until it was time to put them out with the cows so much per head was charged for the use of the blls no money changed hands the engine cattle had a big ID brand on on the shoulder therefore since they were considered government property nobody bothered them the board and the agent also purchased supplemental feed and salt large increments for a cheaper price all this was kept at the Elwoods agency headquarters a flower and feed mill was also set up whereby the operators could bring in their wheat in and get it processed so they would have flour for food stuffs and ran for their Cales the Indian operators never paid cash for any of the above production cost a record was kept at the headquarters office and when they sold their Cales you brought your proceeds in and your your yearly expenses were deducted and the balance was given back to the operator The Association members also set up a small loan program which provided for Indian family needs for all of the pocket expenses during the year from one fall to the next the loan was paid off the same way that other operating expenses were paid when each operator sold his cattle in the fall some operated sold locally and some shipped to other Central Markets like Fargo North Dakota South St Paul Minnesota and to Chicago Illinois I may have missed one or two but those were the main markets during those good prce years for our livestock people on the for beral engine reservation and I say good prosperous years because at that time that system provided uh a good life for all of our uh our people on the reservation and all the people participated in it I don’t think there was a family that didn’t and they had uh uh pigs and chickens and other livestock elk cows to provide uh uh food stuff for the for the family and I want to I’m talking about ranching but I don’t want to leave the women folks out they worked very hard during those days they put in big Gardens and together with their family kept them clean and and uh canned All Summer Long not only from from the garden but also from the wild fruits and so forth we had in the area the lowlands The Association members also provided let’s see I think I covered that okay it had to be a good program because all the families participated it provided a good life taught our younger generation how to work and take on responsibility at an early age basically during that time we had no welfare we had no drugs and very little alcoholism we were living the good life off the resources our great spirit provided for us we were happy we loved each other and helped one another we rolled many miles to worship our great spirit give him thanks for pro providing these things for us then came the pick Sloan era the dam was built at pck city and backed water up the big and little Missouri Rivers our Timber was gone our feed base our water hold our protection and our Indian Ranch was left their heart and soul to wither with and die with all the resources and animals that the water from the dam destroyed some other ranchers tried to Ranch on the upper bench lands they were forced to relocate to due to the Garrison Dam but we’re not very successful in the in the process we lost our credit program that F that and FHA took over we’re now in court with the FHA trying to keep our land together we lost our repayment program and our funds were generated from the bull program superintendent Morin gave to the tribal Business Council without our Authority but most of all we lost a great livelihood thank you you know I I’m the youngest of the of of the family and I just wanted to tell you that you know when I when I would grew up growing up doing chores was riding about two steers and maybe a colt and if they didn’t get me hurt by that then they but they’d put me on a bucking barrel and I’d ride that bucking Barrel till they cut my head open or something and that’s that’s just that was just like doing chores for me uh and then when they were rodeoing hard we’d be we’d be up there working and I remember Pete going in fifth in road gear on when I was on the rake and uh he wanted to get down with his field cuz he was wanted to go to a rodeo in Wolf Point and uh he was going so damn fast that the rake came off and it stuck in the ground and I just went flying in the air so I walked home and told him hell I’m not riding no race for do then uh one time we were rolling up hay in the Hayfield Buzz he came home I don’t know if he come home from a rodeo or a dance but swed holand was in the hay stack and we were around there playing and hell he went to sleep when he was pulling the hay up and he pulled the hay all over on top of the top of the guy and one time Pete he came from we were all hying we was really doing good we were just about done with the field and Pete he’d come back I guess he’s feeling guilty cuz he wasn’t helping haying he was rodeo and he came into the field about 10 minutes he had the damn tractor on fire and he had uh stuff burning and my dad went over there and said get the hell out of here he said you’re a cowboy you’re not a you’re not a hey man you shouldn’t be riding the tractor it was a lot of fun growing up on the ranch uh as my brother stated uh we did a lot of work uh I did a lot of the haying and I stayed home my mother I I started rodeo and when I was when I graduated from in the e8th grade I won the high school bearback riding and qualified for the Nationals uh but my mother said she had enough Cowboys she didn’t want she didn’t want me to be a cowboy and so I went to college and then uh and went into sports and got a scholarship to play football and then I went to law school and became a lawyer state minet state I graduated from in LA in undergrad and I graduated from the University of Colorado law school and I never left Colorado except to come home here uh but I wanted to give you a little idea about what life was like uh you know I remember I was the youngest so I was always the guy that was kind of taking care of things that uh like when we’d have a horse round up you know they theyd start out over here in the what Buzz called the big lease they were wild horses and so they’d start them around across the river and they’d come up on the top out by Pete’s Place there at the end of the road in Twin butes we were taking them to my dad’s Ranch and these horses were wild and and and our horses their horses be about played out by the time they got up on top of that coming out of tunnel point and down there on what was that Martel bottom and and they’d come out of the they’d come out of the brakes up on the Divide there and so I’d I’d be standing there holding a bunch of horses I’d have a truckload of horses unloaded and they’d take new horses and I remember one time my cousin Wesley Hall he was he was coming up there his horse was all played out so he he did but I didn’t have a horse for him so he was just kind of playing around with me there I had the truck and was going to load the horses but I thought well I’ll jump on the back and take a ride with him and I got us both bucked off his horse had enough enough going so he bucked us off but we took them horses all the way to my dad’s place uh Wild Horses I remember that one of the last roundups I think we had uh of taking them horses into uh into the crow they’re up into civilization yeah and uh the other thing I wanted to mention was you know I’m doing a lot of work on the Garrison Dam uh the taking and the uh the way the way the government looked at our life is they tried to buy an acre of land and Save that the value the value was whatever the market value was they didn’t look at the value of the the actual way of life on Fort Berthold at the time of the taking in the 1940s 85% of the tribe lived along the river we were River people 85% and and all the allotments were along the river and so at the time of the taking and this is documented in our report reports 6% of the Indians were on welfare or some kind of Public Assistance and uh they all had family like John said they had family Gardens they had little cattle everybody was self-sufficient and that was because we know we had wild plums we had juneberries we had choke cherries we had wild I know right by our place in on the Little River uh where my where my folks lived we had a little patch it was just like an orchard you know we had all those fruits in there and then we had wild grapes along the river and if we wanted to get coal we got on the ice and we’d go along the river until we found the coal seam that we wanted to that my dad knew was pretty good coal and we that’s where we got our coal and uh we got wood from the trees and our cattle grazed in the river bottoms it’d be windy blowing and they’d be fine you know just like it was just like a shed for them that those trees I know the people would come to my dad’s Ranch on the Little River and they’d say John you got a paradise for cattle here and it was it was a very it was a very nice Ranch and I never realized what happened to my dad cuz he got up to the when he when they flooded the Missouri he went he didn’t really have his heart in ranching anymore he was depressed I didn’t know he was depressed but I just wondered what was wrong with him but now as I studied it I understand but uh ranching then got much more difficult but and and when the Army Corps of Engineers took our property you know they the the United States valued it as what you would sell a piece of property they didn’t value all these other things that were valued the wild animals that we lived off the game that we the the subsistence that was provided by the by the uh terrain and the and the climate being by river I got five minutes you guys took all my time uh but anyway uh what we’re trying to do now is you know we we’ve we’ve progressed you know we had a little guy that valued our property Buzz talked about the tribal council we didn’t have big experts we didn’t have lawyers like my self we our people did the best they could and they negotiated a pretty good contract they got power in there they were when after the taking they could have they were supposed to have a block of power but and and the ACT said that the secretary and the and the tribe would negotiate a contract and we did then they negotiated a pretty and I have a copy of that contract but it went to the Congress and Congress just wiped everything out and did whatever they wanted and we ended up with I think about 12 million that’s all on the PowerPoint but I don’t have time to do my PowerPoint uh about 12 million dollar and uh today we valued that and we used experts and we got the the way it should be valued and there’s two kind of two School of thoughts is how much can you earn from an acre of land by putting efforts into it and then the other way is to Value it on what what it cost to live you know if you lived off coal and wood then you move up to the top and there’s no wood no coal then you have to buy propane so there’s a consumer kind of aspect to it what does it cost you now to live it’s a hell of a lot more to have uh electric heat and propane and that kind of stuff so that really impacted our tribe and when we studied the studied the tribe in 1992 when we passed the jtac law uh 90 94% of our people were on some form of Public Assistance so that ought to tell you the kind of impact that the Garrison Dam had on the on the fort birthal reservation so we went from 6% public assistance to 9 94% Public public some kind of public help so we hired experts we hired an economist out of New Mexico we hired an economist out of uh that graduated from from uh Cornell and uh we valued these now the uh the the jte was a group that was appointed by the United States to represent the United States and they they found that we did not get just compensation for our bottom lands so we studied it remember they gave us $122,000 and so they studied it and they came up with a number of 182 million for the low side using the New Mexico where you earn what you can earn from the land and the the Cornell Economist who who valued it as what you lost how how would it cost you to for as a consumer and also what all the the wild animals all everything you lost from from a a way of life and that came up to 411 million well Congress said you know they they said well we don’t know if this is right the the secretary the interior disagreed with their his own jtac committee that he had appointed and so he he sent it on to Congress and then Congress enacted a bill or they gave it to the GAO the general Accounting Office to look at it and they said well they’ve overstated their uh their amount so what what we should do is remember the tribal counil hired a little uh appraiser that probably from partial or from harison or minet or someplace that appraised the land down here and he came up with 20 about 22 million or 23 million and so the goo said well we think that’s overstated they were willing to take 23 million back when in 1949 when they had no money they had nothing to hire an expert with so let’s just give them the difference between the 23 million that they said they were entitled to back in’ 47 and what we paid them and then they took the uh corporate bond rate and and present valued it up to the present day and that came to 149 million and now uh they valued they went to to uh and there’s a lot of this kind of going on now the river 23% of the land that was lost as as a result of the pick Stone Sloan program was ended land and there were eight dams on the Reed on the river and so there’s eight tribes that were flooded out by and the reason for that is Congress it was easy for the United States to take indan land because it was in the name of the United States it was underdeveloped they thought it was cheaper but it had a crippling effect on the on the on the Indians and now Senator McCain he’s saying you know there they they went to Cheyenne River and Cheyenne River got a value that we all claim is the is the right way to Value the land to Value what we lost as Indians and that came to 290 million and they lost 104,000 Acres well the economist that did that is Robert mofin and and he’s the he’s the guy that uh valued Standing Rock and he valued uh shyenne River well they finally Jo went along with Bob mcgloin’s uh economics and so they uh they passed the jtac bill at at cheyen River for 290 million so that means that our if we get parody with that at Fort berold we should get 41 million in back in 1992 which is going to be a lot more today we’re thinking maybe a billion John McCain is saying how come you guys keep coming back here I mean how how many times you to get your head in the trough he said at the last hearing well we’re we’re coming back because we’re entitled to just compensation when you get when you get land taken for a public purpose and it’s private land you’re supposed to be able to get just compensation and and so that’s the argument that we’re saying we didn’t get just compensation your own people and and Congress said we didn’t get just compensation they said that in their findings in the jtac law so we’ve got a big fight going going on and and John is head of a group we call the upper Missouri River all lates Association which is and and when Congress passed this 149 million 90% of the land that was lost was allotted land meaning individual land and they gave the 149 million to the to the tribe instead of to the to the elates so that’s the fight we’re at now we got and so we’re you know we don’t want to be fighting between the tribes so we’re saying to the tribe you keep the 149 we’re going to go after the 411 so uh so that’s kind of where we’re at and I know our time is up but I just wanted I had a a pictoral I wanted to show you how we lived back when but that’ll be another day I guess thank you thank you all very much well they gave us a wealth of information unfortunately we don’t have any time for questions but hopefully if you do have any questions for Tom Pete and John they can answer them at the back of the Tomi and here in about five minutes we’re going to have Harry bamp and Harry bamp III speaking about a ciny culture and history thank you very much

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]]> Monica May: Medicine, Lewis and Clark, and Mandan Health https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/tent-voices/monica-may-mandan/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:48 +0000 https://research.lewisandclarktrust.org/tent-voices/monica-may-mandan/ A recording from the Tent of Many Voices featuring Monica May.

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]]> I know you can’t see the slides very well but uh I’m can you see them at all okay good my name is Monica May and uh my Indian name is H SES and I’m an enrolled member of the three affiliated tribes the Mandan hiad and orara was born and raised here on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation attended schools here all my life I’m the oldest daughter of Avis Baker mayor and the oldest granddaughter of May Howard coffee and it’s proper for us to introduce ourselves through our mother’s lineage because of the matriarchal uh lineage uh Heritage and uh you might wonder why a physician would be interested in the Lewis and Clark well back when I was attending school here when we all went to school you would check a book out with writing your name on a white card on the inside cover of the book well they don’t do that anymore they scan them him and a young girl came up to my house about 10 years ago and she had this book um that somebody had signed on in 1972 and it had my name on there that was the last person that signed that book out and the title of the book was the upper Missouri River Indians and Lewis and Clark so I guess I’ve been reading about this time this topic for a very very long time and I became very interested in my personal history and bought every book I could get on the three phil8 tribes and we are intimately tied with the lwis and Clark it’s hard to separate us so then of course I got all the journals and read the journals in fact I have the Gary Molton Edition the the one that’s like $3,000 that I don’t let anybody touch and I’m very obsessive compulsive about that’s my primary um my primary source that I use to obtain most of my information but you know books are wonderful things because they can change our lives and I I think young people don’t read as much as we did here in this in this room because of their access to computers and so forth but certainly my medical books have changed my life dramatically but also I think the Lewis and Clark as well has as as well as just understanding my personal history which you know I do every day as a physician here in New Town and when I left here in 1978 I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be when I grew up so I got an associate of arts and education or business management after accounting to I decided that’s enough of that so I became a school teacher and taught high school for a while and came back after my father had passed away and me and my two younger sisters uh all went to the University of North Dakota and I received my doctorate there and while I was there I joined the army to be all that I could be and get my school paid for and uh was 6 years in the military my youngest sister I finished my doctorate there and my younger sister Holly who works here in New Town is the director of Public Health nursing and she received her Nursing degree and my baby sister Renee uh is the tribal Social Services director here and received her masters in social work so our mother was very um obsessive compulsive too about reading and going to school and so forth so and it wasn’t good enough to go to school you had to come back home home with your skills and practice here so I’m very honored and privileged to practice medicine here I’ve been in New Town for8 years I worked for Trinity Medical Center out of minet and run my own clinic in the city of Newtown where it’s a real opportunity to take take care of all people in our community so I think it makes perfect sense that somebody like me would be interested in lwis and Clark from a historical from an educational from a medical standpoint of view and so that’s where my interest lied and and with that I’m going to go ahead and go into the PowerPoint presentation I entitled it we proceeded on let’s take a quick look at the general overview in the medical world and how they got ready and come up the Missouri to North Dakota and by the way for those of you not from North Dakota I am a staunch North Dakota I don’t really care what lisis and Clark did before North Dakota or did after North Dakota just in North Dakota I didn’t mean to be insultive to anybody on that at any rate let’s take a quick overview of Lewis and Clark this will be like history 101 and we’re going to go really really fast today because we’re on a shorttime schedule cuz I thought I was on at 11:30 so I apologize for being late let’s take a look at Thomas Jefferson Maryweather Lewis and William Clark and you know it Thomas Jefferson was such an interesting man brilliant and a Visionary of this whole entire United States and he was raised by a physician and carried many many different hats but he was most proud of his authorship of the Declaration of Independence which is a wonderful document if you have not read it and he you know his beloved monello he entertained people and so forth like that and you know Thomas Jefferson he created the first photocopy machine he wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote with his quill he took a piece of wood and hooked it to another quill so every time he’d write he’d have a photocopy of the document that he had and he wrote tens of thousands of documents and um what a wonderful scientist and Visionary he was and he he was controversial in the fact that he did have an affair after his wife had passed away he never remarried and her name was Sally hemings who fathered four children four sons and um do do you all remember the Bill Clinton Monica Lewinsky ordeal no I really loved my name Monica until that Monica Lewinsky went and blew it for all of us you know had Thomas Jefferson in his time had the media and the and the newspapers and the radio and so forth his legacy may not have been what it was you know today had um that been available in his time but Congress knew about it and they persecuted him for that because it was a very big issue of his time at any rate he failed four times before he got this off and I always tell young people it’s in our failures that we become successful and when he finally became president he had the vision to purchase the Louisiana Purchase territories if you’ll take a look and I don’t know how well you can see but the purple area is the Louisiana purchased territories owned by France then Spain and then back to France in 1800 at that time Napoleon was the emperor of France you know they got that little man syndrome that’s him in United States if you look the people were crossing over that Mississippi River and coming into the Louisiana purchased territory areas and and Napoleon didn’t like that and so he gathered 28,000 soldiers to come across and stop those colonists and build a new Viva France and a new world power cuz he wanted to be the emperor of the world not just France but the world now just look at that I if if he’d had those 28,000 soldiers reach New Orleans we’re sitting on what would be French territories y all would be having some sort of lunch like cinjun me meal today if he’d had been successful right well fortunately for us he wasn’t he um put those 28,000 people on ships and just imagine what what that had to be like and they got to the South tip of Florida where one of their territory Santa Domingo was a rebellion going on and out of those 28,000 soldiers less than a thousand returned to France and they never did get to New Orleans why not Weaponry small poox malaria yellow fever so disease sets the stage and changes the course of history and it’s it’s a very interesting story and uh this is Napoleon he looks very little man doesn’t he so we sum it up this way you know and Jefferson wanted this land he was going to take it by force but preferably by and so when those 28,000 soldiers were decimated by disease um it annihilated basically uh Napoleon’s Army so he sold it because he didn’t want great Britain to have it who he was Waring with seems like Great Britain wared with everybody huh at any rate he sold this land for 15 million Acres at 3 cents an acre the Bess that’ll be the best real estate deal ever to go down on the planet Earth huh and so he purchases the territory and he leaves St Louis he has to get ready and of course he goes to Congress to get the money he had to fangle this because you know the Congress didn’t they didn’t think this was a good idea to buy this Louisiana purchased territory and then of course he had Sally hemings hanging over his back but he got $2,500 to get started but you know how the federal government is they inflated it up to $38,000 so and he summed his Louisiana Purchase territory in a document he wrote in 1805 this way we shall delate with correctness the great arteries of this country and those who come after us will extend the ramifications as they become acquainted with them and fill up the canvas We Begin and we’re all doing that today let’s take a look at these two fellows Lewis Clark Lewis was a Virginia he actually was raised to do a plantation and he was taught a lot about plants and herbs to his mother who was a herbologist in Virginia he was only 29 when he went on this Expedition pretty young he was described as melanine which is a bipolar dis disease such as we know today as manic depressive and he was a very very heavy drinker and very controversial in that was his death a suicide or was it homicide and I think a lot of you know that’s the glory of History we really never know you can kind of deduced from your own deductions and evidence and documentation you read but I I think most historians would agree that he did commit suicide primarily because he was prone to depression he had large gaps in his journals that probably where he cycled in depression he drank very heavily and he was ordered by the president to produce his journals and he did not have them he was on his way to present them to M uh Thomas Jefferson at Montello when he died and further more uh he was broke you know after this Expedition everybody got paid and you know just imagine when when our astronauts went to the moon we kind of had a pretty good idea what was up there and when they came back we had great big parades and parties in Washington I’m sure these guys did too and he partied like a monster for a year and spent all his money so he’s broke he’s prone to heavy drinking prone to depression and didn’t have his journals and I think that’s the evidence that most people look at and most likely he contributed to his probable suicide whereas William Clark he was more of the muscle Lewis was the brain Clark was the muscle known as redhead by the Indians and he had brought his slave uh York with him and he lived a full long successful political life I put the core Discovery men up here and you can’t see it very well but Sergeant Ordway Patrick gas and Joseph White House are all highlighted because these three individuals could read and write the rest of them couldn’t besides Lewis and Clark and if you look at the very bottom on the left side I have highlighted here private Thomas Howard now private Thomas Howard I highlighted that if you recall I introduced myself as being the oldest granddaughter of May Howard coffee and you know it’s all in the mind of the reader uh December 11 1804 the journals enter this private Thomas Howard he jumped the fort fence to get back in because the doors closed that night and three Mandan warriors were with him and he got caught by lwis and Clark and he was punished for doing such an act and showing these mam Warriors how to get get in and 100 flocks well you know again it’s all in the mind of the reader interpretation so I’m thinking to myself okay December cold winter in North Dakota what is a man doing out in the middle of nowhere and takes 100 Vlogs for it yeah this is a fast crowd right some crowds just don’t they don’t follow me with that well I have an aunt who works as the public relations for our tribe Glenda Embry I’m sure she’s around here taking pictures her and I were just fascinated with that passage and I read it over and over we tried to trace that but you know at the end of the Expedition everybody got paid and they signed their letter X and many of the men returned back to the bandan villages we cannot prove it but I have a very sneaky hunch that I’m probably a descendant of the core Discovery as well as the mha people now every nobody got paid on this Expedition except for one person sakaka the only female yeah yeah all the girls in the crowd I always say and all the women oh you know anyway medicine back then they didn’t have anything basically nothing no school no journals no trained doctors and if you got sick it’s because you have a bad spirit in your body and so we got to make you throw it up poop it out or bleed you you know and that’s kind of interesting because you know George Washington most historians by its description he had strep throat but he believed in this bleeding process so Faithfully that he actually died from hemorrhaging and so you know I always wonder gosh you know this guy down here he might be too not very ill so I think I’ll take a half a pint from him but oh gosh this guy over here you know three or four pints and so you know Thomas Jefferson just did not like the way they practice medicine he had a great disdain for it and he had his own medicine chest which incidentally this picture it’s upside down but he summed up medicine this way 200 years ago when they practiced medicine thus fullness of the stomach we relieve by a Medics disease of balls by Purge inflammation by bleeding being syphilis by Mercury and if you don’t know what’s going on give him a little bit of opium well you know some of us still do that I think now the Army didn’t know much more they didn’t have any doctors and lots of diseases and you know poor hospitals but they knew about fevers and everything was called a fever Camp fever yellow fever jail fever you catch diseases drink clean water put your toilet Downstream and bury your bodies away from the camp but they did not know about bacteria and basic hygiene diet nutrition and preventive medicine that were just starting to kind of really try to grasp now in a new Millen New Millennium and interesting about basic hygiene the men of Lewis and Clark were very very astonished to find that the Indian people would clean every day and bathe and wash themselves and put grease in their hair you know the men of leis and Clark did not bathe that frequently and you know interestingly here in North Dakota in 1910 when they homesteaded our great state it was unchristian-like to take a bath more than once a week and so that’s a very interesting aspect that they documented and wrote down and the colonists didn’t know much either more than that you know 200 years ago only five medical schools or only 250 people with a degree 100 years ago only 100 only one in 10 doctors had a degree you wouldn’t even think about coming to see me if I wasn’t through medical school with a residency trained and board certified and years of experience you know you just you wouldn’t so we’ve come a very long way in a short distance now just imagine yourselves getting ready for this Expedition what are you going to take I see Dr Nordell in the back and her and I go to the Caribbean once a year ask two women to pack for 10 days hello try packing for 2 and A2 years what are you going to take and you don’t got no doctor so you know Jefferson had to consult with Dr Benjamin Rush who who by the way did have a degree and he was one of five doctors that signed this declaration of independence and he carried a lot of titles you know he was one of these the bleeder they called him you know he’d go around cutting everybody and bleeding them cuz they have a bad spirit in their body and he wrote 10 healthc care Commandments and I put them up just the way he had them flannel worn next to the skin especially in the winter always take a little raw Spirits after being very wet or much fatigued and as little as possible at any other time when you feel the indisposition fasting and resting diluting drinks for a few hours take a sweat and if caused of take Purge of two pills every 4 hours until you operate freely all right we got to stop for a second here they didn’t have pills back then Dr Rush created a pill and if you’ve ever had a yogurt covered peanut that’s what they look like kind of these big round white nuggets if you went downtown to our local you know drugstore bought a box of xlxs took that whole box at one time that would equal one of Dr Rush’s pills it was made of jalup and cill a little mercury and another ingredient so uh This Crowd can understand that concept of the potency that these pills had and you know again it’s in the mind’s reader again just think those poor guys if you imagine yourselves as being the men on the Lewis and Clark Trail you got to go up the Missouri it’s hot cuz you leave in May and it’s you know June July August mosquitoes and flies and you’re sore and you’re tired and you’re only eating meat with flour and salt pork and no fruits and vegetables you got boils and denter and scurvy and you go up to Captain Clark you say Oh Captain Clark I don’t feel very good and so he says to you here take a Dr Rush’s pill boy those poor guys they must have pooped all the way up to Missouri and all the way back down huh un usual positiveness is often a sign of disease and when you feel it take one or two of the pills where salt cannot be had with your meat steap it a day or two in common line difficult prizes eat sparingly more safe to your health wash your feet with Spirit when chilled and molasses with your drinks shoes without heels and lay down when you’re tired I cataloged all the medicines here and um listed all of the them by name and how much they took we still use a lot of these medicines today and take a look there’s 50 dozen of Dr Rush’s pills for five bucks $969 for 29 people for 2 and a half years today if you got sick I gave you an antibiotic augmenting for 10 days $120 one person 10 days that’s inflation medicines up there say four penis Duo and I had gone through each one of these to figure out what they utilized them for while they had a it it looks like a pen syringe and the men had pretty rampant veneral disease and they would insert this pen and put inject mercury in there for the STDs and the men in the crowd always go ooh and the women look at him and I don’t feel sorry for you so here you go you’re men on the Lewis and Clark Trail you got to gather all this information and you’re going up this River it’s hot you leave at 5: every morning you’re only eating 9 to 10 pounds of meat a day with no you know no fruits and vegetables You Got Scurvy boils on your skin because you don’t have the proper vitamins and you enter North Dakota in sad pitiful poor shape and you meet a well-known group of people the banda hiza and Aika two Mandan villag and three HDs of villages each while one had about 4 or 6,000 people no flushing toilets and matrial lineal primarily and in North Dakota it’s located at these sites here a little bit south of our reservation and incidentally you know um small pox hit in 1837 after Lewis and Clark left the villages were burned down to the ground Chief forbears Jed July 30th 1837 from small pox our casino and our Bridge our name in his honor and they traveled further up to like a fishook village which pox then infested them and then eventually up to Alba woods and Independence and then the Garrison diversion project in the ‘ 50s flooded us out and here we are today this is a beautiful picture that I’m sure you can’t see but George Catlin painted Us in 1833 3234 and this is a picture of sakuya’s Village and how grateful we are for the picture to see what we look like how we lived how we dressed and the Earth lodges were very well constructed and an architectural genius owned by the women the land was owned by her the children were owned by her she took their they took her last name and she owned the crop and there was lots of friendly exchange between them and you know just to say hello to one another you know there was mandan’s language hiza there was Rika there was Shi there was French there was English so just to say hello had to be a very difficult process to do and black moccasin 30 years later when George Catlin was painting him said please say hello to redhead my friend and they remembered that 30 years later I thought that was very interesting and this is Chief forbears he was just a boy when Lis and Clark came and white coyote was one of the principal Chiefs at the time and there was again like I said lots of friendly exchange and here’s a picture of the replica of the fort down in um Stanton Washburn area and I looked at that and I thought wow that’s a big tall fence that uh private Thomas Howard had to jump in the earth Lodge they’re very well constructed and um were very famous for these architectural Geniuses designed by the women and there was a child that had an absis on his back that a mother um took to men leis and Clark who made a scalpel amputated his toes the mother was so grateful she carried a 100 pound of corn on her back to thank him and that soup was turned into corn soup vitamins and minerals rich in many many uh sources and so there was lots of friendly exchanges uh that went on there including the assistant of sakaka delivering her child and when they left when they entered North Dakota they were pitifully poor health scurvy boils and when they left they left in a perfect state of health according to this document he wrote and for the sake of time I’m going to end my PowerPoint with um not only plants did we share and uh other contribution of sweats and the corn but also um The Daily bathing and medicinal herbs and plants that we utilize that were so fascinating that led the door open for besides bleeding people to um utilize the plants and herbs that we use today and I think that’s how they survived and I’ll end it with this they made an 8,000 M Journey it was more than a well stocked Medicine Chest it was it’s my personal opinion it was their devoted attention to healthc care that contributed most to the success and their diplomatic Su success is how they devoted health care and attention to the Indian people as well 200 years ago Lewis and Clark arrived here and met our ancestors here in North Dakota and they met the well-known group of people the Mandan the hza and the rarra whose way of life would be recorded by many and they shared their ideas their Foods their medicines and knowledge freely with the core in a spirit of cooperation peace and mutual productivity if two cultures can do that 200 years ago most certainly we can do it once again today my name is good medicine thank you very much for listening to me and thank our ancestors for I’m sure they are all with us today and I’ll conclude my presentation with we proceeded on thank you very much thank you Dr mayor thank you very much ently we have run out of time for Dr mayor but to let her and and mic’s still on all right to allow you to H answer your questions that I’m sure you have for Dr mayor we will set her table up outside of our Tena many voices to the left there and she can have a more of a one-on-one conversation with you all if you have further questions about the mesons of the Expedition or um or further in her program of for PowerPoint coming up next we have uh gentleman Fred Baker who’s going to be talking about Mand and had Mandan Hada culture in history and they’ll be here in about 10 minutes so please allow us to uh to gather Dr mayor’s stuff and bring it outside e

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]]> Clark: September 12, 1806 https://lewisandclarkresearch.org/journal/clark-september-12-1806/ Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:37:58 +0000 https://research.lewisandclarktrust.org/journal/clark-september-12-1806/ Friday 12th of September 1806 a thick fog a litile before day which blew off at day light. a heavy Dew this morning. we Set out at Sunrise the usial…

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]]> Friday 12th of September 1806 a thick fog a litile before day which blew
off at day light. a heavy Dew this morning. we Set out at Sunrise the
usial hour and proceeded on very well about 7 miles met 2 perogues from
St. Louis one contained the property of Mr. Choteau bound to the panias on
River Platt, the other going up trapping as high as the Mahars. here we
met one of the french men who had accompanied us as high as the Mandans he
informed us that Mr. McClellen was a fiew miles below the wind blew a head
Soon after we pased those perogues, we Saw a man on Shore who informed us
that he was one of Mr. McClellens party and that he was a Short distance
below, we took this man on board and proceeded on and Met Mr. McClellin at
the St. Michl. Prarie we came too here we found Mr. Jo. Gravelin the
Ricaras enterpreter whome we had Sent down with a Ricaras Chief in the
Spring of 1805 and old Mr. Durion the Sieux enterpreter, we examined the
instructions of those interpreters and found that Gravelin was ordered to
the Ricaras with a Speach from the president of the U. States to that
nation and some presents which had been given the Ricara Cheif who had
visited the U. States and unfortunately died at the City of Washington, he
was instructed to teach the Ricaras agriculture & make every enquirey
after Capt Lewis my self and the party Mr. Durion was enstructed to
accompany Gravelin and through his influence pass him with his presents
& by the tetons bands of Sieux, and to provale on Some of the
Principal chiefs of those bands not exceeding six to Visit the Seat of the
Government next Spring he was also enstructed to make every enquirey after
us. we made Some Small addition to his instructions by extending the
number of Chiefs to 10 or 12 or 3 from each band including the Yanktons
&c. Mr. McClellin receved us very politely, and gave us all the news
and occurrences which had taken place in the Illinois within his knowledge
the evening proveing to be wet and Cloudy we Concluded to continue all
night, we despatched the two Canoes a head to hunt with 5 hunters in them

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