SINCE WHITE MEN CAME
_How We Got Potatoes and Other Vegetables_
The government has changed our old way of cultivating corn and our other
vegetables, and has brought us seeds of many new vegetables and grains,
and taught us their use. We Hidatsas and our friends, the Mandans, have
also been removed from our village at Like-a-fishhook bend, and made to
take our land in allotments; so that our old agriculture has in a measure
fallen into disuse.
I was thirty-three years old when the government first plowed up fields
for us; two big fields were broken, one between the village and the
agency, and another on the farther side of the agency.
New kinds of seeds were issued to us, oats and wheat; and we were made to
plant them in these newly plowed fields. Another field was plowed for us
down in the bottom land along the Missouri; and here we were taught to
plant potatoes. Each family was given a certain number of rows to plant
and cultivate.
At first we Hidatsas did not like potatoes, because they smelled so
strongly! Then we sometimes dug up our potatoes and took them into our
earth lodges; and when cold weather came, the potatoes were frozen, and
spoiled. For these reasons we did not take much interest in our potatoes,
and often left them in the ground, not bothering to dig them.
Other seeds were issued to us, of watermelons, big squashes, onions,
turnips, and other vegetables. Some of these we tried to eat, but did not
like them very well; even the turnips and big squashes, we thought not so
good as our own squashes and our wild prairie turnips. Moreover, we did
not know how to dry these new vegetables for winter; so we often did not
trouble even to harvest them.
The government was eager to teach the Indians to raise potatoes; and to
get us women to cultivate them, paid as much as two dollars and a half a
day for planting them in the plowed field. I remember I was paid that sum
for planting them. After three or four years, finding the Indians did not
have much taste for potatoes and rather seldom ate them, our agent made
a big cache pit—a root cellar you say it was—and bought our potato crop
of us. After this he would issue seed potatoes to us in the spring, and
in the fall we would sell our crop to him. Thus, handling potatoes each
year, we learned little by little to eat them.
_The New Cultivation_
The government also broke up big fields of prairie ground, and had us
plant corn in them; but these fields on the prairie near the hills I do
not think are so good as our old fields down in the timber lands along
the Missouri. The prairie fields get dry easily and the soil is harder
and more difficult to work.
Then I think our old way of raising corn is better than the new way
taught us by white men. Last year, 1911, our agent held an agricultural
fair on this reservation; and we Indians competed for prizes for the best
corn. The corn which I sent to the fair took the first prize. I raised
it on new ground; the ground had been plowed, but aside from that, I
cultivated the corn exactly as in old times, with a hoe.
_Iron Kettles_
The first pots, or kettles, of metal that we Hidatsas got were of yellow
tin [brass]; the French and the Crees also traded us kettles made of red
tin [copper].
As long as we could get our native clay pots, we of my father’s family
did not use metal pots much, because the metal made the food taste. When
I was a little girl, if any of us went to visit another family, and they
gave us food cooked in an iron pot, we knew it at once because we could
taste and smell the iron in the food.
I have said that we began cooking food in an iron kettle in my father’s
family when I was about eighteen years old; but the great iron kettle
that lies in Goodbird’s yard was given us by an Arikara woman before I
was born.