168 - Knife River Indian Villages
Interior of an earth lodge at Knife River Indian Villages, featuring a central fire pit, animal-hide wall decorations, and sunlight streaming through a smoke hole in the log roof.
Dosha! My name is Maxidiwiac. I was born in an earth lodge by the mouth of the Knife River three years after the smallpox winter of 1837. My father, Small Ankle, named me Maxidiwiac or Buffalo-Bird Woman. While I don’t know why my father chose this name, we believed that the spirit of the birds had holy power. The Mandans and my tribe, the Hidatsas, had come years before from the Heart River. They had built the Five Villages as we called them on the banks of the Knife River near the place where it enters the Missouri.
Our tribes recognize kin differently than the white man. Instead of family names, each child is born into a clan based on the mother’s ancestral line. An Indian calls all members of the mother’s clan brother and sister while the members of the fathers clan are called the clan fathers and clan aunts. Members of the clan were bound to help each other in need, and we believed that the gods would punish us if we didn’t.
Hidatsa children played many games, from war and athletic sports for the boys to games of skill and housekeeping for the girls. As the boys grew up, they learned to hunt and defend enemy attacks. The girls helped their mothers with daily chores and gardening. They learned at a young age that their roles in life were different.
I am one of the last Hidatsas to have lived in the style of the old ways. My people became schooled in the new ways of the white man's society. My son and his children farmed and ranched on the reservation land above the river valley. Sometimes I come here to sit, looking out on the big Missouri near my birthplace. In the shadows, I can still see the Indian Villages with smoke curling upward from the lodges, and in the river's roar I hear the yells of the warriors and the laughter of little children.
Today the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara live on the Fort Berthold Reservation as the Three Affiliated Tribes. This is where I spent the majority of my adulthood while maintaining the traditional lifestyle of the Hidatsa to ensure the old ways would not be lost.
Then content from this script was formulated through the actual verbal responses of Buffalo Bird Woman, written by Gilbert Wilson in the early 1900s.