Mandan Archives - Lewis & Clark Research Database

Corps of Discovery II: 200 Years to the Future

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:27:42 +0000

Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa tribal member and National Park Service superintendent, outlines the vision and goals of the Corps of Discovery II commemoration, the federal initiative to mark the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial from 2003 to 2006. The article describes the program’s deliberate effort to include Native American voices and perspectives alongside the traditional exploration narrative, recognizing that the expedition’s story looks fundamentally different from indigenous viewpoints. Baker discusses the Tent of Many Voices program, which provided a forum for tribal representatives, historians, and community members to share their perspectives at signature events along the trail. The article addresses the tensions inherent in commemorating an expedition that served as the vanguard of territorial dispossession for Native peoples, and argues that honest acknowledgment of this history, rather than one-sided celebration, is essential for genuine understanding.

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The Mandan and Hidatsa on the Upper Missouri: An Archaeological and Historical Analysis

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:27:40 +0000

Wood and Thiessen present an interdisciplinary analysis of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages near the confluence of the Knife and Missouri Rivers in present-day North Dakota, where the Lewis and Clark Expedition spent the winter of 1804-1805. The article combines archaeological evidence from village sites with historical documentation from the expedition journals and other sources to reconstruct the social, economic, and political organization of these communities. The authors examine the earth-lodge villages’ layout and construction, agricultural practices centered on corn, beans, and squash, and the complex intertribal trade network that made the Mandan-Hidatsa villages the commercial hub of the northern Great Plains. The article discusses the devastating impact of the 1781 smallpox epidemic that had reduced the Mandan from multiple large villages to just two by the time of Lewis and Clark’s arrival, and foreshadows the catastrophic 1837 epidemic that would nearly destroy the Mandan as a people.

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Tent of Many Voices: 08170402T

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:08 +0000

to you our next speaker uh Miss beev Hines of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation she is going to talk to us today about Chicago web so please join me and help me helping welcome be to the stage today I guess we’re all here and ready to go and we hope we don’t have too much traffic on the interstate and too many of them running Jake breaks I don’t want to break your hearts but I’m going to uh cut down some of the myths of saga Saka sakaka Saga and twice Clark called her Janie those of us in Iowa learned sakaa years and years ago the north dakotans say sakaka but not the Mandan Hada tribes some of you had your exposure to Sago waya from Waldo’s novel one of my friends said oh it was such a beautiful story about her that big thick book and I said the only part that was accurate was the start of each chapter where she quoted from the journals s way I didn’t speak English s way I didn’t have an affair with Captain Clark I’m taking all the fun it aren’t I let Legends and myths Die Hard and some of the myths have been that there was a second Saga that lived until she was close to 100 and then died and is buried on the Wind River Reservation but those of us who are Lewis and Clark people think differently this one could almost start like a fairy tale once upon a time there lived some stories in history should always start that way as far as I’m concerned but Saga was quite a young woman the only thing now is that the M Dan and the Shoni still don’t agree on how to pronounce her name you’re more apt from the Mandan Villages and amasa to hear Saga the shones will sometimes say Saga she may not even have been named when she grew up in the Shi tribe regardless of spellings or pronunciation she’s quite a remarkable young woman she has more statues 23 than I’m aware of that have been made her than any woman in American history she’s got all kinds of paintings she’s got mountains she’s got Rivers she’s got just about anything you can think of named in her honor many books about her and most of them aren’t accurate kind of hard to go back and get into the Indian history and and have the history come up with what she want according to the journal she was Lioni one of the snake tribe the salmon eaters her people were a semi nomadic tribe they were called the aaduki centered around today’s Continental Divide through the area of Idaho the lmh High River Val she was probably born in what’s now the tendoy area what we know is documented about where she was taken in Lewis’s journals for July um August of 1805 and Lewis wrote that when she was about 12 years of age approximately 1800 she was taken prisoner near the Three Forks Montana area by the Hada Indians they were a raing part the shonis did not have guns they had great horses but they didn’t have guns and the minaries would come in adasa minari group would come in the men would be off Hunting they would not take women they would not take old men they would not take the young boys they took the young women to be their slave early life as a child had been like well they were semi-nomadic as I said in the summer they went to the mountain rivers to fish for salmon in the fall they crossed the mountains to the Eastern PLS to hunt for buffalo in the spring they went to their C planes for the C rout she learned as soon as she could walk to take her little digging stick so by the time she was three she had a little digging stick and she learned how to dig for rots she learned which berries were edible which of the ground vegetables that they could find were edible she learned how to set up a tear down a t she learned how to pack for whenever they would travel to hunt or anything have to remember the men did the hunting and the killing and then they left the cutting up and all the rest of the work to the women small pox had already been through the area of the shies they were a weakened tribe they got their horses from the southwest from the Spanish and as I said they had marvelous horses just no guns the pl’s Indians really made the raids and took their toll on them when she was taken she was taken back to the m then area Village the area they headed east but they did did not go by the way that Lewis and Clark came West later they took the southerly route they went in along following the Yellowstone until a Yellowstone f up with the Missour so one thing I’m going to tell you is she was not a guide she was not a guide she was not a guide she did not know where she was going she did not point out to them take this route she wasn’t a guide her role key role was As an interpreter for the shonis a woman with a baby meant usually that it was not a war party and she helped them find food but when you see Sago way pointing no she did not know where she was going hate to tell you that imagine being a 12-year-old being taken by a tribe going across several hundred miles and going to live in another tribe where you didn’t know the language if they asked you your name you couldn’t even tell them your name because you didn’t know what they asked so we don’t know if Sako was her name in the shonis or not the shonis frequently did not give their children a name until there had been some major occurrence in their life so she may not have been had a name so today the Shon and the Man Dan still argue does saga mean bird woman or does it mean b boat launcher did she have a name back then but she went with this tribe to become a slave now being nomadic and going there not knowing the language and going into a tribe that planted pumpkins corn tobacco she had to learn to farm this is a totally alien world to this young woman they raised sunflowers beans corn squash and so the digging stick that she had learned to dig for things with became a digging stick like they used to plant things Amy moss and I had a long two hours in the airport one time and she said oh we didn’t take slaves hello yes you did the Indian tribes almost all of them took slaves I haven’t been able to ask any of our our uh deep historians who get into genealogy and lineage and stuff if this was a good way to bring in fresh blood to a tribe so that you didn’t have a lot of inbreeding you would steal from another tribe and bring them in and eventually you took them into their family and then married she was with them about 3 to four years before shano came along sharino had come to the Hada Villages as a Trapper and trater he spoke French he spoke Hada some say he won her in a card game the captains tell us in a in a journal that he purchased her now when you look at purchasing do you think as we do with some other tribes in the country and in the world a bride price he already had one Shoni wife with a small child he was probably close to three times her age thing I like about sharino is he kept marrying very young Indian women even when he was 80 he took another 15year old but he took her as his bride he worked As an interpreter when LS and Clark came he was an interpreter for them we’re told he was short dark loud rough and was always it seemed like in trouble and kind of chickening out on things during the Expedition what they said was a French man by name Shabana who speaks the big Bell the gr language visits us he wanted to hire and informed us his two SARS were snake shy Indians we engage him to go with us and take one of his wives to interpret the snake language no one says it in the journals nor in much of what I have read over the years as to why they picked Sak waya my own feeling is if wife number one had a 2-year-old and you’re going to take a Shon wife to interpret you’re going to take the one that’s got a baby in a cradle board not a 2-year-old that’s going to run around Camp when you look at how they had to interpret and the way that language is very interesting private leish who was half Onan and half French spoke French and did a lot of the interpreting so the captains would speak to him in English he would speak in French to shano shano would speak Hada Justa then when he got out to the show you had to add one more layer so trying to interpret and go back and forth could be an all day thing that winter at the camp at Fort Mandan they moved sharo and Sago waya into the fort itself so Sago waya was away from any of her women friends and the women who would help her with her pregnancy and on February 11th we are told that she was in labor with the baby painful violent and one of the Frenchman by the name of your said he had heard if you took a rattlesnake rattle and crushed it and put it in water and gave it to the woman she would deliver quickly well I’ve had three kids and I think if you threaten me with rattlesnake rattle I might deliver quickly also Clark had the rattlesnake rattle just s gave it to her they say in the journal she delivered 10 minutes later Captain Lewis was enough of a scientist to say he would have to see that many more times before he would believe in the efficacy of it so my nursing background said okay what is in rattlesnake rattle is there something like kosin like we use today to induce labor uh-uh my medical friends say oh B keratin the same stuff that’s in your fingernails it’s what’s in a rattle snake rattle I thought okay placebo effect you tell somebody long enough strong enough that this is going to work maybe it does she delivered on April 11th or February 11th of 1805 and on April 7th of 1805 the kbo went back Downstream 30 men of the Expedition chano Saga and the baby started West 55 days old baby in a cradle board a nursing mother 16 years 17 years old with the original disposable diapers a piece of leather filled with Cattail fluff or Marsh Grass at least it was by greatable the first time that they mention in the journals after leaving on the 7 that she did something for them was she was walking on shore on April 11th she found a pile of wood and she knew that the mice would hide things under the wood so she dug in under there and lo and behold wild are the chokes food for dinner they walked a lot on the shore not always in the boats and she would find The Rook vegetables the things that they could eat she gathered R and all the rest of the way with them now squa was not a derogatory word back then squa when used in context meant the wife of another man back East the Algonquin called the white men’s wives squa and it didn’t have a derogatory connotation it just meant you were the wife of another man on May 14th the white perose starts to tip they’re in the water of the Missour the wind comes up it starts to swamp sh no panics he doesn’t do a thinging the captains were walking on Shore cruzat blind in one eye and not seeing any the other the good River Boatman was at the runner he threatened shano to straighten things up help write the boat sh froze in the meantime Sago waya with the baby on her back is reaching in into the water picking up journals picking up boxes picking up papers and things as they float out everything they needed that was washing overboard she got most of it back cruzat got them to safety he threatened to shoot Charo if he didn’t Shape Up mistake was he didn’t do it LS wrote in the journal that she had the equal fortitude and resolution with any person on board at the time of the accident he praised her June 10th they are now in a camp near the Great Falls they have camped because they are trying to figure out where Falls what’s going with the river they’re trying to get the celestial navigation find out what they’re doing and Saga becomes very ill high fever intestinal pains Medicine of the time one of the things you did was to bleed a patient patient you know they gave you an a medic to make you vomit they gave you a diuretic to make the urine flow they gave you a perg up to clean out the bowels and then they would bleed you and in this case Clark bed her for 4 days she got worse Clark BL her again what the men say in the journals he BL her twice leis was on a side trip Clark wrote every day about her illness and she kept getting worse and she ran a high fever and this is the one place something happened in the trip that might have made a difference had she died on June 14th Clark wrote her case somewhat dangerous he had her swallow some bark Peruvian the powdered Peruvian bark came from the syona tree gave us our quinine but it was also the aspirin of the B so he gave her a dose of that by mouth and and he also put a pus of it on her abdomen she became worse he wrote she got into a depression somewhat dangerous June 15th she refused to take her medicine and so they Clark said to shano I want you to help me I don’t think shano really cared and Clark wrote that finally got her to take some but he wasn’t concerned about her health Clark said if she Di it will be the fall of her husband as I am now convinced leis F away he came back and by the time he came back to Camp her arms and her hands were twitching her pulse was very weak leis wrote found the Indian woman extremely ill and much reduced by her indisposition pulse weak and irregular he gave her two doses of farts and he finally gave her some Lum opium mixed with alcohol or water now that will make change in your pulse and it did help there is a sulver spring not far from there it’s called Sago waya Springs and Le sent the men for some of the sulfur water and he had her continue to drink the sulfur water for a number of days we don’t know if there was an electrolyte imbalance but they tested the water today and they say no there’s nothing in it that really would have cured her but a nursing mother what would have happened if she died good question 4month old baby would the men have chewed food and then spit it back out for the baby to eat you have to look at this and you think that could have been a catastrophe it could have been a catastrophe captains recorded every day of her condition took about 10 days for her to get better now what did they think that she had today the doctors say possibly post cartum pelvic inflam atory disease she probably had had diarrhea because theal diseases were among ands we look at that and we’d say okay do we want to tap it up to a child bed fever the Sago waya that the ls and Clark believe was the true Sago waya died in 1812 at Fort Emanuel 4 months after giving birth to a girl lazette and the fort settler whose name was wrote that the wife of shano who went with ls and Clark died today of putrid fever very much what she had 4 months after giving birth to baby pm to John Baptist they did the journey around the falls it took them three plus weeks to get around the falls and then on the 29th of June there is a flash FL there is this heavy rain Clark sharo sag Lea and the baby are in kind of a valley a gully and this flood comes running through now here’s where sharo panics again he scrambling to get up to get to High Ground trying not too hard to pull her Clark is below trying to shove her up before the water gets more than waste deep on him they managed to get to the top shelf of this area before anything happened to all of them but they lost the Cradle board they lost all of the baby’s clothes sharino lost his gun that rainstorm was so heavy and so bad that they had hail Stones between 1 in and 7 in in diameter were told in the journals that the men were beaten and blooded by those hail stones 24th of July now they’re seeing the Rocky Mountains I love the captains one of those things that you realize that at the time they thought that the country was balanced there’s Appalachians on the East Coast not too high you’re going to get to the West Coast you’re going to find something that matches I would love to have been a little mouse because I’m told the captains would not have use Square words but I want to know what they said when they started seeing the Rockies and then when they got out to the shies and all they saw was row after row after Row the Indians had told them they would see shining mountains snow on them but they didn’t tell them how much and I would love to have heard what they said we are now to the area where Sago waya is beginning to recognize landmarks getting out near the Three Forks area this is the land of my people and on August 14th shano hit Sago a and Clark reprimanded him for it now this is one of the thing that Shon tribes and her great great great grand niece Rosanne ninon says please always talk about the violence because there was frequently physical violence in these families Clark sto The Cho I know August 17th they are in the area of the shonis now and Sago waya sees a woman in the distance she said through sharo and such that she and a friend were captured by enemy Warriors her friend escaped and made her way home and the woman that she met was the friend her fingers in her mouth and she dances she is overjoyed to see this young woman when it came time for the meeting with the chieftain a woman is not normally an Indian woman is not normally in a circle with The Chieftains and when you are meeting with strangers if Saga was brought in to interpret she would come in with her head down she would keep her head down until she was to speak and this is where you go English to French to Vasa to show Shy and back and this is when Hollywood couldn’t have done it any better Chief kwe was her brother now we’re not sure if it was blood brother or Clan brother but it was her brother and it made it much easier to go and get the horses now the custom of the show time was that she had been promised to a young man when she was a child they asked her to stay with the shies this young man though did not want her for now he had two wives and children and she had another husband and she had a child by him so he didn’t want her so there was no reason for her to stay with him one of the things that came up was on the 25th of August kight’s people had been starving the members of the Expedition hadn’t had a lot to eat beforehand and though he had promised horses Kam was going to take his people to go on a buffalo hunt because they were starving and here is where shano is in trouble again because Saga overhears her brother saying that they are going to go on a buffalo hunt which wouldn’t let no horses for LS and Clark she tells shano and shano does not tell Captain Lewis at first not till later in the day the captains did though hold Choate to his promise of horses so on the 29th of August they got their horses and their mules even got a horse for Chicago whale through the bitter Roots starving I’ve often wondered how a nursing mother managed with the food supply that they had to keep enough milk for a young child but she apparently was given enough and managed to do that this is an area where they were Clark recognized her usefulness the wife of shano interpreter we find reconciles all the Indians as to our friendly intentions a woman with a party of men is a token of peace they recognized that through the mountains out to the coast there were a couple of times during the Expedition I would love to have been with them I would love to have watched all these men carting water to pour down a hole to get a prairie dog the other thing I would love to have seen when you read the journals is when the men do the Rapids of the Snake River and the Indians are watching and I’m wondering if the Indians are thinking those crazy white men do they know what they’re going to do but they got to the coast November 24th they are going going to take a vote for where to over winter York got a vote he voted for Overlook like 11 of the other men so that they could see what was going sakado WEA first woman to vote the Native American voted kotas and in the journals this is one of the places that CL called her Janie Janie voted poas root V vegetabl WAP where there is food has to be the practicality of a woman on the 30th of November Sago way had been hoarding flour to bake something for young pong she had gotten wet and it had started to sour so she baked bread and gave some to Captain Clark he said it was had not had bread for months so it was a treat and I say okay did she start the sourdough bread thing because that was Sour Dough Bread by the time she used the wet sour flour when they had the camp at Fort pla was the first time that cicago waya sharo and the baby had a room of their own all the journey traveling west they had used the large leather tent stayed with Captain leis Captain Clark George Jer the other interpreter shanoa and baby pal they had shared T all out one of the interesting things on this was from November 4th to March 23rd there were only 12 days it did not rain on the Oregon coast and only six of those days did the sunshine kind of a wet miserable winter Captain Clark’s note that they did Christmas gift exchanges on December 25th you know there’s nothing like a Christmas dinner of rotted elk meat they exchanged some handkerchiefs one of the men made a pair of moccasins for clar but Sak waya gave Captain Clark 24 weasel Tales how do you know what weasel Tales are when they turn white Herman she had brought them from the Shon when she was there with her Tri now I’m not saying she didn’t think a great deal of it because I think she did and he probably treated her better than Captain Lewis did but she gave him 24 white weasel taals that made marvelous decorations this woman had the captains take her belt of blue beads away from her to buy otter skin cake the Indians on the were ferocious Traders they’ve been trading with all the sailors for years and the other people coming through and they would hold you up for highway robbery and the captains in their journals did not speak too highly sometimes of them but she had lost her belt of blue beads for trade for that on January 6th they hear about the huge quailes over on the beach and sag waya wants to go see it she has come all way with the men she’s done everything the men have done and she wants to go see the big fish and what I would love to know is how did she make known through sharbono without stamping her feet to the captains that she wanted to go see that big fish she got to go it was a 3-day trip carting the baby in his in the Cradle Now by then he’s about 10 months old had to climb this one area to get over to where this big fish was and by the time they got there it was bones most of the glubber and meat had been taken but she was allowed to go she had gotten she wanted to see the ocean and she wanted to see the big fish they started back in March by the time in April the expedition was forced to pay very high prices for horses sharo took two of her leather dresses away from her to trade for a horse he also gave up one of his shirts but it wasn’t like taking her dresses again didn’t ask just took it in May baby pom became very ill high fever slowen at the back of his head and his neck those of us with gray hair probably remember the words of mastoid and the infections that we used to get before the days of antibiotics they said that he was cutting teeth and he had the LAX that means he’s cutting teeth and he’s got Di so what did they give him laxative he was the only one in the whole trip who got an enema and then the white man had the audacity to write but the child felt better they used a pus of hot onions as hot as he could stand they used a pus of beeswax pie and Pitch as warm as could be applied he did survive it it’s amazing when you look back at this and think of all things that happened to the men and everybody else we don’t have immune systems like that today no way they had them they put up with the bad water the half rotted meat of course then when they got disent they got Dr Rush’s Thunderbolts to clean them out and I think sometimes that may have been a help instead of all that the one time coming home that she was a guide the men had split Clark was going to go to the yellow store leis was going to go up here what is now cut back Montana area and she told Clark through interpreter that there was a pass in the mountains that her people took and if he went that particular way it would shorten his trip he could make it through there easier today we know it as Boseman pass and it is the one time in the journal that he calls her my pilot that is the one time yes she knew where she could tell them to go I don’t know if she pointed there but most of the time no she wasn’t a guy on August 17th 1806 sharino and the family left the Expedition sho got $533 he got the tent he got a horse one what’s K again Sil Sil no pay Clark expected I think to make it up to her later because the ricra village on August 21st he did write a letter back to sharino saying that he did not have it in his power at that time to reward her as she should be Clark asked to take the baby back to St Louis with him and educated not live with him but educate him and Saka said no he was not weaned yet he was 19 months old later Sago waya visit through this area down to Missour was in 1810 and she and Cho went to St Louis Cho tried to be a farmer he was given some land sold it back to to Clark went back up the River in 1811 racken Ridge and his journal had written that in 1811 shano and his Indian wife who had gone with ls at Clark to the coast were there on the boat that was going back up the river and that she liked the flight which made me think she was trying to dress as the white people did but her she was in ill health and they on their way back December 12th of 1812 Fort Manuel letting WR this evening the wife of sharino a snake squa died of a future feater she was a good and the best woman of the fort age about 25 years she left a fine infant girl lazette what sagaa did was fantastic feat accompanying the man doing everything that they did except the hunting but she was looking for Soldier food to coast and back it’s like that old saying you know Fred St was a marvelous dancer The Ginger Rogers did everything he did only backwards and then high heels and long dress well Sago waya did it in her moccasins and with a baby on her back a nursing mother Louis said she was happy to Lucky Clark called her uncomplaining and such a trait wouldn’t have been gotten such a compliment if it weren’t true ly took baby Lizette and another young boy down to St Louis arrived in 1813 applied to the court in August for appointment as a guardian for lazette as well as for a Tucson a boy about 10 years old in the court records his name has been crossed out and William Clark’s name has been sub ited so William Clark did the educating of John Baptist sharino and loette the children were educated in St Louis I love the things that John Baptiste we don’t know what happened to lazette we know that lazette there was a lazette carono at 24 there was a marriage license but we have not been able to follow anything beyond that we know that John Baptist could speak English French and hadassa was sent to school learn Greek and Latin went to Germany what is now Germany with Duke Paul of whartonberg can you see them with this young Indian warrior throwing a tomahawk in the Palaces of Europe for a few years and learned to speak German Italian and some Spanish and then came back to this country and over educated indan who then went to lead groups out into the West Clark’s ledgers were found in 1936 he had in the 1820s started keeping track of who was alive and who was dead of the Expedition between 1825 and 1828 the woman who wrote about the Saga waya the one pero the one who never said she was sagaa died before these were published but in his Ledger he had written 182 s dead and then below it SE way off dead when you look at the ways that the name was spelled in the journals about 23 different ways all total and D when he did the journals put in a j because he couldn’t read their G’s so you have sakaia Saka s and you keep going on and I still like Jamie whatever you end up calling her she was a marvelous young woman a feet I don’t know that any of the girls today would walk across the country in their moccasins with a baby on their back and do the things that they did whatever you do she’s a marvelous young woman she was not a guy but we are very proud and recognized that Lewis and Clark would not have survived or made the journey without the help of the Indians that they discovered along the way that they met up with from the Odo Missoura who gave them watermelons when they met down near what is now Fort Atkinson to the man B van where they exchanged metal and blacksmithing for corn sexual favors of veneral disease too to the show shies that gave them horses to the N Pur who rescued them after the Bitters and W said do not kill them this aged woman he said I have been rescued by white men and brought to my people do them no harm they never would have made it without the na of Americans and wouldn’t have made it without this young woman Saka the Shon young woman interpret interpret thank you I’ll take questions if you have any about five minutes left we can take questions any questions there are a few very good books out there’s a couple on Sago there’s a little pamphlet The sharo Family Portrait and Irving Anderson wrote that it’s ailable at our interpreter Center one of the ones I really like is um Chicago way up by Frank tasma and then Harold P Howard did both versions at the very end of the book he wrote the second one I have up here on the table there’s a book list of good accurate lisis and Clark books starting with inexpensive paperbacks and going on to more expensive ones and then there’s a sheet that says happy birthday captains Lewis and Clark it tells about their birthdays August 1st was Clark’s birthday August 18th was Lewis’s they had their best birthdays of all three years when they were along this stretch of the river so pick one of those up read how they celebrated here and read what happened the other two years on the trail and thank you

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Tent of Many Voices: 07230601

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:00 +0000

glad to have you with us this is the tent of many voices and it is part of a traveling exhibit that has been following the Lewis and Clark Trail since January of 2003 started in monachello the place of Jefferson’s dream went on across through the eastern states then from St Louis to the Mandan villages in ‘ 04 in ‘ 05 from the Mandan Villages all the way to the Pacific Ocean and now here we are in ‘ 06 and we’re doing the return Journey just as and Clark did 200 years ago and we’re delighted to be here at pompy’s Pillar thank you all very much for inviting us here and thank you all for coming out to visit with us and to see all the festivities that are going on here this is a commemoration of that event 200 years ago Lewis and Clark crossed the continent and they could not have done it alone if they if it had just been Lewis and Clark it would have been another of those failed expeditions to the West so with that in mind I’d like you to remember the people who assisted Lewis and Clark on their Journey the Native Americans gave them food they gave them directions and they often helped them with their transportation needs so with that I’d like to introduce you to our next speaker today we have with us Conrad fiser who is a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe he is also the tribal historic preservation officer and an educator at Chief Dull Knife College he’s going to be talking about Northern Cheyenne history culture so let’s please make him welcome thank you very much first of all I’d like to thank uh Mary Ellen and and the rest of the folks for inviting me over here to be part of this signature event Clark on the Yellowstone as I was leaving this morning I wasn’t sure exactly how long it was going to take to get here and as I was about 20 mil away I noticed that time was getting a little short so I thought to myself well I said if I’m late I’m going to have to come up with something for for being late and I thought about the about Indian time and how Indian time usually means you’re either 15 20 minutes early or 15 or 20 minutes late so fortunately uh I didn’t have to use that but uh that did cross my mind real real quick I needed to use some excuse this is actually the first time I’ve been here and uh it’s such a wonderful site to see all the folks that are gathered here as part of this signature event I know there’s a lot of folks from out of town that are also part of it and many different tribes when I had gotten a call to do the presentation I wasn’t exactly sure what this would entail and I think it’s mostly based on the audience and wanting to uh at least tie something into the Lewis and Clark event I guess I should first start off and say that uh the Cheyenne people had some kind contact with the the uh explorers that came from St Louis limited contact over near the uh present day border of North Dakota and South Dakota along the Missouri River however it was very very short uh one of our some of the leaders at the time had uh refused or rejected the medal that was was offered by Lewis and Clark and this was based on the prophet sweet medicine who said that uh um and he was a prophet that gave us our spiritual ceremonial ways the structure the political structure of the of the cheyen people in one of his prophecies he mentioned that someday we will encounter this Strang looking man with hair on his face and that he will bring with him an animal with a long man a strange animal and that we were not to be part of uh his enticements because if we do and he would also bring a strange animal with split hooves and the Animals meat would be sweet and that we would take a liking to this meat and then we would be under the uh opes of this strange man um and so that was part of the and there were a number of other um prophecies that he that he uh gave to the cheyen people but as far as the Louis and Clark this was something that sort of tied into to the coming of the European into what we considered our homeland the Black Hills area it was sort of uh strange that some of the prophecies that he predicted uh have come true in many way ways we’ become more dependent on uh the Western way of life today we love beef beef is good uh we’re in the process of revitalizing our buffalo program and uh I think there’s a trend toward ethnicity in terms of living at least partially some of the old ways just a brief history about Lewis and Clark first of all I’d like to give you a little background on the Cheyenne people the origin of the Cheyenne people uh their migration just to give you a little background about who we are where we came from where we went what our role was in the shaping of the Western Plains Wars many of you may or may not know that the Cheyenne were involved in many battles with the US government uh during the 1800s and we sort of shaped the plain’s Indian uh history along with several other tribes one of the last tribes to to uh throw in the tow so to speak uh many of you know the battle of the Little Big Horn or as we call it where long hair was wiped away I’ll be talking a little bit more about it here uh later just like to thank everybody for being here here and me being part of this uh my Indian name is Travoy been passed down from many generations with the Cheyenne and with lot of tribes the people the faces may come and go but the names are always carried down in a lineal sense so the name Travoy has been with our family for many generations normally those are those names are inherited um through your lineal descent the Northern Cheyenne are part of the Algonquian speaking language family the alangan speakers include uh the Ottawa the Mohan the kapoo the poaty the cre the black feet and our closest family or the closest language family would be the arapo uh and this is based us on oral history and also on uh linguists who can trace the languages back to their mother language and if you put all that together our history start in the uh Hudson Bay Area in fact that’s where a lot of lot of tribes have their origin stories the land of many many lakes or Turtle Island and as our oral histories indicate we call this time the ancient time where there was no horses no dogs cold weather we were mostly hunter gatherers didn’t have the bowl and arrow used Spears fished in The Lakes uh and this can be verified through um scientific data and also through our oral histories sometime there was an event that occurred a pressure that moved the Cheyenne Southward in our oral histories it indicates that there was great disease that forced the movement and also famine into the uh Great Lakes area in our oral histories uh it says that we had crossed the great Marsh so great was the marsh that our Scouts were uh afraid to cross this vast Marsh for the fear of being lost and it was uh they used long poles to be able to find their way around and as we know it today it’s on the western part of the Great Lakes area and uh we lived in the close to the Min to the Great Lakes area for a while uh cultivated uh wild rice fished small game Hunters ate a lot of bird um there’s a hill there that is called uh Hill of the skunks and in this area we we uh had an annual skunk hunt and uh so we feasted on skunks every fall I’m not sure if I do that today I’ve never eaten a skunk but uh that’s part of our oral histories I don’t know if we’ve got a skunk Society or not but uh and also um this was the time of the bow and arrow in our histories we call it the time of the bow and arrow so if you look at it from a scientific perspective it’s probably 1,500 2,000 years ago that’s about the time scientists say that the bow and arrow was uh invented here in the northern country little later on we uh moved even further south into the down to the Missouri and where the Minnesota River Cross and by and that was during the 1600s between the 16 hundreds and 1700s we became let me back up just a little bit in the in Minnesota we lived in small Dome shaped huts and uh then by the 16 1700s we started moving Westward lot of pressure from the Eastern tribes uh kind of a trickle effect we became part of the Corn Belt which is the area where you grow a lot of corn and tobacco and beans and squash that sort of thing and at that point we became a sedentary tribe conducive for farming and because of the pressure there we slowly moved our way northward into the dtas all the way up to North Dakota in Southeastern North Dakota is a river called Cheyenne River starts with an S the Sue call it where the Cheyenne plant corn and that’s a documented Palisade or what is commonly known as the beasterfeld site so his in historical times and also in our oral history and also uh from other tribes that was a known Cheyenne uh Fort and uh as we started going Westward we start to see instability of of the climate um at that point we we moved suddenly Southwest we had a lot of pressure from caboy uh they by this time they had acquired the gun whereas we still had the bow and arrow and we have many stories about the defeat by the Asino and the chipas because of of the their ability to acquire the gun before the Cheyenne folks did by the early 1700s we had moved into the Missouri area and at this time we had acquired the horse so we went from a fishing bird gather wild rice cultivators to a to another transition to being farmers and now we were in another transition phase into a horse culture and at this time we also became allies with the araro and had a loveh relationship with Mandan and the groan and of course the feared a cine boy because of their their uh the technology that they had acquired from the fur Traders further up north and it’s about this time in the late 1700s that we start seeing visitors from the west from the north and from the south there was actually uh folks from Mexico that would come up and visit the tribes the the uh the senary tribes the Mandan rarra and Hada and in our oral histories um we have stories about um M the Mexicans coming up north to visit uh the Black Hills area about this time there’s some confusion whether or not not the Cheyenne had actually uh met the the uh non indan non-indians and it was at this time that we discovered our the center of our universe and that would be beb or as we call it NOA this became this is where we we found our political social structure this is where the Prophet sweet medicine uh gave the arrows the sacred bundle of the Cheyenne people we were also in that phase of becoming a horse culture we we were still growing tobacco and corn but we’ plant and then we go out to the Plains and uh acquire food the Buffalo was the primary source of food at this time and it was at this one of these times when the Cheyenne had planted food on another river called the Cheyenne River starting with a CA that uh and they plant this corn and what they did was they’d have these Plum bushes for most of you they’re familiar with Plum bushes they have these thorny Thorns coming out and what they did was they tie the plum bushes together and they’d make a fence to keep out other animals particularly Buffalo and deer and during one of their return trips to harvest the corn they noticed strange Footprints and they weren’t moccasin Footprints these had a strange uh print to them and they they couldn’t figure out who it was but we do know that there was uh uh routes being traveled by by Mexicans and non-indians around the Black Hills area and it was about this time in 1806 I think on Lewis and Clark’s return trip that he offered the medal to the cheyan people and initially it was refused but eventually and the and the the purpose of that was that the cheyen knew that this was uh Bad Medicine based on the the Prophecies of our of sweet medicine so that was that was our uh encounter with Lewis Lewis and Clark the however we did ask him for to teach us how to uh trap Bieber and other pelts we didn’t know the the the the way to trap them to where they could be sold uh commercially and uh we never heard back from him after that so that was kind of our he promised he’d bring back the traps but he he never did come back we’re still waiting for him by the way although we don’t have any more Beaver so the point is moot during this time we went through this transition of being a horse culture called the time of the Buffalo from the from the Palisades in eastern North Dakota to the time we acquired the horse uh Edge just changed the social organization of the cheyen people as with many other tribes number of of advantages of the horse is that uh we didn’t look at the horse initially as being a beast of burden we looked at him as in Practical terms as feeding a lot of families so probably the first several few horses were probably good eaten until we figured figured out that they could also be used for as pack animals and of course as we know the horse has many advantages versus a dog dog can only carry so much uh weight uh movement is fairly slow whereas a horse uh you know you have a many advantages just Superior to to to the uh dog to the canine and uh so it changed dramatically the way we viewed our hunting our Warfare um our trade it became a trade item of value to the to the sedentary tribes further north and this would be the Mandan and Hada and raro um so we sort of found ourselves as being middlemen as we made our way past the Black Hills and further south and the incentive for M moving south by the 18 early 1800s was that the horses uh came out of Mexico so if if you have something of value you want to go to the source and this would be to move further south and but first of all we had to uh we we had to to try to convince some of the ples Indians that were in our way to move further south and that was through Warfare and so the Kwa the pon the kamachi the crow the shishoni were some of the groups that we fought uh during that time um by the 1850s uh we were pretty well established uh all the way down to Oklahoma and New Mexico we covered uh eastern Kansas or uh Western Kansas excuse me western Nebraska all along the Rocky Mountain front in Wyoming here in Southeastern Montana uh Colorado uh and we developed um a political system where we had the Council of 10 major bands there was 10 major band of Cheyenne and you had uh out of that 10 major bands were the 44 so uh and then we had four Omen Chiefs that sort of made up the structure of the of the Cheyenne and this was also the beginning of the if we look at the horse we start to see this phenomenon called the uh counting coup and I think that was evident in many Plains tribes became more of a status uh symbol uh Rank and Prestige and the the idea of course is to touch the enemy without killing it e either with your hand or or with this uh stick the killing of an enemy was secondary but the primary purpose of receiving recognition was to count coup on on the enemy and also the scalping was also uh uh considered a trophy but it was it was also not the primary purpose for for uh getting recognition and so horse stealing became sort of a uh a real special skill and the cheyen were no different than any other tribe in in acquiring these types of skills became very very expert Horsemen this was the beginning of the separation between the northern bands and the southern bands of the Cheyenne people this was also the beginning by 1850s of Westward Movement uh to California and some of the the other places Santa Fe Trail became established uh later the Oregon Trail and much later the Boseman Trail so you start to see these divisions and of course this led to uh many many wars for the Cheyenne people not only were they warn with uh primarily at this point the pan the Kwa the shishoni and the crow uh but also with uh the US government at time as I mentioned we found ourselves in the um mids of a of a this uh Buffalo trade forts bent was established in Southeastern Colorado to trade with Buffalo we still were friendly with the tribes over in in North Dakota we still had these ties with them uh we traded horses for guns and other Western Goods um we we sort of deviated from making arrowheads because by that time metal points were were the choice of use and metal kettles number of other things uh European Beads number of European trade items but the primary Focus was Buffalo and uh by that time there was it was just a a traumatic change for the Cheyenne people not only for the for the uh Cheyenne but also for the animals as well I always uh say that you know there was a number of different diseases that were coming into to the Plains Indians at the time small pox was was one of the uh primary diseases but also with the animals the Buffalo uh acquired brucelosis from the exotic animals coming in from uh uh Europe so it wasn’t only just the and also plants so it wasn’t just the people but it was also the animals and the plants that were being affected uh tremendously really a time of instability because you have uh not only changing to a horse culture but also the of Western Civilization into what we call considered uh Cheyenne territory so just a tremendous change for the Cheyenne people in terms of their political structure their social structure and also the whiskey Traders coming in from Mexico so we kind of took a liken to those to that fire water also not very good for us and as a result of this conflict the gold rush in California westward migration uh Discovery discovery of gold in the Pikes Peak uh and also the Black Hills in the early 1860s uh number of events occurred and that would be the plains Wars um the first Treaty of the Cheyenne was the friendship treaty and that was near the Black Hills and later on there was another other treaties Fort laramy Treaty of 1851 another treaty in 1865 and then uh 1868 Fort laramy Treaty of course none of them none of them ever held they were all broken so but we tried to we tried to be friendly and and make treaties as a result of these conflicts uh we have a whole host of battles that I just want to name a few that may or may not sound familiar uh the fort fetman fight uh in Wyoming occurred in the mid 80s M mid 1800s gentleman was bragging about how he could uh ride through Indian uh country with 80 men um and come out Victorious while he was half right he drove into Indian into a bunch of Indians but he he never made it out so uh so his prediction was half true uh the wagon box fight is another one here Wyoming um and these all occurred in the mid 18 hundreds the Powder River Battle where we start to see the rounding up of Indians that weren’t uh didn’t necessarily want to go to reservations and these are all Cheyenne battles the uh Tongue River Skirmish Battle of the Rose some of you probably know that that was a Prelude to the battle of the Little Big Horn and of course the most famous that everybody knows is the Battle of the old big horn and also after that after that battle was uh Chief D knife P battle uh with the US government and after that was the Wolf Mountain battle um or Battle of B Billy but let me just go back to the fetman we call it 100 in hand because of the fact that uh one of our spiritual leaders had had a vision that 100 soldiers would be handed to the Cheyenne people so the Cheyenne know that battle as 100 in hand the battle of the Rose but we know this battle as where the girl saved her brother during the battle the uh one of the uh Warriors was caught in a crossfire and his horse was shot under him and uh there was in impending um death looming the sister who had actually been part of the the uh battle saw this and she ran the gauntlet to save her brother and came back and this was witnessed by uh a number of Warriors and also by the calvary and so the Cheyenne know this as where the sister saved her brother Battle of the Little Big Horn is what we know as where long hair was wiped away uh and it we call it that because early on uh during the battle of the was in Oklahoma in 196 1866 General George Armstrong kuster had a battle with the Cheyenne he did capture a village but some of his men were killed there and after that battle was over he smoked the pipe with the with our sacred Arrow keeper Keeper of the arrows and after the after the smoke the ashes were wiped on the ground on his boot the sacred Arrow keeper wiped the ashes into the ground and when you smoke a pipe you’ve you’ve committed yourself to to keeping that promise and that sort of sealed his his Destiny according to the Cheyenne that if he ever fought the Cheyenne Again that his his ashes would be wiped into the ground so today the Cheyenne know this battle as where long hair was wiped away so we had this uh intimate relationship with Lon hair Wolf Mountain the Battle of Wolf Mountain was after the Battle of Little Big Horn and we we know it as where big Crow danced in front of the soldiers he was a warrior that uh to show his bravery would dance in front of the soldiers and shoot at them um uh to show his bravery and his medicine and uh unfortunately after the four third time of dancing uh he was mortally wounded but the odds were against his favor anytime you see a bunch of people shooting at you and you’re going back and forth you’re probably going to get shot soon or later and that’s kind of what happened here and of course when we were we finally uh threw in the tow in 18 uh 77 the spring of 1877 we were moved down to Oklahoma to Indian Territory a lot of you know that this was considered Indian Territory a lot of the Eastern tribes were moved over to Oklahoma territory in a uh event called the Trail of Tears uh the Cheyenne were no different some of the Southern bands had already established a reservation there uh for the northern bands this was a long trip on foot we stayed there for a year and a half by 7 1878 um through the leadership of Chief D knife and Chief littlewolf and some others wildhog um Turkey Leg some of those folks we decided we wanted to come back up to our Northern home Homeland we felt this this was our our homeland and it was an incredible journey of endurance and uh unfortunately part of the band was captured in Fort Robinson and uh Northwestern Nebraska and there they broke out a lot of folks were killed finally we made it to our homeland here in the North Country uh and in 1884 the Northern Cheyenne reservation was established uh here in Southeastern Montana in the present Community called lame deer and uh it’s an area that we hold dear to our hearts and that um uh we we try to maintain its uh PR pristine condition we’ve we’ve uh not allowed any type of natural um or Economic Development terms of our mineral resources because our our ancestors fought long and hard to secure this area for for the northern cheen people um another battle was the San Creek battle I don’t know how many of you know about it but it was in uh um Colorado so we had a long hard uh history with the US government the shaping of federal Indian policy here on PLS uh the last confrontation was on during the reservation days when uh a couple of young gentlemen decided that because they had killed a cow they weren’t going to go to to jail they said we’d rather die as Cheyenne Warriors and so they the night before they uh camped on a on a but and they told everybody they said bring the soldiers bring the Indian police cuz tomorrow we’re going to ride down this hill and we’re going to die as Cheyenne Warriors and this was during the reservation days uh and that’s what they did the next day they rode down in front of a firing line consisting of soldiers out of my city and also the local Indian police uh one of them head Chief made it through the line the other one uh was killed as he was coming down the hill so that was the last confrontation with the US government was in 1890 and that was during the reservation period today we have close to 450,000 Acres of reservation land uh in Southeastern Montana vast coal reserves there um Ira form a government Indian reorganization Act or the Howard wheeler act um and that sort of briefly covers the Northern Cheyenne people uh at this time I know I seen the hand go up five minutes but uh like to ask if there’s any questions that you have that I might be able to answer I know that was quick and you probably didn’t know what I said but that’s okay yes was it common to have have um a woman be interested in being a warrior to go to a battle that sort of thing that’s a good question the question is uh when the battle of the roseb but occurred the woman saved her brother how often did they were they participants in every battle depended on the situation uh more than likely the older women would be um would do the the uh caretaking uh making uh prepar ations for those that were wounded um some of the older women never you know they were just as stressed as those that were fighting out there but yes there were women warriors within the tribe that did participate in uh in the battles in fact there’s a Cheyenne proverb that goes something like this and I may not have exactly the quote but I’ve I’ve uh mentioned this a number of times uh no matter how strong a Nation or how powerful their weapons the nation is not defeated until the hearts of the women are on the ground so I think that’s a very powerful tribute to a woman warrior among the Cheyenne people thank you for asking that question anybody else if you’ll raise your hand we’ll come around with a microphone and and everyone can hear your question a couple of things that you left out we had an article in the paper recently where Dr Joseph medicine Crow noted that counting coup also included killing an enemy raiding the horses of others and then leading into battle and those all caused loss of Indian lives and I also noticed that you left out the battle where the cheyen warrior tallbull was killed by retaliating paon forces with the help of the US Army and Massacre Canyon which also involved the paon you have a question so why did you leave those out well if if uh I guess if we had old day I we could get into intimate detail and just the response to to uh medicine Crow I think that uh every tribe is unique in their perspective of what counting coup is so to say that Joe medicine Crow version is indicative of all tribes uh is is very wrong and so you know he may be right according to the crow but the Cheyenne have their own unique uh interpretation of counting coup and I think that’s that’s really the wrong attitude to have when you start to generalize about Native Americans and that they were a simp and give them a simplistic view of who they were just because they lived in teepees doesn’t mean that uh every tee was the same very unique and diverse and in their own ways so thank you for bringing that question up and I hope that answers your question have a question back here we could talk about it some more later but you know we I’ve only got uh 40 minutes to do this uh normally when I talk about the history of the Cheyenne it takes me one semester to do this so you know this is very brief and to talk about a specific incident such as TBO U I think that’s a defeats the purpose of talking about the history of the Cheyenne people yes uh you mentioned briefly the effects of small poox on your tribe and I would like to have you enlarge on that because from what I understand decimate is not the right word to use because it only means one tenth of the people killed and I know the most of the tribes lost many many more more than than some up to 90% and how did that affect the tribal order and the tribal history good question uh with any group I think that when you lose the majority of your people you’re losing a lot of people that have specialized skills and I’m looking at it from a anthropological perspective you’re looking at a lot of talent you’re looking at your spirituality you’re looking at your mother and father you’re looking at your sisters your brothers uh you’re looking at Warriors that have a chained a certain status so in essence you’re losing your history your way of life and that can you know we all know that can be devastating uh if not only if to disease but to Warfare I mean you know not only were they losing to other diseases but you know when you have Warfare you’re also losing a lot of Young Warriors uh to those particular events so yes um I would say that this was uh really traumatic um uh historical trauma and and we still um today we still have a lot of that embedded in our history in our stories any other questions one right here and this will probably be our last question okay if you counted Co coup on me you would receive an honor what would I receive a dishonor within my tribe how how did that work that’s a good question if you re if you if I counted coup on you and and what would that leave you you know I would uh suspect that that if you didn’t die at the at the scene and wasn’t scalped uh uh I’m not sure exactly I can’t talk for other tribes yeah but if somebody counted if you counted coup on me um I suspect that there would be some type of social control that that would address that but that’s a very good question I’m sure you wouldn’t hear the end of that for a long time especially if you were a female all right ladies and gentlemen thank you very much thank you

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Fredy Baker – Mandan

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:59 +0000

and he’s going to be talking about man and Hada culture and history for us today Mr B wow sitting up here I almost tempted to say please turn to page 243 in your hand books and also would someone please pick up a question my name is Fredy Baker and I’m my member of the Mandan and hel tribes wondering what the Mand tribes are doing at on the agenda at meeting in omasa well we we were the the destination tribe when Le and Clark first started out Jefferson had heard about us he heard about us through reading about the probably the Alexander McKenzie vure across Alexander McKenzie was the first white guy to cross the P he cross it up in in Canada and uh actually did what did but he took a different kind of route that interested in C in history because I have two little Branch with our our Canadians living on Vancouver Island if anybody on Vancouver Island very beautiful location uh I just first of by saying that you know in this show celebrating the vice sentennial and so are a big event to close part of the heritage of America being open as it was in those days but for the and the you know L and Clark is really not a big deal so at me and say what what do you mean well because by the words you know L and Clark came to visit us about 1804 1805 obviously and as early as 1700 know we’ve been dealing with the French so we were used to see these white guys come to our village we were Traders uh we had U developed a massive trade system probably as early as 700 you know there’s evidence from archaeological digs and those kind of things that put us uh at that time at the mouth of the somewhere around the mouth of the bad River and for here South Dakota and we lived in in several villages we lived in Earth lodges which at that time were a archaeologic architectural marble which is you know they were extremely well built they were extremely comfortable and extremely useful uh later on when the westbr settlement started out came up to our Ty of the woods you know many folks built Assad houses much like somewhat somewhat like our our Earth watches but the time they were extremely extremely uh Advanced technological he and we also um we also were agricultural people the band band were agricultural people as early as about 700 the say there’s evidence that we were hitting at to the bad River and that we were also fing we raised what I wonder what that’s a sign of get off the stage and shut anyway we raised corn uh we raised squash we raised tobacco we raised beans and we used these for ourselves but also we they became a very important trade item because we were sedentary we liveed in in villages and people knew where we were and raised food people came to us they would bring us different tribes came to us with whatever products they had to to trade we and we had a very elaborate kind of trade system would and we also were’re proba be pretty astute Traders um we would if a tribe came to us to trade you know in order for us to recognize them and trade with them you know someone had to adopt be willing to adopt that and um listening to my little grandfather you know sometimes if they didn’t come with very good merchandise we wer very interested in trading with them and sometimes they might have a hard time finding someone to actually adopt it uh but we did adopt them and the price of adoption of course was to give presents give some of their stuff to the the family that adopted them they also very traitor so so people used to say well you’re you were kind of Walmart of the upper Missouri I said no no no we wer the Walmart we were the original Sam’s Club because in order to trade with us you had to buy into our our system um and then uh as we we moved North oh in our own stories our own myths our own our own origin stories so there still there’s some question about just exactly where we put ourselves we had a Creator by the name of L man who who uh created the Earth along with a K character called first Creator e and uh those two together you know had walked Walked on walked on on the on the water and you know they found this gold found this this little plant with blood coming out of it and he had some connection with that plant and that plant told him you know I you know I’m your mother I’m the one that that produced you and so he was walking around wondering you know how that plant got there and he ran into this little duck call I guess a mud duck I think about and he asked the duck was ding down and coming back up and he asked the duck he said what what are you doing what’s down there and the duck said Earth there’s there’s fruit down there so he said well give me something so a little duck uh down and came back up and so he took four different and brought him four different pieces of earth and so as he was walking along you know he would take those Dr bit of that Earth and as he left left it would become become land this is our know there’s much more to it I mean these are you know long long stories and they were P for for many times so I when I was a little kid I heard you know the complete creation I was very fortunate that I got to spend what the first 6 years of my life living with my grandparents my my grandfather was a full what we call full BL all H and my uh so my mother was was Hera and my father was andad so I have on both sides uh my father’s uh my grandfather was you know traditional in the sense that you know he taught me a lot of the kind of the history the values uh and he always kind of told me about who I was and what I was going to face uh and told me that your life would be difficult as a as a male as a man I had responsibilities and I like these guys was age here and he tell me that you know nothing is easy because you are a man and you have responsibilities and continue this on and U when I was 6 years old in that inevitable day when you have to go off to school you know and like most kids you know went to school for a couple days and he wasn’t too cool he had to sit at a desk and he had to do certain things you couldn’t run around like you always were able to so I decided D this isn’t ready so I decided I wasn’t going to go to school and so I ra the big plus and my remember my grandfather sitting by me and uh talking to me and he said me he said you know he said I’ve been telling you all these years that have certain responsibilities that have and U these responsibilities you know you have to learn how to make a living so it’s very hard on the preservation he was actually was was very successful because we we moved from uh when they put us on reservations you know we moved along the river and continued our same lifestyle we still had large Gardens we raised our own food and we switched from the Buffalo to to raising T my grandfather was a real old of a farmer ground type I guess because he had all kinds of Critters on on his on his place he had East I remember East in particular because when you’re a little guy e like come up and just about discard your body and they like to nip I remember being ni a few times also had chickens I where chicken well because my first real job that I was responsible for was to gather the eggs when I went to get the eggs be uh there always certain hands that decided that they wanted to be mother hands instead of just so they would uh reach out to gra their a little kid Le a big impression on you so anyway so so he he told me that you know I needed to learn he had no idea what education was education couldn’t speak English and fortunately if you learn how to speak speak about almost interchangeably because we had some major Smalls epidemics and you know we were forced to come together our our our our languages are different but our cultures are very similar it’s almost hard to uh to know whether well certain stories are man only or there comination of man or stories um so anyway so that’s kind of how I got my my Foundation I learned I lived in in an environment where under one hand my grandfather Wasa and taught me the ways in the language so I grew up speaking H by folks on the other hand and people at my age my my parents age were very concerned that we learned how to speak English and that we went to school and that we got an education you know and so uh so they taught me to speak English so I I can’t remember a time I couldn’t speak either language I learned how to speak English and it simultaneous so it became a natural kind of thing I went to I went to about the fifth grade um I received an Indian name Indian name I received was uh was yellow yellow yis named after a by by a man uh who was but my my mother or my grandmother that side were we’re very we’re very religious they’re very Catholic my grandfather on the other hand I think you know was Catholic only because you know women have a way of kind of convincing you to do certain things and I think because of that he but I always felt that he really still need the old religion and U he had a ble uh Liv in a fairly large house at that time and I was able to have pretty much run of a house except for this room where the bundle was there was a bundle in there and there was a bule Ro and I was not allowed to go in there but anyway uh so I I was sent off to a Catholic school at the age of five I mean at the age of 10 years old board school by that time the Garrison Dam had was beginning in all of our schools were were being shut down I went to recers four years in a what we call a government School government Day School by theair and U so from there and last summer I was going away you know we had a Catholic priest who was very Adam at the his legacy being a Indian person from our reservation to be ordained a priest and so somehow at the 10 to age of 10 years old I was destined to be that person and so kind of as a uh not quite sure about kind of as a test to that to that charge so to speak I was given the name of a very religious kind of a person he was a very powerful medicine type person not exactly he wouldn’t like ATT but he was a very strong medicine type of person so and his name was yell yellow that’s got name was given his brother I went off to a school about a junior in high school I discovered girls and kind of ended my and I went on to to school re me background give some idea know what like my father was a uh one these guys that know he told you something and you might argue with him under your breath but you made sure that he didn’t hear you and so I I decided I was going to be a pre I was really confused about what I was going to do with myself so I decided I was to go to the Air Force and kind of find out what life was about and of course he he was ad but I going to college and so one day he goes to town and on our reservation you know we have an Indian agency and Indian agency pretty much you know tells us what to do so B long story short went the agent the agent talked about this great School in called fi in Minnesota and so my dad came back I’m telling you hey we were rers I was he my dad bouncing over the hill weighs me down I think oh something terrible has happened byway he uh says I know where you’re going to school and I said oh did you go to Minnesota they already you know they called me school got me Adit everything and then came back and told me where I was going so that was T today you batteries of tests and you have counselors and think well my I you’re going that as I was getting on the bus to leave he grabbed me and said you know you’re smart he said if you go over there and you raise hell and you don’t study and you out he said don’t come back here there’s nothing here for you so that was my that’s not how I grew up like but anyway whether has question who would be the man I told you a little bit about the you know how they they had this massive trade system the H were over in the East also we also have some questions some mythology in our or some stories in our culture that put us some somewhere at the most one time maybe at the MTH of the Mississippi River we might came up the river there some story that and so they like I mean let food but anyway uh you going talk a little bit about you know what life was like what who were we when l heart came to us besides having this massive tra I we have been contact we been we first ran into French around 1700 we were trading with them on a regular basis there were always Frenchmen that come in that came to our village and lived with us they married among our people and uh you know so we were used to to seeing white people come to our village and so when Lo in CLK came to our village we really weren’t B impressed the death were to some extent because in 1781 prior to 1781 they were the rulers of the upper Missouri there were large people there were numerous people and uh and they lived in these several Villages and each of these probably 10 Villages around the area by then they were living around the heart river in North Dakota and uh they were probably each capable of raising at least Warriors which you you think about it so it’s there a lot of people massive infrastructure and we developed all this all this this culture we’re M legal which means that the women were govern compar to know when Lou and clar came to us you women had you know didn’t even have the right to vote in most inst instances they were Step Above shadow in our culture women own everything they own classes certainly they you know with some help of us they they built their cles uh we did the huning we did the uh the garding of the village and the women you know did besides building their lodes they also you know they made clothes and they they also kept a meat PR care of the food and so for but they owned all that St so for example you know if you married a woman in our society at that time the you went into that woman’s Lodge and became part of her Lodge she didn’t come to your Lodge and become part of you you went to her so I suspect that if it were modern a that instead of they taking our name when we married we probably took their G When we married so and uh you know things were and also you know we had some pretty severe responsibilities responsibilities of providing food and those kind of things and if we didn’t do a very good job and if for some reason or other you know their our wife decided that we really want a very good investment there was no such this worrying about child support or who’s going to divide the property or that kind of thing all you did was just take your stuff and put it outside the lodge and and we were and you were hi you hope hope that you that you had a your mother still had room for you or somebody else take you in I’ll give you out there homeless basically um so and then uh you know things like we had our medicines you know people always wonder you know hearing about for instance that she had a very difficult time in labor I never fot why would she be except for Charo uh and charos C bring out the me why she would actually go to the Fort to have this child but she had all kinds of of help and systems back back in the D probably made her her her labor a lot easier all those guys that little try to have a video there but so we had all these Sy in place we knew how to how to doctor things we do the plants that that we had and and how to get tea and those kind of things and some even carry over to my when I was younger one time I was playing with a knife and u i was PR for it I was throwing the knife down like that and beh hold I stuck myself in the foot and I pulled the knife out you know blood just spr over place and I out a loud yell and my dad came running and I guess he thought I was probably probably got fit by r or something but when he saw what I did he went out into the into the trees there and he brought some leaves and he chewed those leaves and he put them on that that gushing blood and he just within literally within seconds of leaving stop never did try to find out what what PL that we choose in order to do that you unfortunately that’s G so so much of that so much of our our ways of medicine those kind of things are are gone because we didn’t uh bother to either find out about them or try to uh r that partly because we had two major small epidemics in 187 1781 and that was probably one of the major major reasons that as result that smallet epidemic the almost wiped out some you prob me if you were in school about when I was went the history books he find out that all the uh that all the mands were were were gone there were no mands I go heing that school and U coming back home and quing my parents about why they were telling me I was about M because I wasn’t there were no M left the teacher said that teacher right so uh we had this so when leis and Clark came up the river you know the mandz looked at them as a way to get some of their influence back to get some of their power back you know some new trading partners they really had no idea about you know what what they were doing they weren’t used to having discovers discover for sa us to having Traders their Village that was change and when they got done you know and all this top about see some of the things that Louis and Par did because we had a very sophisticated system of saying a family you’re born you’re born into a family and immediately at Birth you know you’re a grandfather you’re a father and you’re an uncle we didn’t have cousins in our in our culture and each of those had had K with responsibilities the uncles for instance on my father’s side my dad’s Brothers their role was to help to be to have respect to understand culture and also that was the go of of our B my brothers my mother’s Brothers on the other hand were the disciplinarian they’re the ones that taught you how to pay attention to things how to mind that kind of thing and and they did this with you know a fair h of very good persuasion sorry I what of I uh talking we were talking about that one of one of my relatives tell me about his experience when he was a kid he said he lived in a little Community called Shel and there was a and there was a shelter which and the water ran fairly fast North Dakota in the winter time you know usually gets pretty cold and almost everything freezes over well in this instance there apparently was a little spot there where the ice didn’t freeze and there were fish in that area so he used to run down there and watch play with a p and his mother was very concerned that he would fall in the water and ground and he wouldn’t die he wouldn’t mind keep running down there out run down there so one day her brother showed up and he told she told him that she a really concerned about La she said he’s down there he always goes down there that fish I’m afraid he’s going to freeze or CCH a terrible cold or whatever so he said okay so he went back outside put on his horse SC down there sure enough was La went the fish so he grabbed La by his by his heels and he put his head first into that ice pool water remember cuz what 20 below zero outside he said just about the time he thought he would grounded he pulled him out shook him good as soon as he caught his breath he stuck him back in the water again and then he put him he said he put me on the back of his horse and he G back to the house well you know that when it’s that cold and wind you know everything that’s wet freezes almost instantly and so by the time he got back to the house his clothes from about here on upward frozen but the effect was that he said he never went by that again I the same you my uh my Nemesis was my was my uh one of my mother older brothers his name was Thomas and U that was the role he played was that if I was looking around not doing it what my PO wanted me to do their magic word was we’re going to have tell uple to and take oh no and so and he came to the house first thing he would do is asked my parents if I was behaving myself this guy behaving himself know I’m sitting here the only place I was when whatever I see him coming I would take off of the house I guess when I was younger I would scream and take off of the house try to get get so the place that I always found found any kind of a uh any kind of safety at all is my grandma’s black if I got to my grandma before Tom got to be I was safe no matter what she going to but nobody else would so that was and this was an age old system though parents did not discipline the children they disciplined somebody else’s children in their roles as so we had this very complicated system uh in the earth lodges in the summer in the winter time you know we built Earth lodes on top and the summer one know e to farm up there number two there was you can see distances the enemy coming number three uh comfortable bugs and stuff and wind and blow winds a lot night Bree and all these nice uh bires would be like like an air condition Sy win time we went down below and we we built we built uh new smaller lodges and then onto The Lodges was a little big kind of like an Annex almost and in that anex the uh grandfather or the older folks the grandparents and the young children would spent most their time because it was nice and warm in there just ideal place for education to go on culture so that’s how we were living when those came to us we we had all these all these system we also had a system of PL now remember we when Louis and Clark came to SP time Village we we live you know just and side by side in these large villages we had no Poli system or we had no no written laws or no jails or anything anything like that we did have a place syst that but we did have we those kind of things and so we um we kept order number one we they developed a plans system and the plans were you know basically almost like an extended family they also played some of the same roles like the clent unes were people who provided certain kinds of par for instance being a Society we were born into our mother’s plan and the mother’s plan had certain responsibilities the father’s plan on the other hand also had certain responsibilities and they would um one of the major ones was they were it was up to them when you passed away you sent your spirit to to the spirit world EV our we we still do that where we we called senior be a our language and their job was to be sure that you are sent to the right right direction and we’re all with those ke that one of things we always had I think kept us through difficult times was our ability to laugh at things to laugh at ourselves to tease to tease each other even you know at very somber times I remember one time there was a story about this guy who was his job was to send the spirit off to the to the right place you stand at the foot of the the gra you know the person’s head is pointed to the east they always set the spirits off we believe that they to to the East and so he’s out there and usually know say you give instructions say don’t come back you know don’t be scaring people don’t know always all these kind of things say this kind of long Sal thing and one the things he said to this to Spirit was he said you’re going to a place where there’s going to be good things to eat like oranges and apples guy couldn’t speak get he sing this in English and one the guys P the other guy he said I think he’s send him to Florida go Sav R I was going to try to stop about now I guess um and I kind want talk with you rather than at you so anybody has any questions I try to try to try to answer that right now yes how does the okay the ricas uh were always south of us they you know they came from around the area around the Arkansas River they moved up and eventually I think when Lou and Clark came they were probably somewhere around around the border of north south F South and they always were sometimes we were at war with them U you know we had kind of a difficult relationship until about the 1840s when they came to know because of the the tribes the or thetic tribes coming together they move closer towards us and we asked them to we were living at like a fishal village and at was 1845 they were across the river and we said you come and join us because in numbers we can be more effective against our enemies and the arra felt that at that point that they didn’t need to do that this happened a few times and eventually they got attacked by a bunch of enemies and eventually joined us that’s how they came together again I was saying that know we we teach each other all the time and so our word for the they call themselves sish and we call them which basically means you know if you were in a fight with somebody and that person was beeding you up and you came running to me for help that’s what choice words for us questions yes what about the the I’m sorry I forgot to mention well about the Welsh coming up because some of your words are similar to The Welsh and you’re home to come they weren’t really they were more like Buffalo bus yeah that’s what I mean I well I don’t know I guess most of us don’t think that there’s anything to that you know and you know and um really there’s no evidence there’s there were stories about Mand dancing some some blue maybe the Vikings have gotten mixed up with somewhere along the way but in our Among Us there’s really no evidence of that ever Happ so first Contact was with a friend andly the French came with us and they married with us but there was no think so yes if you were wiped out if you were wiped out by small pox I said we were almost right okay almost thank and we do have and there’s very few unfortunately Amanda culture itself you is really the language is really endangered at this point there to my knowledge there are two uh real fluent Mand speakers left I I also shared the U I worked at the Museum my my career was in Healthcare Management um after I retired in 1999 and then U I got interested in history and amateur historian with emphasis on amateur that way I can say anything to you I want so but so that’s kind of how I uh that’s how I got you know involved and and we’re trying to preserve we have a a u you know working with one of the colleges and we’re we have the person the one person that we have that’s a fullet speaker is being taped to telling stories in in the Mand language and will archive those and then know so we’re trying to at this point to preserve the language but the other on the also on the other hand being you know somewhat pragmatic that we need to preserve so that you know we will have an archives to go to to be able to bring back and and see what we can together there is an apprentice typ person who is studying just got his Masters he’s one of our trial members nephew of M uh just got his Masters in specialy in preserving uh indigenous languages and he’s desperately Mand know doing almost a total abion Liv with this and language so might yes are youu yes yes yes we are it’s difficult because most of you probably stud foreign language you know some type of foreign language Latin did four years of Latin in high school and took a year Spanish oh I also know how to I I used to know how to speak German primar because I used to hang out with the grade school I went to high school I was German Russian community in North Dakota lot of the so I learn how to speak anyway uh so it’s very difficult to teach it in school because with two things one is that know we need to preserve the language and the culture at the other hand we also need to have our kids learn the skills they need in order to become you know successful World they need to learn math they need learn English um you know they need to learn sciences and that kind of thing so it’s kind of kind to put those two together we have the double responsibility learning the skills that will allow us to be to be successful in the world and also Hader I was up in North Dakota last year we went over into Mont there was an Indi University that we went to okay we also have AOL okay and they were saying that there were mostly young women with children who were attended and that there was a day care for the children wouldn’t that be an ideal place to start do that we’re try to do that reason that there you just mentioned that there are most of our reservations don’t have community because we tried sending students out when I went to school there were I think out of out of our tribe there were probably what six of us that went off to colleges I went to a school at B there were four big reservations right around B and there were six Indian people in in at the state and all six of us were Jacks so but now you know they have an IND studies program you know we have this year we graduated a lot of students we know our TR this doation for being pretty well educated we have we have doctors U Physicians we have doctors philosophy we have several M I guess we say that almost any field you mention a field we probably have one of our C members that’s successful at practicing that field doesn’t mean that we’re without problems you know the the system of destroying the male especially when you know when transition happened we put on reservations uh and then we had a thing called Garrison Dam which completely destroyed our culture and we’re trying to recover from that uh you know lot of the destruction was aimed at the veils and our system our way of life and and quite successful yeah so we’re trying to recover from that we’re trying to Define who we are as and and and what our life will be in the future because we feel that’s our responsibility to that take care of ourselves feed ourselves and set up but also to preserve who we are and and communicate that to the Next Generation yes how did the M get along with the suit not well not well we were their name for us the s word the makot word I say there three different dialects of word for for the h man dance is uh to and to means enemy but I I used to work uh at 48 s Ro which is reservation down where city was from and so forth I first win you know and people were strong I oh you’re a to so I got the right idea okay that must be what we are so asked me where you from I said I’m a to some me you know what means I said oh me enemy but we not we get along really well in fact my uh see my niece back there and you know she’s a m and some German and my my son-in-law is a is a now we’re friends but we no we didn’t get however we did we we had this massive trade system they used to not trade with us and so when they came to trade with us we we had a u i like a truce not only a truce but when they came our village to trade they became part of us so if we got attacked by a sue band while they were there they were obligated to Def to help us defend ourselves working the world today I don’t know question about your Earth lodges a question about your Earth lodges you said the um the summer ones were up on the top of the hills and the winter ones down in The Valleys uh did you rebuild the year or were they had to re well the summer lodes worked those were permanent but us the river ones were I mean the B ones were usually because what you know during the winter you have a massive drain on the the resources especially especially wood because we wood and so we probably Prett well completed the resources we also had we elected chief that came to our Villages a couple guys happen to be was happen to be their particular time to be and so they were immediately chosen as the as as the Chiefs we had temporary kinds of chiefs so we our people our leaders we had this elaborate Society system where you started out as a youngster and if you proved yourself then you ended up being you know a black mouth which was the top Society he became to old to be a black go and he became a a member of the the old go dog Society the old W societies those two societies were the ones that made policies and for black car them out and there were like there was a group called The Fox kit and their job if the village was under attack and we needed to escape there were like the kamakazi on that would sacrifice their life for the uh you know for the good ability of all their songs and centered around the philosophy of death you know good to die for the cause kind of thing we’re kind of one more question yeah I play I this week 6:30 uh earlier did you describe kind of in depth your spiritual belief so when was Catholicism introduced to your tribe and were there any attempts to suppress your your spirit oh absolutely absolutely I probably around 18 1860s ’70s know we had a reservation which divide the fa into two two parts and and the the uh Congregational Church was given the responsibility to christianize the Savages of one side and the Catholics were given the responsibility to christianize these saes you know on the other side unfortunately you know again it was kind of like those in park when they came to our F they recognized nothing positive about what we were doing we had this elaborate system we survived for for centuries develop the spiritual people gave there to us but then we were desolated by Smalls we were starving to death and I think it was more of just a Breaking of our will we didn’t have much that and so we we became we became Catholics who became congregational now there’s all kinds of other churches there too but the you know our Traditions are are coming back and we’re trying to find you know redefine I think anyway I think my time is it’s been a pleasure and we make a commercial announcement in the uh fall August of 2006 there will be a signatur at Fort birle you know we’re kind of as I was saying L and Clark were really no big deal I’m doing an oral history project right now and I’m interviewing several of my contemporaries and direct I reservation believe it or not um and one of the questions I asked them you know so what do you recall your anybody in your house your an your your grandparents anybody talking about leis and Clark and there’s virtually nothing about L and Clark say what about she whatever you know where she married Etc ET there’s very little to do about about s the only thing that you know we take pride in is that I mean we’re not was a fine win uh and but the thing that we that we we can say with with confidence is that there were any number of our women that would have had the stamina and so forth you to be able to walk out to the pafic carrying a child and come back but anyway August of 2006 we’ll have our s event hope that a lot of you will come and visit us we the home of or we’re the place where ghost and Par spent their winter we’ll try to make you as comfortable as we may l in par when we came there hopefully hopefully you won’t be as much trouble because us the little the little I been able to gather about you know one I know one of our our Chiefs was saying you know that they came to us having no skills I they never lived in the in in the cold North Dakota winter before 42 was toally totally unheard of I was in at the monello opening up the park I think one day it was there like seven above and everybody was freeing for that I mean that’s you know that’s where they came from and so they had no skills and we had you know they were one of the old Chiefs old was saying we had to watch them like a HW so we wouldn’t do anything stupid with that think for coming in and sharing that with us we always like to having it here on our stage I’ll tell you a little bit about the

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Tent of Many Voices: 07300603

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:59 +0000

once again to the ten mini voices for our 1:00 program um like I explained before this is part of the core Discovery to traveling exhibit and inside this tent we do ask for many different voices to speak about aspects that have something to do with the Louis and Clark Trail and today during this hour we have a real treat um a musical performance is always a good draw and uh we’ve never actually got to hear Jay old mouse before it was a real shame he got stormed out so we’re all really looking forward to hearing from Jay old mouse he um has several different tribal affiliations Northern Cheyenne Mandan Hada and arika um and his program is entitled the Cheyenne cording flute but there’s so much more to it and I want to just kind of turn it over to him he’s the expert here so please help me welcome Jay old mouse to the Ten of mini voices e thank you good afternoon the honor is all mine I’d like to take this time and thank the Lewis and Clark people for asking me to come and be a part of this last week and I was able to share at pompei’s Pillar and it was just as hot there as it is here today I’m here today with my wife Amy and my youngest son Trevor sitting up front here and um I’m here today to talk about the Northern Cheyenne cing flute this is a handmade Flute made from a raw piece of wood I got a big chunk of wood up here made from a raw piece of wood to a finished musical instrument again the Lewis and Clark thing listening to the gentleman before me um I am of the Mandan Hada araro and I have heard the stories of of the Lewis and Clark Trail amandan Hada ARA on my dad’s side on my mother’s side I’m Northern Cheyenne I was born in Dickinson North Dakota and I was raised on the Northern Cheyenne reservation it was here with my grandfather it was about 18 years ago 18 19 years ago I was approached by my grandfather and just in a casual way he asked me if I would be interested in making a flute I told him I was I’m a certified Carpenter by trade and always interested in arts and crafts so it was easy for me to say yes so we started by he’d say come on up on a weekend so I’d go up to his house and we’d go down uh in Bernie area I’m from lame deer Montana uh Bernie area Northern sh reservation and we would hunt for this wood he would show me what to look for straight grain no no knots things like that and in my mind I was just very interested in that I could take a raw piece of wood and finish with a beautiful musical instrument along the way he would tell me things he would say I took him as uh well at the time just as as a young man um I took him as just information and my mind was so geared at getting to the Finish instrument but throughout his teaching throughout his showing me he would tell me little uh I took them as uh life information things for myself he said JD you’re you’re human you’re going to have bad days you’re going to be mad at whatever your bills uh the weather anything he said when you feel that way don’t work on this flute work on these fluts when things are good when you feel good so along the way he would tell me these things we we we started with a raw piece of wood to a finish musical instrument and it took about a year took about a year to finish it just because we worked on it on the weekends or in evening and and and because of that it took that long song Upon finishing my first flute I remember the day I played it for him in his house and I made it sing it it sounded beautiful my grandfather was even impressed with it we sat and we visited we laughed and when it was time for me to go home my grandfather said from this day on from this day on Jay if someone needs a flute if someone needs help I am going to send them to you I left and I went home and I showed my mother and my father Roger and Verna old mouse this flute that uh me and my grandfather had completed and I played it for them come to find out that my grandfather had given me the right to make and play the flute for the Northern people and upon understanding that my mind began to wander my mind began to to want to ask more questions so naturally I went to my grandfather my grandfather’s name is Douglas Glenmore his Indian name is Black Bear M nak he is my mother’s dad so I went to him with questions a lot of questions one of the first questions was Grandpa who taught you how to make the flute who gave you the right took you step by step as you did with me and he mentioned a guy named Grover wolf voice so my immediate question after that was do you know who taught Grover wolf voice and at the time he he mentioned the name turkey legs a gentleman they called turkey legs I asked if he knew who taught turkey legs he said no I’ve only I only know the name he said so again an honor was bestowed upon me and it came into my life at a very young age I was my early I was in my early 20s and I started out by helping uh playing at graduations I was asked to play at a few birthday parties weddings and as our people found out that I was a flute maker and player I also assisted them during times of Sorrow during funerals and to this day I’m called upon quite a bit at home other reservations and and everywhere and one of the things my grandfather said was was share this share this with the world so I would go around give presentations in schools uh and even in places such as this because I’m proud and I’m honored that this has become a part of my life life and for a long time there I had no pictures of the gentleman called turkey legs and at one of my presentations back home in lame deer when I got finished a woman had approached me and and said I have a picture of turkey legs and chills just went up the back of my neck and and and a couple weeks later she brought it to me so displayed before you here this is a picture of turkey legs and I was quite honored to receive this picture because in his hand he is holding a flute so the picture is even that much more special to me on the back of this picture it had Fort k on it so this picture was taken right here in m city at Fort Kio and I notice on my way in I’ve been here uh several times at the one of the forts is still over here or a building is and it it surely resembles this one in the picture and this picture they tell me was late 1800s so this is a picture of turkey legs he was the flute maker and player for the Northern Cheyenne people the gentleman I spoke of there came a time when when turkey legs had to seek and find someone to pass this on teach them step by step just like my grandfather did and he chose this gentleman Grover wolf voice Grover wolf voice was the flute maker and player for the Northern Cheyenne people taught by turkey legs he is also holding a flute and I have with me today and I have it with me every time I do a presentation but this is an actual Flute made from Grover wolf voice Grover wolf voice also had to find someone and teach them and he chose my grandfather Douglas Glenmore Douglas seminal Glenmore again whose Indian name is Black Bear M I also have a flute that was made from my grandfather also today that I carry with me for display this flute was made by my grandfather and again roughly about 18 years ago I was chosen my grandfather chose me and I had this picture taken of my grandfather and myself um in honor of all of what I’ve just shared with you so again it was a big responsibility I consider myself a young man and still learning still learning about this flute we still have Elders at home that share stories with me I just most recently heard a story um about the flute again it’s the Cheyenne cording flute it was used for a young man to win the heart of a young woman kind of like Cupid’s arrow but it was also used for prayer purposes healing and easy listening and I was just a story was just most recently shared with me that when the when the camp when the Indian village was ready to move that a flute player or players would take turns and play music as they were tearing the camp down and getting ready to leave they would also play as they were leaving it was also said that when someone was sick that a flute player would go to their Lodge and they would play and the music is real soothing and haunting that it would take the pain away take the pain away and allow that person to fall asleep or be more comfortable for a moment so again it served several purposes in regards to the cording end of it I was told that a young man would go to the flute maker and request a flute be made for him when the flute was done that would be become a part of him again and used for the things that I’ve mentioned healing prayer and also to win the heart of a young woman and the way they say that this how they would do that is in the evening when things were at peace after supper so to speak these young men would take their flutes and sit amongst the hills around the village and they would play music and as they played they would think only of the woman they were in love with and if it was meant to be that woman would hear that music and follow that music and follow it all the way to where that young man was sitting they would meet and their relationship would grow from there so that’s how the flute works and again I’m still learning myself I want to take this time and share a story with you it’s a story on how this flute came to be with Indian people in the old days the old Indian days the way a young Warrior man would be recognized by his tribe by the societies um by families and and most importantly by the women the way a young man would be recognized was how well he helped his people how well he uh did uh things of Bravery go to enemy camps and steal horses and bring them back go fishing go hunting bring food back and help feed the people this is how he was recognized the story goes as there was a warrior man who struggled in these all these areas he would go fish he wouldn’t catch anything he would try and go steal enemy neighboring tribal horses he’d get run off he just struggled one day he went hunting and he did happen to shoot and wound this big bull elk and he chased it all morning all afternoon he could never catch up with it before he knew it night fell upon him so he built himself a fire he was going to Camp there and continue tracking this animal the next day that night as he sat there gazing Into the Fire he began to feel sad he began to get down on himself he he was thinking why am I still out here why is I can’t just go hunt and and get an animal and go go back to my people with it he just started really feeling down and sad and as he was feeling this way he began to hear this music play and this music really soothed his heart in his mind it cleared him of all the bad thoughts it relaxed him he laid back and he fell asleep the next morning just up the ridge there laid this big bull elk so he gut it he skinned it he corded it he packed what he could back to his people and as he came into the village with his with his kill the old people saw him and they began to sing and cheer and sing songs for him as he came in and this made him feel good he was like yes this is how it’s supposed to be as he came into the village and walked by the the The Lodges and stuff even the women looked at him and winked at him and waved at him and this made him swell up even more saying yes this is how it’s supposed to be so he shared what he had with his people they had food a new hide antlers for tools and weapons and as time went by a few weeks went by this young Warrior Man thought of that music that he had heard that night and he was curious and May made him feel so good that it it cleared his mind and his heart and he fell asleep so the story goes is that he went back to the place where he had camped that night where he had heard that music and he fasted he prayed he prayed to the Creator that whoever whatever played that music for him to come forth and talk to him and the story goes is that on the fourth day this woodpecker came to him this woodpecker came to him and spoke spoke to him he said I am the one who played that music for you that night he said follow me so this Warrior man got up and he walked to this old cedar tree with this woodpecker and in this cedar tree the Woodpecker pointed out a hollow Branch the Woodpecker pointed at a hollow branch and said I am the one who played the music for you that night I know how you feel I feel that way often myself the Woodpecker said listen you can hear all the birds singing said I cannot sing like that said I was born a Carver and I carved this into this hollowed out branch of this old cedar tree and as the wind blows through it I spread my wing over the holes and I can sing with the rest of the birds take this down cut this down and take it with you to your people and play music from your heart and if it’s meant to be it will come true so that is a story that was shared with me on how this flute came to be with Indian people so with that I’d like to play a little more for you for again still like I said earlier considering myself a a young man and I there’s a lot that I know for fact that has been lost uh from the times of turkey legs to the present time um of me standing here and playing and sharing with you I do rely on some questions and I’m glad the other presenter asked for questions and I’d like to ask for some questions too also and and don’t be afraid to ask any question Under the Sun I’ll do the best I can to answer it but again back to the teachings um this came into my life again as a young man um early 20s and a time where many roads or doors of opportunity doors of Destruction all of the above and this coming into my life has helped me walk the good road they say um it closed the door on drugs on hatefulness on uh alcohol all of that and I was thankful for that because life is tough life has many obstacles and to be called upon by My People by other people is is an awesome feeling to help people my grandfather said anytime you can help someone help them so again that’s why I’m here sharing this with you and back to some of the teachings uh being a a carpenter by trade uh when we started I asked my grandfather I’m like well how long is the flute supposed to be and I was reaching for my tape measure but he said five hands which is basically one two three four and five so even the blueprint so to speak was real primitive and I found that very interesting and fascinating one of the things he said also is he said when you finish a flute the notes that it has make music from that none of my flutes are tuned to a music scale I don’t read Sheep music the the music I play comes from a feeling and I call it chasing a tune so I just grab a flute and and get something going and then fall it so again that was interesting make note or make music from the notes that it has another interesting thing he told me was when you finish a flute and if it does not play that I might want to put this aside and step back and take a look at myself and see how I’m living see how I’m treating people see how I’m treating my wife and my my children and again that those were some powerful words if you finish a flute and it doesn’t play that I might want to put it aside and again see how I’m living I’m honored to say that since I’ve been taught about 18 19 years ago I’ve made close to 80 85 flutes and every one of them have played well so and the other thing that might be hopefully it’s a question I keep referring to about 18 years ago I grew up in the days of writing everything down times date actual day he asked me actual day I finished the flute but I didn’t and often times when I stand before people and share that I often think of that but I often think that along with the modern day world that I live in that maybe that something that’s just better off left alone so therefore I just refer to it as about 18 years ago and I’m pretty close also the picture down there late 1800s some of you might be trying to do the math as passing it on these gentlemen were well into their 80s I know my grandfather passed a year ago this July so I had a I had a a long time to be with him and ask questions every time I finished the flute I would take it to him first and I would play it for him he would take it and he would play for me one of the reasons he he he was he felt it was time his hands were real arthritis up and he and it’s real tedious work to make one of these those are some that’s one of the obvious things of why why he had to find someone there’s still some reasons why I was chosen that are unanswered because he could have chose any anyone any member of the Northern people and even in my immediate family my cousins there’s a there’s several of us but I was chosen no disrespect to my brothers but I was chosen and that was an honorable thing there was a there was a song I had mentioned that I play from the heart which I do but there was a song Always requested in church um often times at a funeral and I’d like to play that for you a little bit here I’m sure you’ll recognize to again just listening to the the present the presenter before me again speaking of of uh on his map showing where my on my dad’s side the Mandan Hada and arra uh also hearing them say that they shared songs I often wonder if there was a flute player back then also but again those are areas like I said I’m still learning and all of that another thing my grandfather told me that you could do with this was you could bugle an elk has anyone heard an elk bugle before any Hunters here okay I’m going to do my best here and hope we don’t get one to come across the Yellowstone here but if we do help me get him and he again uh they also probably used it during the the hunting season naturally they hunted with bow and arrow and and to bugle them in and get them closer would be the way to do it so let me try it here was that close with that do I have any questions I need at least yes or Juniper the question is is this cedar or Juniper very good question I refer to it as Cedar it’s the stuff that has the nice Aroma um but also I’ve I’ve read um my my dad uh knew of this man Grover wolf voice and he referred to it as Juniper and I think there’s probably a big family of of cedar tree I’ve heard it referred to as Western Cedar aromatic Cedar but yeah SE I uh Cedar Wood hold on here we go do you use any other type of w like Lodge Pole or do you stick to the hard harder uh the question is can I use any other kind of wood the cording flute the Cheyenne cording flute I was told to always use Cedarwood um a brief discussion with my grandfather um Native American Indians use um certain Cedar certain Juniper cedar trees the the thistles off of them to burn as an incense to to bless their home to um chase away evil spirits and through his discussion like that I think that was part of the reason to use the wood but also it’s a very beautiful wood um and we all know that cedar again I guess moving into my Carpenter uh knowledge Cedarwood doesn’t rot or takes longer for it to rot it keeps for a long time um things like that so always to use the cedar um I have made one out of Redwood before that played real well but again I was always told to use the Cedarwood yes let me come to you are are there uh specific songs that have been passed down uh from you know earlier Generations uh and do you then uh improvise your songs make your own songs like I said earlier from the time of turkey legs and I’m I’m still curious on who the man that taught turkey legs but what you’re asking is a good question she the songs I was told by my grandfather that was that there was at least three songs that came with this Flute one of them I think if I remember him was a badger song a badger song and I’m not quite sure the other two but those songs were lost in there again um and back to what I said as far as playing um and I think it stands true with most tribes um because I know the crow have flute players I know the Sue have flute players and tribes down south and it’s always referred to as a love flute so but they have their own stories their own stories um what I’m presenting today is the story and the history of the Northern Cheyenne cording flute and with myself the songs it’s like I say I play music from the heart comes from comes from a feeling but also was told that not only from my grandfather but Elders that whatever the occasion a flute player is called upon say a funeral um we naturally know it’s a sad time so you want to play something that’s lowkey and and and and as you play you pray for the family you pray for I pray for myself my wife my children and then the I pray for the occasion that I’m playing for also so again that’s where the music comes from also any other questions one over here um have you chosen someone to teach have I chosen someone yet uh no I haven’t and the reason I haven’t is because I still enjoy this very much it’s an honor it’s a blessing but I hope I don’t have to make that decision till I’m well to my 80s also and I do have have four boys I have no girls I have all boys so I guess to kind of answer that maybe one of my grandchildren maybe one of my boys but I don’t even begin to know how or who to choose and that was always a question also but I always answer that by saying number one I hope that I don’t have to make that decision till I’m well into my 80s and I think something will tell me something will show me so hopefully that answered that it any other questions I’m not sure how I’m doing for time here you’ve got about 10 minutes so we can do a few more questions no problem do a few more questions and I can play a little bit um do you use modern day tools or hand tools yes I do when my grandfather taught me though he had a lot of um well my grandfather you got to understand was uh he was always tanning hides and he also made drums for us to sing at uh paow um he was constantly working and he had a lot of his own homemade tools although there was tools available to make it easier but I mean even hid scrapers he had a old Elk Horn I remember Elk Horn with a piece of of metal bent on it wrapped with a raw hide and he’ scraped all his hides with that um lot of uh tools he made but I myself use a lot of modern day tools yes but I think where the beauty is is to start with a raw piece of wood and finish with a musical instrument and I always kind of answer answer that question too that if Turkey lades had access to a band saw table saw he probably would have used it also so but any other questions I was wondering are you the eldest son in your family or what is the order of your birth in the family am I the eldest in my family no I have an older sister and an older brother in my immediate family and again I’m not sure what your question is but it’s like I said there was something about me special probably maybe to my grandfather on why I was chosen and it was no disrespect to my other brothers and in the endian way my first cousins are my brothers also and I have several of them so um I have another question do women ever make the flutes what’s that do do women ever make the flutes do women ever make the flutes uh to my knowledge no and that is a very good question and I’m going to do my best to answer this and I want this heard clearly in the times of turkey legs and the men before and and uh I would say turkey legs in his time and before I would say strictly men again being a cording flute um strictly men during uh wolf boy time I really couldn’t tell you and I’m going to stay away from kind of that era but my grandfather told me that if you can help someone if if by helping them and we’ll say it right out a female was to want a flute he has made a flute for a female to to play and to have as a as a home um decoration or whatever but he also encouraged her to play because he felt that if this flute can help a young woman stay away from drugs and alcohol that it was a good thing now you might get some different feedback from different Elders maybe Elders even of this gentleman’s time so again thinking and that’s a very tough that’s a tough question to answer but I have personally um had uh through this St lebre Indian School um during the school year I put on a they called it a flute playing class we’d all Gather in the Catholic church in lame deer in the uh social room um and we and kids from St Le would come over uh boys and girls so to help them but I’ve never yet honestly had a woman asked to me to show her how to make one but I have had women asked to play them so again even the playing May May raise some controversy depending on the age but the way I look at it again is the way my grandfather looked at it if it can help a young woman be a better person and feel better about herself I’m more than happy to to assist them any other questions raise your hand if you have a question I’ll come around okay when turkey legs selected you was it like a Hands-On um one onone saying you know I want you to carry on my tradition or was it with the whole assembly of people it was a one-on-one and my grandfather’s the one that taught me Douglas turkey legs uh taught Grover wolfo then wolfo taught my grandfather and my grandfather taught me but yes it was just a one-on-one and again to share with you those those things that he told me like I said if one does do play put it away for a while see how I’m living but no it was a one-on-one it was a one-on-one from the from the time of asking to the time of how to um find the wood and how to carve it and and the finished instrument it was a one-on-one once that was done it all it became a community thing as far as helping the community um I don’t think I’m stepping too far out of bounds by saying if you were to go to lame deer and ask if you had if the cheyen had a flute player I think 98% of the time my name would come up again there’s no certificate there’s no badge there’s no diploma that says that I am the flute maker the way this is um known to people is just like what I’m doing here I’m here and I’m sharing it with you and I have the proof to back it up so when you guys leave here you’re going to share it with a family member a friend that you saw Jay old mouse the Northern Cheyenne flute maker and player and again that’s how the news travels so again Jay we have time for you to play one more song If you uh audience would like him time play a song here and then uh I know there’s a this this program there was some information and the playing is is kind of brief you know it is brief but through being taught through being taught my immediate family requested that I put it on a cassette tape so I did put uh flute music on a cassette tape and then I did transfer it to a CD so um they are available my wife and son have them over here and if you purchase one it’s greatly appreciated but I do have uh a flute and it’s dedicated uh to my grandfather Douglas Glenmore again whose IND the name is Black Bear m go somewhere oh thank you Jay Round of Applause thank you very much for sharing if uh you don’t mind I don’t know how much time there is but you’re more than welcome to come on up here and take a closer look at these pictures because they are beautiful and they are awesome and I want to thank again you guys for inviting me the Lewis and Clark people and I want to thank you guys for coming out here today in this heat and and listening to this thank you very much if you are interested in purchasing J CD we’ll set you up Jay off to the side here um away near the building where you and your wife could sell your CDs so if you’re interested CJ off to the side here we’re going to

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Tent of Many Voices: 04090601TMB

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:57 +0000

genten welcome to the tent of many voices this tent is part of a traveling exhibit that has been following the Lewis and Clark Trail since January of 2003 set up in cities towns reservations all along the trail uh we have followed it all the way from the East St Louis up to the Mandan Villages and to the Pacific Ocean and now we’re on the return Journey heading back East just like Lewis and Clark were 200 years ago Lewis and Clark made this journey in three years time period we’ll be making it as well in that same time frame but they would not have been able to complete their Journey had they not had the help and assistance of many of the different Native Americans that they met along the way in this tent of many voices we bring people in from different backgrounds different walks of life to tell their side of the Lewis and Clark Story or tell the side of the Native Americans and what their lives were like before Lewis and Clark and after Lewis and Clark so it is with great pleasure today that I introduce to you our next guest this is Terry Courtney and he’s going to be talking about fishing along the great Columbia River so let’s please make Terry welcome thank you very much uh if if any of you in the back room cannot hear me uh sometimes my voice gets real low so just raise your hand I’d really appreciate it I know you know it’s not fun to go somewhere and not understand or hear people I am the oldest of seven children I have one brother Five Sisters my ancestry starts here on the Columbia River the Wasco Little Village up here by Lone Pine Indian village by the Dells and where the Dell’s dam is there’s still some old structures there that where people had built modern type buildings and now they’re dilapidated but that’s where my ancestry starts from now we’ve been moved Inland uh to the waren Springs Indian Reservation which is about 90 miles or an hour and a half Inland it’s uh well I guess I need to start off with uh took the wig in my language is good day Ki NAA I’m just asking how are you I am fine IM always which means my name is always which is little brother the name I adopted from my grandpa and my grandfather I thought so much of it that I put it on my license plate and and so now I drive around in the countryside and I have have my own name on my own vehicle it’s kind of warm up here so it’s kind of kind of taking my mind off of where I need to be and and what I need what I need to cover um years ago most of the people on the Columbia River never really traveled away from the river when the fish started running we needed to catch each and every fish that we could but even though there was an abundance of salmon we had people in our tribe that would tell us when we had enough fish years ago there was between 9 and 16 million fish that run the Columbia River but even then we had bad times just as much as we had the good times and the way our people looked at it the way I look at it as a a person of vision is every time you have a bad time the Creator is testing you to see what you’re going to do the fish are low the water’s low the huckleberries aren’t there very much so the Creator is putting you to a to I believe put us to a test how do we combined as a tribe or as a clan to harvest and take only what we need then the rewards come every so often I was raised in a boarding school and uh to well I lived way up in the woods with my mom and dad and uh one day this big black Buick drives up and this lady all dressed in white which is a I thought was a nurse got out and was talking to my parents and the next thing I knew I was I was 5 years old and I was riding down to worm Springs to a boarding school so I never got to see my parents for about about three years and it was it was quite different because in the boarding school we had to to get up and then we had to all wash and get cleaned up all by a certain time and then we had to line up outside and be in and actually be inspected while you’re five six years old and on up to the eighth grade so yeah I never I never spoke any of my language I did not have long hair so in a way I was blessed there I I wasn’t picked on because I I did I only knew English but my friends around me that knew knew the language were forbidden to talk it and there were consequences the same as there was consequences when we were learning things to like to read and write if we consistently didn’t get it right then they would kind of tap you on the hands right here and if you persist if they thought you persisted on being nonconformist and they would turn your hands over and and uh lay it across your hands so a lot of our elders grew up that grew through the system before I completed it did not ever want to be called an Indian or didn’t want to be known as Indian because there was too much heartache with it so even now you run into some of the tribal people that are seem to be real hard noosed and everything and it’s it’s something that you know is just not passed out of the mind and then it passed on this is what some of the kids have learned but I was fortunate enough to have my dad come in from from outside our culture he was from Alaska he came down into tahola area and was raised raised there passed among missionaries for probably four or five families before he’s adopted so the first thing they did is after they got him they asked him when was his birthday and he just said what’s a birthday so they thought you’re not serious and they said well I don’t know what a birthday is so they said well that’s the day you were born and so we got you on September the 17th you’re you’re about this old so September the 17th 19 12 is your birthday and the preacher and his wife there were English their last name was ellworth so they said well you’re not really our son so we’re going to pick you out a name so they went down the list and Y and behold here’s Courtney so that’s how we got our name uh and my dad uh was raised off the reserv ation and so when he met my mother we no longer even though we lived on reservation we no longer had ties to the language we didn’t have ties to to the beliefs and stuff that we had but the one thing my dad did teach me was to when I we mainly were fishermen I mean not not as you see a net but a fly fisherman and so that’s all my dad knew so he always events he told told me as I got older I was catching too many fish and so did my grandpa so he said you need to take only what you need so if you go down and you catch fish for a week for the week you’re no longer going to fish so you have to string your fishing out so that’s that was my first knowledge of of having to deal with anything in nature I’d like to share with you now uh years before then when uh our people first lived on the river we depended on the salmon steel head coo whatever was in that River at time the fishing methods uh vary greatly from most of the stuff that you you see now uh the Water the Columbia River as you now see it wasn’t the way it is was then it was a series of whole bunch of different Rapids turbulent boiling water in a lot of spots and this was about the only spot that their tribes could really fish because when the river was wide in spots the fish were all over so was the channels narrowed up and the water became turbulent and rough and this was where the fish congre at it and they would pull up in holes and some would go straight on through and some would go around and rest and so our people would had different methods of fishing for the salmon and uh before we get too much into that you probably see the fiber on this and you’ll say that that is really thick how can you catch a salmon with this but most of our Nets and stuff were made out of fibers this is in this would have been the inner bark of Cedar and the fine mesh on the Nets their finer would have been out of dog bang uh Nettles and there’s some other materials that are long forgotten or that our people didn’t want to share with other tribal members so it just disappeared with the coming of livestock onto the reservations and uh not people not having enough Savvy to to uh have enough crops to feed the feed the wildlife then they naturally ate everything in sight so a lot of a lot of things that we knew medicines fibers disappeared this is just a this is just a little baget I don’t have a dip net which would be about this long and fit on a hoop this size to about like this and each one of these strands the women would go out and they would Harvest they would Harvest these plants some of them are this short and some are as tall as I am they take and they they break the plant up and they use uh stones and until they get the fiber and then they peel them back and then they take all the they would take all the fiber and if you put all strands together and they would they would spin them like this until they got to the end to be frayed so then you put another another one on here and you put this over and uh if you wanted them larger then you left them at a small small diameter and if you wanted them larger you just took two or three whatever you needed and they did the same thing so to make a dip net I would estimate that it would take uh probably about two lengths of a football field for these women to spin this twine so that the men could weave the Nets and usually the men were the only ones that W the Nets and the women did as they do now they did most of the work they spent all the twine they were always consistently working on that plus they had to take care of the children then when the salmon came the men would bring the salmon to the women and they would cut it and they would hang it to dry most of it would you know there was no refrigerator or anything so most of it had to be dried so it was all Flay and laid out a dried so they were continuously hanging fish cutting them hanging them and uh the way I understood it is nothing was ever wasted in The Villages they had dogs so they would take care of all and dry all the meat the backbones the heads and the heads after they they dried them laid out they were called Muk each strip of dried jerky was called cage that’s like jerky and uh the backbone I I I don’t know the words for that but they had dried skins too and after they got through that they ate the eggs and I I I never wanted to eat the eggs because they just you know they look slimy they pretty color but they didn’t smell good so you know to kind of get off the subject a little bit one year um my little daughter was sitting there and she’s a year and a half old so we catch the fall salmon and the fall salmon have like marbles for eggs because they’re so big whereas the the spring salmon they have skin and the eggs are real small so they’re together so I’m looking at these eggs I’m looking at my daughter and I thought I’m going to see what she’s going to do so I rolled out about 10 or 12 and she starts eating them and I put some more on there and she started eating them so I thought well if she can eat them so can I so I ate it and it really isn’t any different than a boiled egg which to me was surprising it’s just the thought of it and now we get back to where the the women doing the work and after the women did this and uh certain women were picked out of the tribe and they would go and travel up to about 6 months away from away from each Village and Clans and they would make this big circle going up into the like like uh we take the May sometime the celery comes out and they go out and they harvest the celery and that’s only edible during the season they can’t be can’t be dried or anything but then they go and they start digging Roots there’s about five or six different types of roots there’s some that that are around I think they kind of call them wado down here that are down in the will Amit River back in uh our country is called looks and you have dck which is about this long and about that wide looks like a carrot they’re all about six to8 8 in underneath the ground then you have pahi and it looks it’s a little root system a plant that only sticks this high of the ground and you only dig down possibly maybe an inch and they they fan out but they’re they’re in a rock patch so all these can be dried so the some of these women would go out and they would pick the roots and they would dry them and then from there they would make it into the higher country where they had the medicine stuff Camas and and other stuff then they from there they hid into huckleberries and once they were into the huckleberries and they dried them up there by building fires and uh having finding rotten logs and they would they would sh uh scoop them out a certain way this is what I was told by one of my friend scoop them out a certain way then the uh one woman would be in charge and they would put a bunch of huckleberries out and then every every half hour they would turn the berries and turn the berries so that’s how they they took care of everything so when you came back a big basket of huckleberries like this might be just a little little conglomeration like this and I knew that they had our people long ago had to have Foods where you could travel because uh uh as as the tribes moved through different areas some of the people didn’t like you and they were saying this is my country so you didn’t dare build a fire so you had to be able to travel through different parts of the country and I think uh through this whole United States as we know it I think all the tribes had their own their own version of what they call pimkin pimkin the base on there’s two different types of bases I guess there could be three now but they had one that was they ground up the salmon and that was mixed with with uh uh all the berries and The Roots and stuff and then if you wanted the meat then you took elk or you took the deer meat and you ground it up and put it into them but the key to all this I’ve been hearing two different versions and for years I’ve always wanted to try and make some but no one would give me the ingredient so finally three years ago up River they’re talking talking about how essential the steel head is to the tribal people because they cut the underbelly off and then they hang it out and they catch it and dry it and this is what they mix with the with the pimkin and that just that so won become rancid and so just lately I read another book and it says they take the oil out of a chinook so it’s kind of a I’d hate to Tri in a it then the other one is I say three is because now you have people that are into to non meats or anything so you could possibly make that into all vegetable dish if you have any questions along the way and don’t understand or or want to know something just don’t be afraid to hold up your hand or say excuse me and uh so as our as our women folk travel then the men Folk it was up to them to scr the shores and and uh meand are out a little bit looking for whatever deer they could find that were that would be near the river because the elk were up in the higher country so that’s why our people used the uh columia River and the natural resource out of it which would be the fish that was our currency so we needed buffalo buffalo highs and certain times of the year people would bring in from the from the Doos bring in the Buffalo hies bring in the obsidian that we needed and then tail your shells off the coast so there’s various Commodities that were traded up and down the river and I’m pretty sure a lot of you have heard of salila Falls which was the the last of the great trading centers but it it was not the biggest it was the last is the only reason you hear about it and people saying it was the biggest but it was not the biggest up here by the Dells there’s a place called cyhawk where horse Steep Lake is that was known as probably the one of the biggest trading centers and if you look at the Gorge as you’re going up it’s all steep walls you get up to the DS and it opens up so it was easier for tribes to come in and and Venture and trade right there so that was why most of the big trading was done up River until you got to the mouth of the coli River and then there is where uh the main tribe there was a chunuk nation and uh as you come up you have different different uh Clans and bands of tribal people like in this area uh see it’s a River Bridge of the Gods this was owned and fished by the dog River tribe and I think you I don’t know if you been aware of when loose and Clark came down they they dumped over a few times so they pulled out above the Cascade Rapids and went around and put their boats on the side and it ate all all their equipment out you know to dry what they didn’t know well the Indians came along and Indians start picking up stuff and walked off and so they were hey what’s going on you know the people stealing from us right in daylight you know but the dog River people owned this area they made the trail so you had to pay a fee the same as you would have to come you know pay over to come over this bridge so there was a kind of a big M uh misunderstanding and and unfortunately it was in black and white saying that you know they were thieves and stuff but uh and of course you know the some some tribes they if they saw something they like then you you better keep your your hand or an eye on it pretty close because it could tend to disappear once in a while but most of time if our people saw something they like they would try to trade for it and so I always looked at the uh trading back into I know one of the uh necklaces was made on the coast out here by the ha Indians and made it up to Columbia and it event she made it back to Milwaukee Wisconsin so I always looked at it as the the tribes had internet first it was just a lot slower um and uh I also have a name that was given to me uh in the honor of my uh grandfather and it is tea tea a cold but right now I don’t use it too much because there’s a little bit of conflict with an another member of our tribe so I’ll I’ll take on two other two other names and then I will take my grandfather’s name still which I which I’m entitled to but the names are given to to all the children as they’re growing up so that you’ll always remember your ancestors so even now when I went into the service I came back out I didn’t know some of these kids and I’d only been gone for two years so I’d asked them their name and I didn’t recognize their last name so I’d say well who’s your mother I who’s your grandmother then I knew who they were so to us it was like this is your this is another way to trace your DNA um trying to think here back to when we’re grown up along the river now I’m not sure how the female part interacted because I think the daughters as they grew up there were just taken right in to the to the all the work you know the hard work and everything but I know it for a while until a certain age the boys and girls all played together but then there was a certain time where um Boyhood kind of died and they had they used to have a ceremony for when you when you were a young man you were no longer a child anymore they also had a ceremony for honoring the girls into Womanhood and this was a big thing you know it was nothing to be ashamed of they had they had uh rights that they that they did for them and it was astounding to to find out that uh some of the I don’t know if it’s some of the tribes or all the tribes but you have uh uh right of fertility and this is actually where they carved the stone out of a excuse me but they carved a stone into a penis and this is a right for uh for fertility I don’t know how that went on but to me it was It was kind of different to see some of these things and you I mean the way we’re raised now you’re kind of halfway ashamed to see some of this stuff or to even talk about it and as as a young boy if I’d have been growing up in the village when I start turning to a young man the first thing I would have to do is start learning how to make the knots to weave a net and you were during the winter we didn’t fish we didn’t hunt everything was away from us everything was hibernated and so the tribes everywhere always looked at as a winner and stuff is when you when you’re a family you spend time together you teach each other by Word of Mouth you teach each other your language you teach each other the rights and stuff if you’re going to work on Nets you want to work on them then if you’re working on your hunting gear you work on them then we were not supposed to as the salmon is running we’re not supposed to be working on making I mean we’re supposed to be ready because each and every fish that you caught made a difference so as a young man would make they would have to make say four or five Ines or so then as you got older then they got more and more but probably by the time you’d you been working on for two or three years you had to be able to make a dip net and the net material was fairly strong then so you you didn’t have to work on too many but after the coming of the white man please don’t take me wrong at the coming of the white man then the tribes were pushed off of places where the natural material is livestock came down if they weren’t fed right then they ate everything in sight then a National Force comes along and you can’t go there and harvest anything so our people start turning to twine you go to store twine so you know you catch two three fish they make a big hole in it so our people the boys as they were uh growing up in the 50s they were always constantly making Nets because of the material that they had to work with and finally they came up with h with nylon twine and that was much better but it wasn’t treated so it tend to be very slick so it was a trial and error of how to make a net to make different different types of knot so that the when the fish H in they wouldn’t split open the mesh and go right on through so even nowadays we have a regular Mash knot and a half double knot double knot and a half and the double knot and a half comes in really handy because that’s when people started working a monofil line so it’s the fish couldn’t be able to see the Nets and stuff on the the boy the well all the all the children in the family when you’re growing up we have laws that are Unwritten and those we had to learn word for word and sometimes as children are say you’re a teen you’re 19 20 years old and grandfather starts off with you know when someone dies on the river and the kids will say grandpa we’ve heard it a million times and he’ll he’ll say but you haven’t heard it enough because when I pass away you have to be able to tell your children the same thing and one of the reasons they didn’t write it down is because because you cannot amend it you cannot add an amendment to an unwritten law now people can even nowadays are people in the tribe you know it’s not written down but people don’t really know so they they got an idea so then it’s up to myself or some other Elders that know their laws that are supposed to be which I did not know until I was about 36 year years old and I started doing doing this fishing and doing hunting because up until then I had never been involved in any of my treaty stuff I just went to watch the dancing and the celebrations and there was no power I was in I went to the ruse feast and everything and I didn’t speak the language and they talked their native language so I had no idea what they were saying or what they were doing and as I got older while the elders started realizing that there was a gap the language wasn’t any good what they knew because a lot of the young people didn’t know what they were talking about uh in honor of the uh fish when we were what we’re supposed to still do is when the fish comes up well let me back up some years ago when the river was Wild and the water was turbulent we could drink out of it anywhere and the main reason being that as the water spilled down it turbulated and so all the all the stuff that was impurities or any solids that were in the water would naturally float to the top so even nowadays I know I I’ve tried to share with people if you’re out rafting somewhere you lose your water you don’t have any water find some tumbling water you take your cup and you turn it upside down put it below the water surface about a foot turn it over and swish it a little bit you bring it up because you have the more pure water underneath as you come up to the top everything flows off so you can you can get your water that way now when the Waters narrowed some fish went through and some came up and were washed back down some came up to the falls and I think you’ve all seen the picture where the bear is standing out there waiting for the for the fish for a demonstration a lot of people or a lot of our old people would take and they would have a a net assembly with this is a waterfall right here so the net would be shoved out here fish jumping in you know there’s 9 million fish so there’s no problem with getting a fish so when a fish two or three fish in then they pull it back in and on the other end of this there was another net so when you pull this one in club took the fish out you were pushing it back and forth so you always had a had a net in the water at this level and so that was one of the ways that back in the old days that they got them plus they uh they did a a dip net system I guess I’ll have to kind of back up here have do you all know what a dip net is dip dip when they dipping just sweeping the water anyway since I got this here I was going to make it into a set net but I realized that usually this is usually a fur Pole Douglas fur white fur tends to to break and even though this is a tubing it has about the same principle but you usually need to find where the where the fish come up because most of your fish are going to be out in the middle of the river and that’s the plan that’s that’s how nature takes care of herself make sure that all the beig all the good fish are going up and then you have the weaker strand which comes in comes in along the banks so you take and you you dip the water come out like this and when you hit the end and you raise up come over plunge it in real quick and and then come down and as you’re coming down you there’ be rocks and stuff so you have to eventually you you’ll find out where all the rocks are so you bring this up over the water you come in like this and as you’re coming down like this and all a sudden it’ll Tremor well the fish has got in there and it’s trying to get out so you just jerk up real quick and the old ones didn’t didn’t have this but they had a a real long a real long n on them and they were probably three times as big as this and they were all wooden so they pull them up and then whack them and then get them out and then start scooping again nowadays they have uh metal hoops and uh when you catch this salmon now most of them you jerk real quick and this will collapse down into a bag so your fish is hung out right here so as you’re sweeping the water and coming down through here and sometimes you can feel you can feel it you can feel when you miss this it’ll slide right right right by them and you come back up and you come down and then when they get in there sometimes if you’re not quick enough just because you have a net you know they won’t be in there oh the other thing too is you the fish hear that and they’re gone they’ll turn and they’re going down the river see this more gentle it’s that’s more like wood so wood was always recognized as being a lot better but became became more work and harder to get this is what I would go through even if I was on a platform I come down enough enough time to I’m a night fisherman and our tribe years ago used to never never hardly fish at night because it was dangerous and there was so many fish you could get what you could always get what you wanted so a set net you just take this over plunge it into the water and you have a what they call a tie down rope so you move this down you just make sure this is tight and you just stand on it and so the water tubulates and Bone bounces and it moves and stuff so you have to get used to I like putting my hand on it because if a fish hits the hoop on the outside I can feel I can feel sometimes feel a spin or if it hits straight onto the pole because you can hear a thud but you don’t you it’s hard to tell because of the the water whether the salmon has hit the hoop or has hit the pole so if it hits a pole you feel you can feel it through here and the nothing down here so the reason they they call this a set net is because as the water rises you’ll have to move up with it and sometimes you have to to move in a straight line either way so that’s why they these trigger strings are usually like this and we usually just try a twig on here real quick like that and when you do get a fish and you pull it up you get it here on the deck and just like this you have to watch for the club and everything you get it out here and then you always got to make sure that you put it up here because that fish is if you put it down here that fish is out and more more than likely at night he’s going to be gone you put it out here and then you look for your club and I usually spin the and then try to try to hit the salmon between the right between the eyes on top of his head and the reason I I don’t use a flashlight we don’t have very many fishing places but we have more and more fishermen so if I build a platform and I leave or I do something I have people coming down and bother me so if they don’t know how much fish I’m catching the chances are they’re not going to be down bothering my fishing place so in the dark the salmon is a streak like this and it’s narrow and it gets wide to the head so I know where the head is so you just reach down there and push down on it and then you smack him gently and then when he just shivering then you can you can feel up on the head and and I’ve never hit myself in the in the hand then you have to pull the salmon out and lot of as the fish are running I usually just slide the fish to the back of the platform take this and push it in real quick take this underneath a 2×4 and then you take it around and lash it down and no you have to reach out here to find the string in the dark okay it’s working real good nothing is hit so then you get up go back put your fish back in the in the box and come over and and uh I use a uh I’ll have a 2×4 out here so that if the fish does bounce he won’t go off the edge because sometimes you’re trying to find a club and you get over here and you get too far over this one if he drops over the edge and you have to bring him up over the lumber and the lumber will catch on the net and you have problem s and I also have a 2×4 on this side and I put a flashlight right here in a flashlight in case I need it and there’s a what’s missing on this is a a setting that we have one wire that comes to the front here another one that will come about from right here to this side of the hoop and it comes underneath here it’s called a tieback so when you throw it over so when you’re fishing at night you have to I usually we grab the pole and stuff and then you have to search for the trigger string put it in your hand like this so that when you throw it over it’s it doesn’t catch you on the feet or it doesn’t catch you behind the back of the head because it will and when you put it over most of us just put it over and you you push it hard so if this thing comes over the top of your head you could you could go in and we’re all tied with with uh safety ropes and so a tieback is is really essential because uh as the salmon come up they Glide along the Rocks that’s her guide path and the water’s spilling and boiling and turbul so when they come on here like this me and so if fish aren’t hitting in there I have to pull it up and then I have to untie everything actually everything water comes over here then I have to get out on this plank and I have to reach out out there and lengthen or shorten the wire then I come over here and then I have to take this one back it looks kind of dangerous when I first started this old guy told me you know all this stuff and I’m standing there and the only thing I’ve ever done is f fish you know you get out there and and here’s this platform sitting out there above the water get get on it oh man you’ve heard people say I wouldn’t get on that thing for it save my life so I’m thinking holy mackerel you know I go out there and I’m going like that and it’s so I finally got off and looked underneath and there’s a lot of lumber underneath there you know that we so wouldn’t pull forward rocks on the back and so I get out there and push a net over and the water takes it like this whoa you know no one told me the water was going to be that vicious you know so and then I hit another one where they said just push it over you know and and it’ll set in place and I put right here and I’m trying to grab the thing and the water keeps pushing this thing up and down and you’re trying to reach underneath you know and so it can be quite an experience I just I just finished this this is this one is a just out of uh store twine they call it I don’t know if you I don’t know if you remember store twine back when I was growing up you ordered groceries and you put them in a box and when the box is overflowing they put the lid the lid staying straight up they got this grocery twine and they wrapped around two or three times and tied it and so that’s what this is is just is mainly for a for a demo it fits on about a about a 12T hoop which is probably about like this we can fish with Hoops up to on or I fish on a dute river in Central Oregon uh we we can use up to 16t hoop which means I could walk over and I could just go like this and walk into the to the NIT to the hoop and some of the some of the uh this is one where we fish up by the walls that made for a 16t 16 ft hoop and it is tapered I worked 8 to five and when I go down a fish I I would miss fish so I kept thinking how am I going to make this better so I got this how to make a net book even though my uncle had taught me how to make one and so I thought I’m going I’m going to get greedy so I made the net real big on the bottom so pull them here and and I can see the fish going down the River it was so big the fish had turn around and come out so then I went back and I made so I made it tapered a little bit so then when the fish come in they hit the back then they’re there’re they’re hooked up for a split second so I was able to catch more fish so then I just as my Nets got longer I just started using the taper and U there isn’t that many fish so a lot of stuff that I that I learn that I have I watch other fishermen fish like the tie down that holds the hoop right up against the bank well you go up there and and you’re waiting for your turn to fish with some of these guys and you can feel the fish bump you know and if bump again you know so you say well aren’t you going to move it and I say well what are you going to move it for they’ll go it eventually you know I mean that’s that’s that’s no other way of sitting it is so a lot of times I go up there while they’re sitting there and just talk to them and I reach on back and grab that tight down wire and then I just pull on it you know okay well I won’t tell them nothing because they know how to fish so when they leave I’ll just adjust it my way and then I catch what I need and then put it back the way you know I’m for the fish I’ll be I’ll be truthful so pardon me not really it’s it’s it’s all in the mind uh like on a Columbia there there is no choice because the water’s so slow you know the water’s so slow you have to have a big fairly big hoop and the net has to be really long because they get to the back and if you had a set net or something and you’re trying to pull it you know by the time you start pulling it up the fish have got so big time to uh to turn around and they come out so they in the Columbia they they fish up to 26 30t Di dier of Hoops which I could be like this you know and the net is from here to the end of the stage you know and it’s it’s it’s getting a little tougher you know there there isn’t very many places like that to fish I think the the Klickitat River the dut River the yakar river a little bit you know not too much u a lot of places are just disappearing where you can catch fish but that that’s one of the things I believe been been concerned is uh arguing with our tribe is because like now the fish are not very there isn’t very many numbers but the way that our people fish you fish whether it was good years or bad years because what you’re doing is you’re taking out the weak strand so if you close the season completely you got the weak Strand and you know you have them in a mix so you delete your your uh pool hate to say it Terry but we’re out of out of time I know you guys probably have questions for Terry because this is an interesting topic but um I’m sure Terry can stick around and uh you guys can talk to him ask questions in the back of the ten many voices if you don’t mind so we can get set up for the next program which will be York he will be here to tell his story of the Expedition so thank you so much

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Tent of Many Voices: 06120602

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:55 +0000

is part of a traveling exhibit that has been following the Lewis and Clark Trail since January of 2003 started in monachello the place of Jefferson’s dream for a western Journey went across the eastern states then to St Louis from St Louis to the Mandan villages in North Dakota and then last year from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean and this year we’re on the return Journey just as Lewis and Clark were 200 years ago ago so just to let you know 200 years ago they were up at Wei Prairie talking about how beautiful the C Bloom was so if you get a chance stop by on the other side of our Sandwich Board there and we have this day in history what happened and while you’re here be sure and see all of our other exhibits here on our site and also across the street many other things coming and new things coming in every day we do have program schedules in the back so feel free to Avail yourself of one of those note there are many changes and our most upto-date changes are made on our front desk schedule so stop by there and see if the program you’re looking at is one that you really want to see and if it’s really the one that’s on the schedule because we have had some changes here in the tent of many voices we invite people in from different backgrounds and different walks of life to tell their side of the story and the stories that we tell here in this tent are local history and culture stories Native American history and culture stories and Louis and Clark stories so with that wide variety we have a wide latitude in the programs that we give here so at this time I would like to introduce our speaker Mary Jane Souther and her topic is visit with an elder but often in the Native American communities you may have heard about how the stories are shared and they’re shared with the from the elders down generation to generation so she’s going to be talking about some of these elders and the ability to listen to those Elders as the stories are told so let’s please make welcome Mary Jane Souther okay okay oh thank you and uh welcome to the tend of many voices uh I was really thrilled when they asked me if I would come and do a presentation and uh I guess some of the other Elders uh declin and so I’m very happy to be able to share um a story and the story is uh of sharing and listening and uh traditionally all our um tribal meetings our presentations are always opened with a prayer and this morning I was to have a um a a young lady uh who is um serving as a princess for one of the powow and she was unable to come down she was a relative of mine and also a descendant of Chief uh Looking Glass and so at this time I’d like to offer a prayer and uh before we get started gracious father we just thank you for this day this day that we are committed to sharing with our friends and we ask that you will help us to come together and to bond in our communities we thank you for the creation that you have made of each of one of each one of us and we need to come back together in harmony we thank you for the Earth for Mother Earth for the Sun and the Moon the stars and the rain dear Lord we just know that you are providing all these things to make us aware of you so now be with us as we as we continue to this speech this we ask in your precious name amen okay thank you um to begin with I kind of let would like to let you know who I am I my name is Mary Jane Zer and I’m an elder uh I just turned 70 years old May 29th and um it’s uh everybody says well you know how do you feel you know and I’m definitely not feeling anything I’m feeling like like me you know and I guess when we look back and times uh Elders used to be in moccasins and scarfs on their hair and around their head and um always working you know and I haven’t come to that yet of wearing moccasins and U putting a scarf on my head but that was our definition of Elders because I come in that era where when um this is the way you looked at your elders but my name uh Indian name is tatatu which means little duck and I was born and raised in CI Idaho and I had uh four brothers and three sisters and uh we um lived oh I guess I said we lived in Tami and was um uh brought up by our parents lonus and uh Isabelle Walker and it was always traditional almost to get a nickname and uh when I was born my dad gave me the nickname of Tootsie and so I give you permission to call me Tootsie it uh whenever they call uh out when I worked with the tribe they call they would call for Mary chain S you know and said Mary out there you know who’s that you know and then they’d say Tootsie and then everybody knew who I was but I have done that at many levels at this um county level the state level National level um as a um as a so social worker and um it it works you know I can uh also uh you know I’m identified as Tootsie so I really feel comfortable with that and I feel very loved uh when somebody calls me that because it’s very endearing I have um I come from a very matriarchal family uh as most uh Native uh Native uh families are and um my matriarchal family uh was was all in CI we were part of that family that um was taken with um missionaries uh we were separated our tribe was separated the centralization of the centralization of the uh coming of the missionaries was in Spalding and um they uh you know the missionaries uh never really knew you know weren’t uh tuned into to what Indians were what Indians beliefs were but they come with their word and so there was a separation of us a separation of where um we were taken to the camea area of my my my people my family and uh although we have relatives here in in laway well then we had some real negative things about being the Christian Indians and the lower Indians were known as the heathens and that was so wrong and to this day I um really you know kind of get frustrated at it uh you know of back then but today I think that um our uh we’ve come to a Harmony where we all know each other and we come you know there’s Tami laway norino that um that represents uh where our people live and laway being the centralization of our uh services such as our Bia are used to be our Indian Health Service which is mimu Health now and uh the be Bia and so we have to come to down here to laway to um uh you know for any kind of assistance any kind of um negotiations I got Bia uh about our land and um long ago there was a um and allotments were giving out to the land to the people and um my my family had allotments uh up in the ca area I guess it was according to where you were living that you were given an alotment at that time we had a very large uh reservation and it got dwindled down I couldn’t find a map that I would uh wanted to show for this presentation but back to um my uh family everything in our our family was done matriarchal you know uh I always thought of my grandmother and my mother as being the first feminist and uh they they were you know like we’re all known as gatherers uh it was my mother and my grandmother that would do went out huckleberry picking Ro Gathering um and as we Grew Older uh my mother would bring us down here to go cherry picking and we also went down to get raspberries so thank you so we were um you know our our guider guidance was given by the woman in our family we were also brought in up in a very Christian home uh Christian home where back then and I wish you know sometimes that we could revert especially the growing up of my grandchildren my um uh other relatives the young ones because we were brought up in a very Christian home where there was no televis no computers there was nothing that would distract us from Sunday Sunday we all went to church and um my grandmother great-grandmother uh made the rules she told us that there would be no sewing on Sunday there would be no cooking on Sunday all the wood had to be chopped because we cooked on a um wood stove and so everything was done accordingly and if you um I guess in my young mind at that time when when we would um do something like sew a button on I thought oh I’m going to go hell you know because of of the teachings I had and and the strictness of it but my U great grandmother was a man a woman of many things she had so much wisdom and she never uh spoke a word of English it she used to try you know and I think when they’d laugh at her she would you know become kind of intimidated but we my brother and I out of our eight children were taught to speak our language and uh my brother and I Jerry excuse me at the time um we come from that era where when you when the first born granddaughter was brought if it it was a granddaughter you were given to your grandmother to raise and nurture you and this didn’t happened to me until I was about 9 or 10 and my grandmother uh my dad we had a farm and I had uh two cute little sisters that were born you know a few years after me and at the time I was the apple of my dad’s eye and my brother was the apple of my dad’s eye cuz he was teach teaching them all about farming and um all of a sudden mom said um let’s get your clothes together and I thought oh good we’re all going somewhere you know the whole family wrong she her and my dad gave me a ride down to my grandmother’s and we got down there and took my things off the car and as we went in the house my grandmother come up to me and grabbed my hand and she said uh your bedroom’s up on the right upstairs and I thought what is happening you know in your Yen mind you know you don’t know what is going on you know you don’t know that this was a tradition being carried and I was really hurt I was really hurt in my own own little mind I was thinking you know my Dad hates me and and how dare though my little sisters be born so cute you know and it was it was a rivalry that I was I was building up and but as I got older and was explained to me and I had to go to mental health for this they told uh they said when did you first become angry in your life and uh I reported I said I I’ll have to come back on my next session and let you know where my Angry where my anger was well I did come and I finally said it was when I got dumped you know and and not knowing our traditional ways because uh you know we we carried some traditions but we were not of um you know we did not weren’t allowed to go to powow we weren’t allowed to go uh watch stick games or anything like that because the missionaries had stripped us of all all kind of interactions with uh our cultural ways and in fact that wasn’t even told that was our cultural ways but finally I got myself straightened and then when I was young I come to the time uh when my mother you know like I said we were gatherers and it was up to my mother you know to make sure we had uh she provided the food for us and everything and she um uh come down here to apple picking and we had a bunch of families that would come together and it was wonderful because we were interacting with our people that lived in laway and this was the only time that we were ever going to get to know our relatives and granted it was hard because we were fighting all the time I don’t know how many times I get hit with an apple or my face mashed with strawberries and all of a sudden you know and we love to share we love to put our our meals together and at that time we used to sit on the ground and we would make our table in the middle and everybody sit there and eat well then one night after we had all finished working uh my grandmother and the mother of a young man decided that I was going to become his wife when I grew up and he was the one that was the most honious and I thought there’s no way I’ll marry him because by then I’m already 12 1 you know and it was um you know it was when you know and I think about now when were they going to include me in on in the planning of my life you know as as kids do now why they got their plans projected and we’re and back then we weren’t I guess allowed to think or we were guided but I was really happy that I was brought up in that uh that at that time because I did a lot of I did a lot of things that my kids don’t do now like my kids never did and I always wish that they would have had the chance to be a part of that to be out there to Milk The Cow to go out and feed the chickens which was a and clean out the Brer room and it just you know having all those fun things to do because today you know our life is so fast and the interaction of families isn’t as it should be but we there are still some Indian families you know that keep their family together that keep a structure and uh with the coming of alcohol and drugs it’s it’s a hard thing it’s really a hard thing and um it affected I think it affects most families it affected our family and uh it was something that we all had to I think I think because of the effect it had on our family we have come together as a family and um have used that those deaths as a lesson that we give to our children and let them know how much how much were um uh susceptible to becoming an alcoholic and it’s isn’t um you know it’s a disease you know and um it was um a real terrible thing to go through it’s a terrible thing today that we go through uh with alcohol and drugs while working with the um neur tribe I served as a child advocate and as a coordinator for uh domestic violence that was a hard one that was you know um we didn’t have a system set up but we were pushing it so fast that we never did really become effective uh in having those Services there because we had all your systems have to come together you know to work and doing something for the victim and doing something for the perpetrator and um it we tried everything we went to churches we went to counties I mean this was a sharing this is what I’m about is sharing and I have gone to all the Commissioners around here and all the Mayors in trying to enlist their help in uh providing this service and doing something with the perpetrators and to ensure the family you know that our main goal is family Unity but with with a different direction and it was a very challenging job that I had in my life and uh it just um you know I’m unemployed right now I will say I’m semi-retired but I don’t think I am because I still have people that count on me uh and getting uh summoned to the hospital or summoned to a domestic violence shelter or someone with a child abuse and um it’s you know we’re all in denial that these things are happening we’re in denial that um child sexual abuse is happening I know uh all our programs are under our ners tribal executive committee and they’re um you know they’re the ones that have to en you know that are there to ensure that we get all the needs met on the reservation and and uh when I brought up child sexual abuse incest they were in denial that it’s out there until it hits your family and I I would do everything to you know to convince them I took some films in I went out into the community you know and therefore why I was oh titsy you know she thinks you know she thinks that we’re all bad you know that everybody’s doing this and it isn’t that you know you’re trying to educate same way with our elders in uh our tribe we’re our tribe you know like I was telling you I said I used to respect you know the fact that they wear their moccasins and their hats and um when they’d go to church they’d have their Shaws it was a beautiful beautiful elders and uh we’re not that kind of Elders anymore you know and uh but because we’re growing with the world you know and I’m I’m certainly happy that I was able to have met all the elders everybody every Elder was everybody’s grandmother and it was so wonderful because they also guided you in your growing up years and back then uh family extension was there the aunts and the uncles were there and it just you know and you were ided by the church and I’m only speaking you know to my to my story and um I’m you know I’m really proud that and happy that I have been brought up you know in that way well I maybe before I go on let me I’ve got a uh show I need to show you my matriarchal uh Parts um the the first one that’s Hattie Axel she was my great grandmother and she was my P she was the one that did all the the dedication of us and the guidance of us in our uh Christian Life you know when we were in we you know course you know growing up you’re not aware but we knew that there was a Jesus and that there was uh you know what would happen to us we were never given that story about um what is it hell and heaven we were taught we weren’t told in a scary way and I remember this lady she would get into the church she’s very emotional lady she would get up in the church and give her testimony so um it would just so honest and she would start crying and it was you know when my P cried I cried you know because I was brought up by her and um sometimes you know she was very particular about who uh got to sleep with her uh and uh she had this old feather mattress bed and I always wanted to you know I when I’d get in there say p I’m scared and she’s okay get in so I’d get in and um sleep with her and I remember her smell so well she used menum for everything menum for the head the ears the knees the feet you know and uh it was you know it was a good sell it was and today I think about how at Comfort I was because she was so she was so loving you know and I just think today that oh how I wished we had more pffs you know and knowing that I’m a p i have one gr and it’s and I’m sorry I can’t give him the life that my P gave me she he was so um she was so tearing and so lovable and uh they had this uh back then the elders they were in competition in our CI area and when the federal when the federal agents first start handling you know the Bia we had agents for everything and they started this extension program and they gave all our women um seeds and so my pke didn’t hear about it until later all after it was announced SCH one and uh all that time she’d been doing her own garden and um they were giving money away for it you know so she entered it one year and wouldn’t let any of us help because this was her project and going to be her winning but you could see her and I can still see her today you know when when the wind would come after her beans were were ready to be uh separated here she’d just be uh letting the wind take the shaft off of the beans you know and it was and uh Gathering the corn and drying the corn you know to make uh Indian corn and there was so many wonderful things and did we ever have watermelon she loved watermelon she crossbreed some watermelon meons one time and just by chance it took and we had the most beautiful yellow watermelons ever they taste like a peach and um calou and a a melon and it was you know and that year she did win so I was so you know I just you know she was already up in age and uh she was doing this and uh I used to be so proud of her you know she’s going to win you we take it to school and tell all our cousins or whatever you know and they said well my grandma won it last year you know so we also put us into competition but um my cook died when um in 1954 and I graduated in 1955 and oh I know she wanted to she so wanted to see me graduate she uh was so worried about me because when I start going out with boys she’d say you’re related you know and then I get the history of who I was related to and then this one time I went down with a white boy and I told her I said uh PFF this is so and so and she turned around went in her bedroom and I thought oh no you know she’s she’s disapproving already well anyway um she also reminded me she had a favorite um granddaughter her name was Lily Moody and Lily died of U tuberculosis and it was at that era where the tuberculosis was very prevalent around our reservation and uh so she kind picked me up you know and I got back then you know a penny was a lot more than it is today and so I always had money you know and I always had all the goodies and um when I asked for some I I knew I had it and so this one time um in my junior year I was uh I got to put a prom and my PK said are you going with a soy apple and that’s what in our language means white boy white man and I said yes I said you tell me I’m related to everybody you know and so I was really defeating myself because she told me at that time she said if you’re going to continue to go with white boys I plan to disinherit you and you know at that time land didn’t mean nothing to me getting an inheritance didn’t mean nothing to me you know I was pretty safe in in Comfort at a comfort zone while I was growing up and I um so I told her that I wanted to go to my junior prom so she says well let’s go to louon and so this boyfriend of mine had a real hopped up car and here we come from Tami we get down here to Leon and uh she hands me some money and she said I’m just going to stay in the car and uh she loved to eat at Majestic Cafe down here and anyway we uh I got this gown a beautiful gown one that I thought I wouldn’t even dare think of I had to think of something that was going to be proper you know covering my shoulders and I thought no I dare I’m going to DARE so I got this gown but it had a little cave and so uh you know we all had kind of real strict rules at our house and so we’re coming to the night of the prom oh first before we uh you know louon used to be at two-way street on Main Street and my uh book you know um I uh drove very cautiously you on this I we’d get to a place you know where there’s a lot of pedestrians and my P would tell me in India and go ahead and run them over they’re just soy apples you know there’s a lot of them and I said oh P then I get picked up you know but she was also very humorous she had a lot of I mean she was fun but she was strict one time uh so then when I got home and I got ready was getting ready for the prom and I kept waiting for her then we didn’t have bathrooms in the house and our water was outside and so I had warmed up a bunch of water on the uh wood stove so I’d already taken a a semi bath and I thought how am I going to you know how am I going to shave under my arms because you know I know that my P would not allow me to shave under my arms and and we kind of you know grew up knowing what were the dos and don’ts and I knew that wasn’t going to pass so I thought she went to bed and so boy I jumped in there where my granddad uh did he shaving and I got all all my water and just as I was lifting my arm up she comes walking in and oh I got it and she said Okay I want to see your dress and I thought oh no you know she’s going to so I come down with my dress on and I thought well put that cape on but it was a see-through cape and I thought well I put a sweater on you know and by then she was already halfway up the stairway and I had I’ve got to show her you know so when I showed her she was just telling me you know you’re you know you’re setting yourself up for trouble because look some man can just go and reach in front of you or reach down behind you because it was a strapless gown and I thought about that and it made me kind of embarrassed I was wearing it because she had told me that so she was kind of also our conscience and uh really did a lot of you know you sit rules that were set you sit in a chair and you sit with your legs crossed you never allow your your legs not to be crossed you didn’t laugh with men you didn’t put makeup on you didn’t wear fingernail polish and you didn’t you know do all these things that have already been you know embedded in your mind um by watching you know what the rest of the family was doing especially the females in the family and you know I guess now I think of all the Impressions you know that she made uh every morning we had um a morning worship if we were up we sat with it um we’d have a Bible reading and a and a scripture read and then we would have um at lunchtime we had our our prayer everything was with prayer in the evening we would have service my uh Granddad used to play piano and that was probably the most entertainment we ever had in the house at that time and um he loved to play so we all learned to sing you know and I think um I think of then had I paid attention you know our um our uh translated hymns were son without a book at church and uh now we have to have a book you know that were singing our uh church songs but it was you know it was a good upgrading then and uh she really you know impressed upon me and we I tried to impress along with our family by telling the stories uh about what our p meant and everything was what M Isa that was are you listening to me did you hear me because that was a command you know did you hear me and when it was real serious it used to be did you hear me Tootsie or did you hear me Mary Jane and that was also with all the grandmothers that I had down in laway um when we’d go sweating down there they were always saying what missa you know Mary Jane you know I thought how come they’re picking on me you know but then now I think about it it was because they loved me and it was because they cared how I was U being brought up the next one um uh next picture I have is my mother my mother was Isabelle Moody Walker and she was a mother of four boys and four girls she was a wonderful caring mother that um I think I learned all my caretaking skills from all the matriarchs in my family mom was one that would bring in if somebody would tell her there’s a child out there that is running around and has nobody uh taken care of them well we got them you know and I always thought we lived in this very huge house well they tore that house down about oh about 10 years ago that we lived in I couldn’t believe how we all fit in there you know it was um a lean two bedroom two of them a kitchen and a living room and but my mom always said that was the happiest times of her life when she lived in the village and uh everything centered around our church uh mom headed up the quilt making she headed up the woman Society it was just a wonderful uh leadership that they were showing and when when they would all come together all the kids come together with their parents with their Grandma their moms and uh then we would have our dinners there then we’d be able to go out and play and um I just you know I am just so thankful that um you know my mother taught us how to cook and I know to this day when I make a cake they said oh you’re making a mom Walker cake you know and it’s and it it it you know at the time when they say that and then later on I think about it you know that was some that was you know they made a good um they had a good impression of my mom’s cooking you know and uh my mom was one there was a lot of humor in our family is as well as um other families you know you can go to a lot of the F uh Indian fam’s homes and you’re hearing a lot of laughter and it’s just amongst themselves you know so that interaction and that communication with humor laughter also expresses how much love there is in that family and I am so impressed that uh our family is that way um I myself have five children and um 15 great grand or grandchildren and one one great-grandson and this is my stand up chant this is one of my granddaughter Chantel and uh as you see um I married a white man so I was going to be so I did get disinherited and at the time you know even after I um after I um thought start thinking about land you know I thought man I would have had it you know but I was related to all the males on our reservation and um anyway my husband when our uh when our children were growing up you know he said our children are going to be Indian you know but what stopped them to continue any of the culture of our tribe was they were not allowed at powow I was never allowed to awow I never seen a pow till I was 17 years old and I got reprimanded for it by my Pope and so I I wanted my children to be Indian I wanted I had a red head I had an uh my son was a tow head and it was you know Indian Community is not going to accept them you know but they made it you know they’re um they’re grown they have children and it’s um you know I have uh I have a lot of U I have a lot of fun with them I guess uh I’m getting down uh also the other part of my matriarchal family well he’s my uh grandmother’s husband he’s my pilaka and he’s um in a way grandma was so strict matriarchal but we did not eat until he ate we did not go anywhere until he was ready so the next one is my grandmother who that was my grandfather and my grandmother my grandmother attended um the carile Indian school when the Pres u presbyter u had sent a lot of the our uh students off the reservation to acculturate them and my my P She they told her she would get her back in 6 months that wasn’t happening so this lady that didn’t know how to speak Eng gone on a train and to this day I don’t know whether she had a federal agent that took her there but she went clear to Carlile Pennsylvania to get her daughter and she was shocked here was my grandma in these great big beautiful fluffy glasses and a skirt and shoes you know that was that was a no no and but she changed back when she come back and had to get back acculturated into the tribe you know as a tribal member my next one I wanted to tell you about all the women in our tribe that are that have excelled to positions where they were um where they were uh known woman this is my sister Connie Connie would you stand up this my sister Connie Evans and um this is a picture of her she served in the Vietnam War as a nurse and uh we’re very proud of her I think these are two other pictures I guess you know who’s my favorite veteran and um we were so proud of her you know that here she is you know over there fighting for America and U she has one son and uh two uh grandchildren adorable grandchildren and adorable husband Dr Steve Evans and would you stand up Steve and Steve’s retired here from uh LCSC okay we need to get moving so here is my aunt this is the aunt that I took place with my PO uh she was an Army uh Army Core Cadet and uh she just recently has been acknowledged as part of the Armed Forces okay this is an aunt of mine my dad’s sister uh she was staff sergeant uh in um the US Air Force and I always wanted to be like her I wanted to be that big secretary and do all the secretarial duties she did and the next one is Bernice Carter Lawrence who is deceased now and she’s she served uh in the US Army and this is uh private Elizabeth Allen Redwing Williams and she also is deceased and this is off uh petty officer deline Allen uh Rose and she’s also deceased um probably three years ago and this is Gladis Allen uh who theyve ID ID ified as a first woman on our nesus tribal executive committee and she lives in lway this is a p and she is uh was a resident up at cler Creek in um KUSI and she had many skills and um she did a lot of beating and brain tanning hides and was a good horsewoman and she was just the little lady and uh she made te peas okay this the woman on the right is my dad’s mother I I didn’t have a picture you know by itself but the she was my uh my Al that would be grandmother on the paternal side and she was a good baseball player they said she could run faster than anybody you know and I and then after I look at her you know in her older age I how did she run you know okay and this is too I think many of you heard about too you know she was a heroine uh in um uh in the history and I didn’t really get a whole bunch about her that only she had went 20 she ran 26 M uh Rod horseback 26 miles to warn uh people of the coming of the of the army and that there was going to be an 1877 war and this is a tuberculosis hospital as you know uh a lot of our tribal members were um affected by tuberculosis today is diabetes a lot of uh heart problems obesity there there’s so many you know different things that affect us and this is Hattie Coffman I think a lot of you have seen her on TV uh she’s our first woman that native woman that has been nationally known as a News correspondent and she’s going to I think she’s going to be here yet yeah Friday okay this is our first we have a a camp meeting she’s our first woman president my dad was the last one and um I’m kind of in a rush here this is very makes me very proud she’s our first nesus tribal executive chairman and um she is into her second year of being chairman and and this is my Puff and I’m p and he’s the one that’s going to carry on our heritage okay thank you you ready for the next one just once again it’s Mary Jane Souther just so you guys know and thank you so much for sharing um all your I have some door I have some door prizes okay she’s got priz if you sign your name to this and then we’ll take e e

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Tent of Many Voices: M07130505TMB

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:54 +0000

good afternoon everyone and welcome to the core of Discovery 2 in the tent of many voices this tent has been set up for us as an opportunity to learn from different individuals with different backgrounds different areas of expertise hear different sides of the Lewis and Clark Story and also to learn more about the people that Lewis and Clark met as they were heading Westward we are very fortunate to have with us today Amy mosset who is is Mandan Hada from the three affiliated tribes of North Dakota and today she will be giving a presentation on traditional gardening so if you would please help me welcome Amy mosset thank you thank you it’s nice to be here thanks for coming out it’s um the the weather is kind of intimidating out there but it’s nice once you get under the under this tent here it’s um cool it’s a lot cooler here than it is being out in a garden today even if you went out early this morning it would it would already be quite warm out there um 200 years ago Lewis and Clark um while they traveled across Montana but before they crossed Montana they spent a winter with us and they spent a winter with the Mandan and the hiza from October of 1804 through April 7th of 1805 when they left our villages and Lewis and Clark were not the first non-indian people to come into our Villages and this this is actually one of the villages that Lewis and Clark would have come into 200 years ago this is the village of aad and you see the Earth lodges that are standing here in this hiza Village this is in North Dakota north of present or north of bismar North Dakota I don’t know how many of you have ever been to Stanton North Dakota it’s um it’s it’s about six or seven miles up the river from where the Knife River would meet the Missouri river which is where about the spot where Lewis and Clark built Fort Mandan their winter quarters and the Mandan were living down um at the at the Confluence of the knife in the Missouri but up the river about 7 miles were three had odds of villages and they looked something like this from a distance this is there were uh close to 60 Earth lodges maybe over 60 Earth Lodges at a the reason I put this slide up on the screen this is the village that I’m descended from I can trace my hiza ancestry all the way back to aad and it’s also the village that sagaa lived in for about four years before she joined the Lewis and Clark expedition and when she was taken captive she ended up in this Village and then eventually was married to her French Canadian husband to S shano well of course uh sagaia and any other non-agricultural person who came into our Villages would discover that we were a little different than most of the Indians on the Northern Plains and that we farmed and the farming that we did was so extensive that it drew people from great distances because you know that living on the Northern Plains is pretty tough in whether that’s as Extreme as it is and in the winter time if there were no Buffalo herds nearby if the Buffalo calling ceremonies that we we usually had in December didn’t bring the Buffalo into the villages or if we had a a bad a drought season uh if we were not able to do the kind of hunting that we would that we would need to do to dry enough meat to store throughout the winter um life would be pretty tough but with the Mandan and the hiza villages in North Dakota and then also with the arika further on down in what is now South Dakota we had food we had an abundance of food enough food that in the years that we had a surplus we were able to trade this food and that’s what brought people from great distances first other tribal groups even our enemies would make peace with us at the end of the growing season late in the summer the Sue in particular the the the arikara were actually our our enemies 200 years ago and it took a very long time for us to ever befriend the arikara uh eventually when you when you look about the village and you you’re living in the Mandan or a hiza village and you look around and you see that you’re related to everybody in that Village either by Clan by a marriage or by an extended kinship system or through adoption and you realize you can’t marry anybody in your village anymore so you have to go down and perhaps you know marry somebody from the Mandan Village or as things got worse we ended up having to marry into the arikara tribe and I shouldn’t say that I shouldn’t make jokes about the ARA because my daughter is are Mandan hiza and Ara so um but anyway we were agricultural people and the the women did the gardening I think that’s the thing that the men are are most impressed about is that the women did the gardening in our Villages and people ask well what did you grow in your Gardens and I’m just going to run through all the different kinds of crops that we grew in our uh hiza and Mandan Villages the gardens were not located right within the villages the gardens would be located Outside The Villages not on the Prairie but on the river bottom and the Mandan have lived on the Missouri River for thousands of years and even 1,000 years ago the Mandan my Mandan ancestors were farming down in the southern part of South Dakota near the South Dakota Nebraska border and archaeological evidence indicates that we farmed to a great extent at the borders of South Dakota and Nebraska 1,000 years ago and so it’s a centuries old old tradition that we pass on from generation to generation from mother to daughter and it just continues into every single generation and we’re still doing that today the the women did the gardening and the Mandan according to what we’ve learned about our history is the Mandan had 13 different varieties of corn just corn alone and of course you know that you you have to keep corn separated you cannot plant it close to another plot of another another variety of corn and so we also had accordingly 13 different 13 different Clans within the hiza tribe A lot of times people are confused between Clans and tribes and bands and societies and and so on but all tribes are very different and then within tribes you have different bands of people you have different Clans within the tribes and the Mandan had about 13 different Clans the hiza also had about 13 different Clans and those Clans really Define who you are what you do the kind of corn that you plant every year who you can tease who you can marry um just it sets the rules and it sort of sets the stage for your whole life and how you live and the way you live is always determined by your mother’s Clan and so that’s that’s where you receive your identity and receive really identify who you are and what Clan and what tribe you belong to is through your mother through your father’s clan that is the clan you go back to the spirit world uh through when you die and so your father’s Clan is also very important because the afterlife is forever whereas this life is just temporary but we had 13 different varieties of corn and today we have still grown or we still grow quite a few of those varieties we had flour corn which is a a softer corn that you can grind and then we had sweet corn and then we also had a flint corn which is really a very hard corn this is blue flour corn which and and all of this is corn that that my daughters and my granddaughters and I have been growing over the years but we have blue flour corn yellow flour corn red flour corn Mandan sweet corn and then I have some gummy corn around here someplace but it’s probably down here in my burden basket my tupperware box um in addition to all the different varieties of corn that we planted we also planted beans squash Sun flowers and when we were able to we planted melons melons watermelons are really uh crops or seeds that we acquired from the arara so there were some positive things about the arara in that they were able to grow watermelon further down south and in when they were in South Dakota you can still grow melons in North Dakota if you have a real long growing season but just to give you an example uh last year in June we had a frost and I think it was about June 18th the temperature in Dickinson North Dakota was 25° and so we lost a lot of um June berries and some of the other berries we didn’t have any plums but we we also had a very cold August um and and in order to grow these crops you need to have long hot days and you know that on the Northern Plains we have light for a very long time it doesn’t get dark until about 10 10:30 but we also have really extreme heat very long days a lot of light and so because of that that we we are able to grow or we have been able to grow crops in a relatively short growing season The Way We Grow our crops um this is a Mandan Village here you can actually visit this replicated Mandan Village this is h a slant Mandan Village on the west side of the Missouri River just south of Mandan North Dakota and my Mandan ancestry is U goes back to the west side to the newa tandan Villages this is my garden that that’s growing right now west of New Town North Dakota and you can see how it’s growing in nice neat RADS well 200 years ago when or even 500 years ago the gardens weren’t planted in nice neat tilled Rose The Gardens were planted as as soon as spring arrived and we know that all winter long the women who would be going out there to Garden were probably very um they they probably held very prominent positions in one of the women’s societies and we had you know I mentioned Clans and then bands and and societies within tribes there are societies that are um specific to different activities and societies are they’re very similar to societies that we have today they really regulate a lot of the social and the ceremonial and political organization of the tribe and one of the most important societies that we had was the goose woman Society and it’s it was a garden society and the goose woman Society was comprised of women who were in their childbearing years and of course that makes sense because women in their childbearing years are fruitful and they’re productive and they are the women who are in who are uh charged with this um this task of going out and harvesting and or and planting and and nurturing this this crop these these you know acres and Acres of crops All Summer Long singing the ceremonial songs engaging in the kinds of prayers and the ceremonies that are associated with traditional gardening now not everybody belonged to the goose woman Society you had to purchase your way into that society and my and and I think it it makes sense that the women who belonged to the goose woman Society or to any of the women’s Society were were Daughters of very prominent families and and prominent families were Pro were those families that possessed and and uh were the keepers of very important medicine bundles and there are medicine bundles of course that are associated with Gardens and so the goose women society would engage in all of these activities throughout the years now there are and I’m sure that that women are of course curious about what happens when you’re beyond your childbearing years then what Society do you belong to then well the women who were beyond their childbearing years W moved into or sort of graduated into the ne to probably the most important women’s society and that was the White Buffalo C Society for the years and that was a society comprised of the wisest women the teachers the keepers of the tradition the women who taught and who advised all of the younger women of the village and so the older you were the more important you became in our culture now with the with our Gardens um you see that it looks it it looks like there’s weeds growing in that Garden um because you the there is all this stuff around the bottom of the Corn stock those are beans and corn was planted the very first thing we planted in in the beginning of the year of course was sunflowers and I’ll show you some images of my sunflower plants but this is the way we planted this corn um in not in row but in Hills and this is this corn is not actually planted in Hills like it was long ago you know hundreds of years ago the at in the beginning of the spring or let’s say in the fall the men would help with the women they would go down into the the river bottoms and they would chop down some of the trees and they would let them fall onto the ground and the pieces of that tree that could be used for firewood or that could be cut for firewood would be taken back to the Village but the rest of the tree was left laying there on the ground to dry out and by Spring they would come back and they would pull all of the the organic matter all of the grass and the weeds and the stubble out of the ground and then they would leave it laying on the ground and then they would burn it all and of course those of you who are farming the land know that when you burn any organic matter and it is absorbed into the ground it softens the ground and it nourishes the ground and so that was the whole purpose of not dragging this organic matter off the garden site then the the sunflowers were planted the very earliest they were the as soon as the the water on the Missouri River started to bre break up and thaw and the geese were flying back from the south that was those were the signs those were the signs out in the environment that it was time to put in the sunflowers and those sunflowers would then be planted the very first crop they were the last crop to be harvested in the late in the fall now the corn would be planted in late May or early June and sometimes again if a frost came in early in June or late in May after the corn had come up we would just go back out and plant more seed which of course is why it was so important that when we gathered seed at the end of the year and saved it you always saved enough seed every single year for several more plantings because the following year if the insects or a drought or a hail storm came in and wiped out your whole Harvest you couldn’t be sitting there without seed so you’d have to have enough seed for at least a couple more years of planting now why is this corn planted in with the beans around it well the women of of The Villages knew that there was this symbiotic relationship between corn and beans and when you plant corn and beans together you kind of have a mess oh that’s a sunflower when you plant corn and beans together well let’s just go back and talk about the sunflowers for a second since I have them on here this is our sunflower notice it doesn’t have that one single tall long stock this is the our sunflowers grew with multiple flowering heads and in one of one of my sunflowers from last year I counted uh 41 41 flowers or 41 heads on the sunflower but only the top ones were about 6 in across and of course the very largest very the very first sunflower that that grew and and got the largest that was my seed for the next year but um the the the largest uh head you know it would it could have been up to 11 in across but for the most part they weren’t much bigger than 8 in across and the very top one would be this big and then as you go down the whole um plant they get smaller and smaller but with the one of the sunflowers that I planted last year I had 41 um flowering seeds on there or seed heads with the sunflowers they’re real sticky and these sunflower plants get very tall and what you do with sunflowers you is you plant them around the edge of the garden and I planted all of mine on the north side of the garden so that they wouldn’t shade any really shade any more of my garden but the other thing that these sunflowers do because they are real sticky and and they have real rough you know rough stems they sort of keep they help to keep your corn from cross-pollinating and when these sunflowers get to be about 13 ft high they make a very good barrier in between Gardens they also help to keep your Gardens separate so you never have to get into an argument with your sister-in-law about Whose Garden you’re working in because you have this long row of sunflowers that sort of borders your garden and separates you from your sister-in-law and you might have lots of sister-in-laws depending on how many brothers you have um and you just don’t want to get into any hassles with your sister-in-law okay this is just a little bit closer image you can see all the way down the stem how the sunflower is flowering and of course this is the the flower at the top of the sunflower and it’s not very big but the you see all the leaves and the the foilage and everything is is quite extensive on the sunflower this is um the I just put a pen in here so you could kind of get an idea of the size of my sunflower and then of course that is um I I sprouted the plants and long ago the women would just take a piece of hide and and damp it and put the sunflowers in the hive and let it let them Sprout and soften up the seed before they put them into the ground um I let mine Sprout quite a lot before I put them in the ground um not because they need it to sprout a lot but because I really travel a lot and I’m not home as much as I should be these are the beans these are aara beans oh here I am growing aara beans I can’t believe it but um I was I was I was working with an elder uh of my an elder relative of mine and she for the longest time just insisted that these are not they these are not arikara beans these are Mandan beans but um you know I think a lot of times depending on who these seeds were collected from um there would always be an interpretation of whether they were Mandan or hiza or arika but you know I would I would say that since I’ve been planting these things for quite a few years by now they got to be Mandan beans so or hia beans beans at least but um this is what the the bean plant looks like and this is what the bean plant looks like when it’s growing up and remember I said there was a symbiotic relationship between corn and beans as the plant grows the beans these Beans really need something to cling to um yeah maybe they are Rara they’re um they’re they are they just twine around that corn and they are just stuck there um you’re stuck with that bean plant all the way through Harvest but uh but but these plants need each other you know this is Mandan blue flower corn growing and the beans that are growing on this plant actually are shield beans and these Shield beans these are my favorite beans they’re so pretty and they’re white they’re white and they’re they’re big white plump beans and they have um kind of a red uh shield on them and they’re called Shield beans but you can come up and take a look at this stuff when my program is through here and um corn and beans there’s a there’s the symbiotic relationship because you know that corn does not have a very extensive root system and beans do um this is corn before I healed it and you can see that if a if a strong wind came along it would just knock this corn right over but when you have a bean plant growing at the base of that corn and and the bean plant has a real extensive root system and it also because it’s a legum it nourishes the soil and so the root of the of the Bean nourishes the root of the Corn and helps it to grow better the corn stock provides um a climbing device for the Bean to grow on because if you let one of these beans grow by itself and I did this last year and you have these long stringers and Runners just looking for something to cling on to and you just you just almost feel sorry for that poor little bean plant because it’s just out there looking for something to climb on and so the cornstock provides that that climbing device for the bean and then the corn also provides shade for the bean plant and corn that grows in shade grows better than I mean beans that grow in shade grow a lot better and produce more quickly than beans that are growing right directly in the Sun and so you know the women and this I think this is amazing that the women knew that there was this relationship between these plants and that’s the way they planted them the only downside to all of this is that when you go to harvest this in the fall it is just an absolute mess that’s why it’s a good thing to have many daughters and many granddaughters this is uh one of my um favorite plants this is red flower corn Mandan red flower corn and this is what’s growing out in my traditional Garden West of new town and again we would put the we would put the corn in in late may very late May and early June and again if we were able to if we had a frost all the way into the middle of June we still might be able to put some corn in and hope that that we didn’t have an early Frost um at the base of these beans I think we have um arikara beans growing and you can see the stocks on that corn the stock on the corn is actually red also it’s not all green uh this is a close-up of my red flower corn I love red flower corn because it’s just so red the whole the whole stock and when you pull the husk or when you pull the corn off the um stock in the fall the outside of the husk is all red and you can make all kinds of beautiful things with that red with that red corn husk this is the top of the the the tassel or the top of the Corn and that too is red it’s very pretty it’s or burgundy I guess it’s a it’s a very pretty color this is a a Rara sunflower all or an aara melon all by itself out there in the garden we only planted three of them and it was just so difficult for us to um to to get these arura seeds sprouted and my arikara seeds would Sprout and this year I even put them in little pots and they came out of the pot and I was so pleased and I was crossing my fingers and then I left for a few days and came home and those arar Rob plants were just laying there just dead and I couldn’t figure out what happened to them and and my daughter Nicole looked at me and she said well Mom you know you really are not a riara and I said yeah I know and I I don’t think it’s because I’m not AA that my ARA melons absolutely refuse to grow I think it’s just because of all those terrible ARA jokes I’m telling constantly the squash was planted at the very end of the garden because these plants take up so much space and um they they just the the leaves just grow all over and and with the squash plants um I’ll talk a little bit well I’ll talk about it now we dried everything when we harvested our crops everything was dried there was no Refrigeration no ice no canning everything was dried the beans were dried um with the beans we didn’t pull them off individually you could just go into the garden and sort of thrash the beans and they’ll just pop right out of these pods the squashes and and I have a few pictures of some some squash flowers or you can hardly see these these are my squash seeds that I sprouted and then put into the garden and then here we have squash growing and up in the corner there you can see that little green and white and that was the first of one of my squashes that I grew last year and then of course the Squash Blossom plants now not only did we eat the squash we also ate the flowers and we have recipes for all of this stuff and and with squashes we would eat them fresh as soon as we harvested them but also we would we would dry them and we would cut the squashes in slices about almost an inch thick and and and imagine how difficult this would be for the women because we had different kinds of squash some of that squash had real soft um the the outer you know the outer part of the squash is real soft and some of it is really hard and as you’re cutting it it just sort of cracks while you’re cutting it and imagine trying to cut that stuff with a flint knife you know we didn’t we didn’t have knives until the Europeans came into the villages and introduced um introduce metal and the men the men just loved metal but the women you know the women used used well we we eventually began to use metal knives and metal OLS and metal hose and those kinds of things but before we had metal all of our tools were made W made out of everything that we could take from our environment our hose for the garden were made from a Blacktail deer ant I mean antlers and then of course you’d put a ash wood digging stick or an Ashwood um handle on this because Ashwood is very hard and you could um and and it’s very durable it would last for a long time and um that Ashwood would get real it would get real smooth but it would would also be very um very sturdy we also use the shoulder blade of a buffalo and of course this is not a shoulder blade from a buffalo but this is a little shoulder blade um and we would attach a um an ash an ash stick here and use raw hide or senu to wrap it real tight and then you’d have just a perfect hole you know to to go and work in the garden you know I mean we had to do something before Martha Stewart had her TV series and so we had many many things that we were able to use in addition to our our Blacktail antler rakes we also had Willow rakes and we would make rakes out of Willow and and so we had tools our digging sticks we did not have holes we did not have tillers we had digging sticks and the digging sticks were also made from Ashwood and we really Shar the end of it and then burn the end and then that digging stick was perfect it lasted throughout the Summer with the digging sticks you know again I said we didn’t we didn’t till these long roads you went out and you dug a hole you dug one Mound and you would you would you would plant in Hills and you would plant your corn and beans in that one Hill you didn’t dig anything up in between but you’d move four feet over and then you dig up another hole chop up the dirt where it was nice and soft and then You’ put another um few corn kernel of corn and beans in there and then you’d move down another 4T and then you know dig another Hill and so everything was done in Hills and we didn’t really mess around with the area in between the hills except to take out the weeds and and then and keep it clean with um my garden that I that I grew up in New Town um my rows are 4 feet apart the the all of the Corn that I planted is about 2 ft apart and so um it’s and and the beans are planted in really not actually in the same Hill but my beans are planted in between the two corns and so as they grow they’re going to attach onto One stock or the other and so that’s kind of how my my garden is growing right now with um oh with these um sun with the with the um squash flowers we would take the little green stem off the bottom and flat them out and dry them so that in the winter time you could have fresh squash flowers in your soup or in the in the recipe that we had or else we would we would cook them immediately and they were pretty tasty here again is another squash um squash U Blossom and the the name for this you know I’m not really sure I guess you can call it a Squash Blossom or a pumpkin flower or a squash flower but in hiza the name for that yellow flower is gagui nagab that’s in your test when we finish this is um everyone has to spell that correctly gagui nagab here’s another squash plant um I’ll this is my last slide here and I’ll leave it I’ll leave it there with um with the gardening gardening is a really important part of our uh has always been a very important part of our culture and people often wonder like where do Indians get their names and Indian names traditional names I I guess you could call them come from medicine bundles and so you can imagine in our culture how many medicine bundles were in our Mandan and hiza culture that were associated with gardening if you come into our Villages you will never find anybody with a name that’s that has anything to do with salmon we don’t have too many names um that have anything to do with elk or we we don’t have a lot of names that are named after shells because those are really not things that are in our environment but we have we have many names that are associated with gardening we have many names we have um names with like corn silk and and um names that are associated with the squashes and many names that that come from gardening and and that’s still a very important part of our culture today this is actually my name in my hiza name and in Mandan my relatives would would call this and again in hiza it’s gagi nagab or gagi nagab and so my name when I was given this name I was given the traditional name of gaki nagab bish and the the reason I say it in hiza is that the clan relative of mine who gave me the name um was hiza and she was a member of the hiza clan and the hiza clan that I belong to is also the hiza clan that was um that this Village at the beginning here this um the the village of aad on the South Bank of The Knife River was a village comprised mostly of Mandan or hia people who belonged to a clan called the Mida day and just one little interesting note Clans had sort of subdivisions and there was a subdivision of this of the of this hiza clan the midi and that subdivision was called Iuka and I’ve just learned through my studies that saga’s son belonged to the Iuka Clan and I I find that really interesting because we don’t really know for certain which clan sagaia belong to but we can sort of speculate that perhaps the clan she was adopted into was Iuka because when her son was born he would automatically be a member of that plan and so with um the only thing I wanted the last thing I really would like to say about traditional gardening you know is is to talk about why you know why do we still do this we can we can go to the store and buy a bag of beans or a can of corn um but you know you can and and you can go to to flea markets or to farmers markets and you can get corn you know like colored corn but I think it’s really important for us to keep all of these different varieties of corn pure and to reestablish a seed bank which is specifically seed grown by Mandan hiza and women agriculturalists horticulturalists gardeners and it’s important because that was really part of our culture it really defined who we were and every time I think about you traditional gardening and or not well gardening any kind of gardening and what it meant to the to the survival of our Villages it was so significant it was so important it’s really what brought people into the Knife River Indian Villages trade area because the women’s work produced enough of a surplus of an item that was used for trade and before the Mandan moved into this part of the country and brought all of their corn um culture the hiza traded uh Flint Knife River flint and that was the main item of trade but once the Mandan came into the Northern Plains then the hiza adopted that that part of their culture and really the two cultures started to Mel um to the point where today there’s really no no distinguishing between Mandan and hiza except in name only but it’s also very important because it’s it’s part of our culture and and no matter what culture you are whether it’s Norwegian or German or you know Chinese or or shinuk or or nees Pur it’s always really important I think for all of us to teach our children as much about our culture as we can the other thing about gardening is that um for young people I I think every single Community should have a gardening club for children and the reason for that is that when you when a child when a young person plants in the earth if you talk to a lot of young children and ask them where does celery come from or where does a potato come from you know a lot of young people do not know where potatoes come from and so when you when you take children out and have them plant one plant a tomato plant and they see this little white flower growing on that tomato plant and then all of a sudden there’s this little green ball on that plant and then before you know it it turns kind of red and it gets bigger and bigger and then you can take that tomato off that plant you can eat it you can make it into all kinds of different things and this child will all of a sudden have a whole new kind of respect for the Earth and for every living thing that comes out of the earth and I really do think that people who till the soil and people people who plant who people who plant flowers people who plant trees people who plant food and people who use the Earth in a real respectful way and teach that to children just have a whole different kind of respect for all living things and I think that’s why it’s so important for us to carry on these kinds of traditions because our children today all of our children I I say that about my own children my grandchildren really need to learn lessons in respect and I think gardening is one of the ways that we can teach that without you know lecturing and pounding all these things and plus it also helps to sort of um it it helps to sort of uh lessen your burden because if you can take a bunch of kids out into the garden and have them help you to pull weeds around 194 corn plants it’ll really shorten your day and and uh it’s a lot of hard work but I think it’s all really worth it and and I love gardening and my daughters all garden with me my my daughters all have um traditional names that are associated also with with growing with food that grows off the the Earth my oldest daughter’s name is midua Mau which in hiza is Cedar berries my second daughter who is 19 years old um is her traditional name is um Mau debash which is juneberries and my youngest daughter who is 17 is Young turtle and her name is madaki my granddaughter who’s here with me also has a traditional hiza name and her name is um AR SIDS and her name our our names were had all belonged to somebody in the past my oldest daughter has her own very original name which was given to her and my granddaughter has her own original name that did not ever belong to anybody else and her name in hiza again is arug SIDS and in English her name means good Garden um I’m uh have uh time to answer a few questions if you would like to ask me anything you would like and we have a mic here so everybody can hear the question I have two I have two questions the first one’s easy uh the second one if you don’t want to share I understand uh the first one is do you use traditional Tools in your garden or do you use stuff you buy at the hardware store I use traditional tools when I do my programs and I use the most modern conveniences I can when I’m in the garden the other one if you’re free to share um how does your creation story line up with your gardening culture we have um we have a few different creation stories and you know I’m I’m I I think I can even tell you some creation stories here because you know we have a certain time of the year when we can tell creation stories here in my my medicine bag um we have uh you know different all tribes have creation stories and you know I can tell you the story because it’s right at the beginning of this book if you wanted to learn more about traditional gardening this is a a hia it’s a book about life with a hiza woman it’s called buffalo bird woman’s Garden mahish is her name and at the very beginning she talks about the hiza creation story and in that creation story it actually and in in the hiza creation the hiza believed that we lived under the Earth and um in eastern North Dakota near Devil’s Lake or what is now called Devil’s Lake North Dakota and there was um there was a Vine and and the people Came Upon This Vine and it went up into the sky and so they climbed the vine and here they came out and this they came out onto the Earth and there was a one woman who was Heavy with child she was expecting you know she was very large um and expecting her child and they when they sent her up the vine the vine broke and so the vine was gone and everybody hadn’t come out of the earth yet and so there’s the belief that many of our hiad or relatives are still living under the Earth near the Devil’s Lake in it’s not Devil’s Lake it’s Spirit Lake in um or East Central North Dakota and then with the Mandan creation story it’s a very similar story We There are several variations depending on which side of the river you’re on but according to the Mandan story um it’s believed that we came out of the water also and um at the center of the universe and so there’s kind of some um difference of opinion on where we actually came out of the Earth to the center of the universe because a lot of U people believe that our culture or that the mandam agricultural people actually migrated up the Miss Mississippi and Missouri River and they have been somehow connected to the cahokian um mound builders culture um I’m just wondering how if you or how you can obtain some of the corn seeds if you want to try some in your own garden how do you obtain the corn seeds there’s a there’s a a place in Ames Iowa that um I think has really taken over a lot of the Oscar will seeds Oscar will was a Pioneer in in in gardening and in seed collecting espec you know particularly the seeds from the Mandan hiad and arura and he was in North Dakota for many many years and I think that the ases uh Seed Company in or that that Seed Company in ases Iowa has a lot of the Mandan hiad and a raras seed there’s also on the internet you can check into Seed Savers and you can you can find uh corn seed and a lot of different kinds of seed um through through the internet the internet you know you can find anything on eBay I hear um but uh Seed Savers has uh corn seed we are packaging our seed and after this year’s Harvest we do hope that we will have enough seed and that the corn will be good enough that we’ll be able to package it and we do have a signature event and the whole Lewis and Clark Bicentennial coming back through North Dakota and 2006 and we do have our signature event in 2006 and so we will be selling um our corn seed during that time and then probably on the internet in in the future do we have any okay back here do you do any irrigating how do you keep the water to the plants um my garden in in New Town North Dakota is planted right in my yard so I have my my oldest daughter lives at my house in New Town um in in this Garden here out at this this is actually a land lab this is there’s a huge land lab west of Newtown North Dakota and Fort berl Community College is a four-year college and at this college the the whole well what it it’s the mission of all tribal colleges to to strengthen and perpetuate the history and culture of the people of that particular college and our college has really taken on um a huge role in uh perpetuating and strengthening the whole agricultural um culture of our tribe the traditional agriculture of our tribe and so we have a huge agricultural division at our tribal College uh they they go around to different parts of the whole reservation they actually till plots throughout the reservation and then this land lab the whole um surrounding area of our garden is tilled uh weekly it kept really uh clear of uh weeds and in between it’s tilled and they actually um uh dug a well and they have water piped all the way over here so thank goodness you know we don’t have to go hauling water with any water vessels or Buffalo stomachs or anything like that you know we just grab the garden holes and sometimes they even water it for us if we’re on extended travel are there any stories or Traditions related to the Walling about of the different plots by the sunflowers as they create that barrier are there stories that go with those walls I mean we have Paradise Gardens and Paradise really means wall and it’s original what are there any stories that go with the wall with separation with sunflowers the only stories I know with the the separation of the sunflowers is that you just don’t want to get into a hassle with your sister-in-law um no you know the the walls it it just makes sense there I I don’t know any stories there are a lot of stories there are songs there are prayers all associated with gardening and uh I I didn’t mention this but in in 18 I mean in in 1912 through about 1915 I think there was a oh I’m not sure if she was um ethnomusicologist or something like this Francis denmore came out to the Northern Plains and and she was Commissioned I think by the Smithsonian or it was an Eastern Museum she was commissioned to come out there and record tonu Warrior songs and different songs on those wax cylinders and so while she came out to the Northern Plains on the train the State Historical Society of North Dakota commissioned her to record Mandan and hiza songs and she recorded Mandan and hiza songs from The Men Who sang War war songs trapping songs all of these magnificent songs and she also recorded my great great great grandmother um otter woman who was singing Garden songs and it was just it’s it’s extraordinary because a friend of mine in makoche recording in bismar had some of the recordings and I had I had I people have sent me some of the recordings in the mail and I was and and I could you can listen to the recordings they’re on tape they’re on a cassette tape now they’ve T they took took them from the wax cylinders and put them onto reels they put them onto the reels at the wrong speed or from the reels to the cassettes they were done in at the wrong speed and so those songs that that people thought were men singing were actually women singing some Garden songs and so in the last couple of years they’ve kind of um they speeded up or adjusted the speed and re-recorded them onto a cassettes and CDs and so we can actually reorder all of these songs now that were sung by our ancestors but to be able to sit in a Sound Studio where you have this magnificent sound and he had all the technology to clean up the pounding and the scratching that was on the original wax cylinders but to sit there and listen to my great great great grandmother singing Garden songs was just the most extraordinary experience of my whole gardening career and so um that it it’s pretty special and there are lots of stories and there are sacred stories that are associated with gardening and there are prayers and songs and um just so much information out there that we’re trying to sort of pass on down to the kids when they listen uh did you raise blue corn I got some from gurnie one year do we yes we did um blue potatoes blue potatoes I have never I have never planted blue potatoes I I was just trying to think if I ever planted potatoes but I’m not sure you you can’t drop that on the cor you have to pick up all the little shells that fell on the ground now um I’ve never planted blue potatoes I just I rarely planted white potatoes I’ve you know most of that stuff that’s really not traditional I I don’t plant I and it’s because just because it’s so much work just to plant all of this and and take care of it and you know it’s it’s tough to do that in between um other jobs and so this to me is just so important to to get this stuff planted and then of course with the fort Berle Community College what we’re doing is we are trying to reestablish a seed bank there there’s a lot of seed there on the reservation but people can’t tell you where they got the seed or when it was planted or who planted it and with a lot of this corn I can trace this corn all the way back to who planted the Original Seed and I think that’s very important to do that and to catalog that so you know where all of this is coming from and you you know the history of it we have time for one last question Monsanto seed company just created a thing called The Terminator Gene and within 5 days after 911 they bought up 56 seed companies which means that all our seeds are now either hybrid are owned by one company which owns a gene to terminate that seed after one production so what you’re doing is extremely vitally important to our survival we have to keep the genetic seed being produced being held in it in fact we went into the hopy land and into the Navajo land to find pure seed it it rarely exists anymore except held by the native tribes so my question is how do you keep it from Crossing how do you keep one line pure of corn from Crossing with the other line we we we plant one variety of corn in each of our Gardens and the traditional garden plot out at uh west of new town at the the land lab is completely separated by a great distance and a and a huge Grove of trees from the other garden and every year we plant one variety of corn and and I do have an I I have an older sister and three brothers and they all are they’re actually better gardeners than I am except for my older sister she’s always planting her corn too close together and and I was telling her to um you know don’t plant your corn close together it’s going to cross and she said well yeah but when it grows it’s so pretty and I’m telling her but your Mandan and hiza and having pretty corn is not the point what you’re trying to do is maintain the Integrity of one variety of seed uh and corn and so hopefully she’s she’s um you know planting her corn but we do plant only one variety of corn in one location which is so far away from any other corn that there’s no chance of it Crossing well thank you so very much for being here this afternoon thank you very much once again Amy mset we appreciate e a right on oh w for sh what h you

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Tent of Many Voices: 07090604

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:35:49 +0000

that has been following the Lewis and Clark Trail since January of 2003 started in Jefferson’s home in Montello the same place the dream for a western Journey began went through the eastern states then to St Louis from St Louis up to the Mandan villages in North Dakota then from North Dakota all the way to the Pacific Ocean and now it’s 2006 and we’re on the return Journey just as Lewis and Clark were 20 years ago All Along on this journey Lewis and Clark were meeting many different people they had different languages different cultures and different backgrounds and they met them with graciousness they showed them the way they often guided Lewis and Clark across a difficult terrain they gave them directions and they traded them for transportation as well so as you look at the Lewis and Clark Story realize that it is not just a story of Lewis and Clark or the just a story of the men who went with them or the young woman who carried her small child and went across country but it is also a story of the people they met along the way so with that said at this time I’d like to introduce our next presenter this is George heavyrunner he is black feet and he has been in charge of getting this exhibit right here to the black feet reservation he’s been a wonderful host thank you very much George we’re enjoying our stay here and let’s all please make him welcome can you hear me thank you very much and good afternoon and uh as she said uh this has been a work in progress we’re least a couple years to uh put this uh event together and and um and see where we go from here my job today is to offer some perspectives if you will uh from the at least from the black feet on the lwis and Clark expedition and um talk a little bit about perspectives and basically that’s what uh we have in respect to the expedition’s uh a trip up here they first with Lewis decided to explore a little further north here I think they were trying to expand the northern boundary and so they moved up and followed the the the river up there to the site down here on the on the camp disappointment and it rained and it was terrible weather for them and they realized that they could not uh do any northward expansion uh but we soon found out later they were going to certainly work on the westward expansion and um and and so they decided to uh pack up their bags and um head back down and and which culminated in uh in another encounter not another encounter at least a encounter with uh some some members of our tribe there uh Tanya if you could hand out that that handout there in in terms of perspectives a lot of our history is oral history and of course on the other side when you talk about what happened up at Camp disappointment or at the fight site the encounter with some of our young blackbeat men we have nothing but the journals the memories of those men who were were asked I guess or in some respects uh required to do to do journals for posterity purposes but as I was putting this thing together we also did our our own accounting if you will and we did it through a process called winter counts and so we had people our I guess our historians who over a period of times would would uh would would write if you will in our our own way about important events of that particular year so as we talk about 1806 and coming up here you’ll notice there’s nothing about loose and par there and I and and again I think that’s a interesting note in terms of perspectives as we have been going over the three years of this event and it’s been all over the country people have been really asking the black Beed well what’s your perspective was this an important thing that it uh uh you know and to to what I have read and others have researched uh it did not uh maybe it was just a small blip on the radar screen and and so it but it did have some some impact as other uh historians have noted uh as a result from the uh two medic and fight there and so I I want to offer that to you to at least know that in terms of perspectives we we had our way of of recording our history and our we really were strong in the oral side of it and and um and can you imagine uh these guys coming up the river and just imagine those three young men after they left uh the camp disappointment side and started to head down on to medicine and they’re looking there and they saw Oh Captain Ls I’m sorry this isn’t as clear as as it could be because it’s a real poed picture of the of the river here and and checking it out and I imagine there was a lot lot of tribes along the way that were up there on the bluff or on the banks and saw the Expedition coming up the river and said just who the heck what the heck’s going on here and who are these guys and what are they dragging that big KB around for but some of our people back then in in terms of their and again I wish this is a great picture of of of of our of our uh mindset back then our culture our our worldview and places that that we lived in our our neighborhoods if you will and the and the type of interactions we had as as as as communities and just all those type of things that uh that were going on on then in about 1806 there we we were having our ceremonies you’ll see across if you’ve been over to the to the uh campgrounds over there and watch some of the dancing it’s more than just the dancing a lot of the things that are going on prior to the contest dancing there’s ceremonies going on there’s there is uh remembrances there is acknowledgments of people who passed away there are all these type of things that we that that we still hold on today uh 200 years years later and uh and and we’ll continue to do that this gentleman here was named wolfcat and I’m I’m getting over to the area about the fight site when Lewis encountered eight young men down there and they were quite as a few uh yesterday a gentleman named Curly bear Wagner described it quite well in terms of the of the encounter and and how they were pretty much scared of each other at the time and they were eyeballing each other but this gentleman here name was wolfcat and there was an interview that was done with him and he was 102 years old in 1895 he was one of the young blackbeat men that uh that that were part of the uh party and so that’s our kind of uh U Central Point in looking back to our people to this uh gentleman about what uh took place down there uh from that interview this particular site there is a and for and again perspectives is is this this area here that that uh this sign that was erected by the Boy Scouts down in Cut Bank and they built the FRS around this area you can’t see it very well but the signs over there is this the actual site perspectives if you will you know there’s there seems to be if you read Lewis’s Journal how he describes the site and you go down there it’s it’s a makes me wonder sometimes too and so there’s other historical sites where again we put in the idea of perspective was that the real site or or not we we didn’t have no GPS at the time the GPS was in the brains and the Stars if you will there but he described that this encounter these these U kids are if you will were the 12 to 15 years old and they were as as curly bear Wagner said and I say curly bear Wagner because we have other historians Daryl Kip you’ve heard Daryl Kip’s presentation John Murray a gentleman named BOS we seing have looked at the history and and looked at uh what was written and the stories they’ve heard and they’ve offered their perspectives and according to curly bear they were just back from a a raiding party of hes probably from The Crow and they they they run into them and they got together and that night to sit down and uh and they were talking about stories about where they were from and and they were talking about a camp up here of of their people a large Camp there as I read the journals one thing that fascinated me they told Lewis and he wrote it in his journals there was a white man amongst them up near the mountains about 1806 and I can only assume that was a fur trapper from from up North but I always wondered that if this encounter didn’t happen what would have happened if they would have took him up here and they would have uh uh had that meeting with that guy or if they would have found out that the Mariah path over here in terms of easier path to get across the mountains and whether we’d even be here today uh telling you this this history or perspectives about this area so there there’s a lot of whfs in in terms of of perspectives and the thing that struck me as I as I researched and went out to monello the first event they had out there there was a professor named James Ronda that talked about this encounter and what struck me the most was as he described in in his own perspective of the event that happened and the young man that got stabbed and the other one that was shot by by Lewis was as they were getting ready to leave according to James Ponda they they put one of the uh peace medals the medallions around uh the uh uh Dead uh person’s neck and he’s called it a calling card and I really agree with him because he said it was it was to show whoever Came Upon him of just of just who who these people were and I call it it was a calling card of inevitability of things to come of things that that that were going to happen there and I think that’s that was a uh a real uh moment for me as as we had people like Alexander Culbertson that started to come up through through the uh through the Missouri up through Fort Bon to start setting up the Fords to trade and then to marry into our tribe and a lot of the fur Trappers and people decided to do that in order to get in if you will and and and not be traced and chased out because the way our people were if you married in we accepted you and and so there was it was a process there a lot of the people that that have the non- indan names around here that also came up to Fort Bon or from Canada they’re married into our tribe there and as a result their their ancestors are are still around here today and we start to move into that inevitability of change here uh uh over 200 years of of uh town starting to be built here on the blacker reservation this this this old place called Sherburn Mercantile one of the first uh Traders on on the reservation here him and another gentleman started setting up shop because they knew uh that our our people uh needed all kinds of goods and they started shipping things up through Fort Bon and just just what have you and change did start to happen it it just was a a matter of of of time for for us and we went through a tumultuous time in the middle 1850s up to the 1900s with a starvation winter that happened in uh 1883 where we had hundreds of our people that starve down here at the old agency site because the federal policies was the agent for thought that we could do pretty good on growing potatoes uh I don’t think this is Idaho or a place to grow potatoes but policies like that had uh implications uh in terms of that we had uh all kinds of things that start to happen to to our our people there so this Le and Clark was was was done and was gone and what we were dealing with was with the inevitability of Westward Expansion the times were changing if you will and and there was nothing I think if that didn’t happen and out of Counter eventually it was going to happen we were so far north we were one of the last tribes if you will that really start to feel the brunt the brunt that we felt was through the invisible brunt and that was through small poxes and diseases that we couldn’t see but it was decimating our our our population and we’re more worried around the time when you’re starving and when you’re sick about just trying to survive and um and so that’s in in terms of of the change in our perspectives and then so you may talk to George heavyrunner about the Lewis and Clark experience and you can go talk to John Murray but it’ll it’ll be quite different but it’ll have some some uh same uh threads there and it was a I just want to share one more experience about this inevitability I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the national L and CLK exhibit have you that’s been going all over the country there well if you get near the end there’s this one panel and uh it it talks about the encounter we had with those young men and in that panel there’s a pistol a replica pistol that Lewis supposedly had that shot the uh young man and then there was amulet that uh was what they said in in the in the panel was similar to what Lewis took from one of the young men and then there was this um a shirt that uh was was full of uh of scalps and it was really interesting to see on on some of the shirt with the blonde hair there was red hair and uh and that that was given to a museum uh many years ago by a gentleman that I think they met in Fort Union or somewhere and he he gave that and they this Museum had it there but it was interesting and quite emotional to see that amulet there and and then as I remember back in reading about uh about that encounter because Lewis’s rationale was that they were sleeping and the guys were trying to steal their horses or their rifles so they had to defend themselves but but after I read what Lewis did in terms of that after they they killed the person and the person was injured they took their horses and some other stuff they said so I wonder who stole from whom at that particular point there because it turns out as they headed out and they were figuring some of our people are after them they did take their horses and some some other things there which were part of the uh collection that they that they took back there but that’s not talked about too often so uh I I think we in terms of perspectives uh we should think about that one in terms of the rationale of why uh they uh decided to kill those young men now there was another story that I heard from up here is that it really didn’t happen that any stealing was going on is that one perspective was that we’re gambling people and they probably sat down and did some games of chance and these young men were beating them and they got angry about it because they were probably bartering for horses or for or for what have you and this other person perspective is that they were winning and uh they didn’t want to give them up so that’s another not that’s another perspective I was interested when I when I heard that and I thought about it because I was interested the way Lewis wrote his journals about that inent he was very careful to lay out that they were using all restraint possible that they were they were not going to shoot tell to see the whites of your eyes and that kind of uh perspective if you will and I Al thought it was a little shaky or suspect the way he was careful about how they uh did that encounter but he and it it sounds Ed a little a little nebulous if you will because the way they described how they got the hell out of there I mean they they did they covered 80 miles all the way and just so they must knew something was up there because again our our reputation was preceding us about the uh running into the black feet we had this this reputation if we will as pretty mean people we defended our our territories and and we did I did more research about that and in fact we uh we were probably some probably the Bad Dudes if you will uh around that time there and it’s uh and it’s it’s interesting because as we as the uh core two came here to the black reservation I’ve enjoyed the encounter I’ve had with the park rangers who are representative of the government just like the Expedition huh and so they’ve been a little those bad boys on on the planet if you will there but uh you know and so it’s it has come to and when you talk about the Expedition you just can’t just talk about that particular moment for us and in in my view as things changed here and uh and in 1895 when they interviewed uh uh wolfchild there was another event going on and that was the creation of Glacier National Park or as as as one gentleman called The First theme park in America they started them they had if you go up to manyi Glaciers you’ll see it’s kind of the Swiss Swiss atmosphere there so it was interesting as as those things were changing in 1895 we were signing another treaty called the seed strip where that land was was being taken and there’s controversy today about the Border where the Border stops and uh in terms of our reservation boundary line so maybe there’s always been this kind of a little nebulous relationship with Glazier National Park but that’s not going to be our point at on on the last Pres presentation we’re going to talk about a form relationship as as a government toover relationship there but uh I thought it was kind of interesting to uh to hear that uh our good friend Mr morous has his his canoe over there and the other morning we came here to see how things were going and he was checking it all out and part of his one of his ropes or several of his ropes got cut and and he was feeling kind of bad why he told him well you just got to remember where you’re at you’re in black feet country there was probably a young kid come by he uh needed a rope probably cut it and one of our our uh security people saying they have to chase some kids out they were trying to rope a cat so probably just took the Rope it looked handy and uh and uh then this morning he thought he lost some more items but uh what one of the park rangers saw the the stuff there and and put it away for him but uh I was trying to remind you they were probably just counting coup on you and you should be honored but uh but that but that was uh not the way he felt this this morning um I’ve got to move into this this other area about um this other perspective um when I went this thing got over at 6 and went over to the uh opening ceremonies of our dance there they had the grand entry if you have you all seen the grand entry yet it’s it’s quite awesome you get there and the people all come in the different dancers and their and so I was standing there and I saw all well there there was a lot of you out there that were taking pictures they had your movie cameras and there’s people I was just looking around and checking out the non- indans because we see every year they’re just ODed by all the beautiful pageantry if you will and and all that and and I kind of chuckled to myself about that and cuz we see that all the time and so after that was all over I went home and uh one of those seaspan junkies first thing I turned on was seaspan and I was kicking back was tired it a long day and they were doing a series on the nation’s capital and all the buildings in Washington DC and they had uh Senator Frist who the majority leader for the Senate he was talking about his office they had Ted Kennedy talking about his room called the Hideway above above uh uh the majority leaders office and the corridors and all the things and it was interesting to hear the gentlemen talk about the fireplace or the chair or the book and all all the objects to us what are have no life in them they will and they were marveling that they were 200 years old and it was good to hear the history because I I like our American history as well where where uh Thomas Jefferson might have stood or Aaron Burr or or where the um House of Representatives and and were about the very foundations of our government and everything but they’re all referring to chairs and and and I’m telling you this because when we when we refer to our we’re we’re we’re a living history and what you see over there has been going on a long time I was just reading an article before I came here where a gentleman was describing how we had dancing Arenas where we had several of them the black people were dancing here and our Crees had theirs then they had this big one and uh when we’d have our celebration then they’d get together together so if you’re at those dances you hear uh in tribal you know there’s some some some reason for that all going on there but I want to share that with you because that look I saw in those people’s eyes and the pictures it it was to me it was like a yearning to to to witness uh living history that is go that is going on like that’s going on we just don’t do it just for four days or uh some of you are missing there’s ceremonies going on there’s people that are getting like I said getting honored for for coming back from from from my from Iraq I mean if you want to talk about patriotism you’re talking to people that that are the true patri every time one of our people come home and proportion as far as Native Americans uh we probably have the largest number of people that have been involved in the wars there so we’re we’re very proud of that that goes back to our our history and culture about about our Warriors who we we we uh we hold up high there so a lot of things uh go on during these four days because it’s an opportunity for families to to get together you walk around the camps you see people laughing and talking and they’re remembering uh last time that that they got together and as I was telling uh T there that you have the tent to many voices well you got the T to many voices over there and and and it’s alive and so you don’t have to walk through the panels here and and and visualize you can just go over and and see that uh uh In Living Color if you will H and so these it was it must have been tough imagine people that in the 1900 there that were 70 or 80 years old that were that were our tribe was at the lowest point in terms of our population of of starvation and all that was going on and and there must have been some disparity going on the the feeling that uh that will things uh ever get any better I want to share with you if I could I want to I I come across this prayer this gentleman named George bird grenell who kind of one of the historians uh uh recorded this prayer and it was a prayer made by an older black feet to the CH the chief Mountain the chief mountain is this last Mountain over here and that’s very important to us and to me and it was done about 1903 and it to me it really reflected this this uh the results of the inevitability all the federal policies of at a pretty much low point in our in our time as a tribe and I’ll just share this with you this is what this this gentleman was saying he says here now you chief of mountains you stand foremost listen I say to the morning of the people now are the days truly become evil and are not as they were in a ancient times but you know you have seen the days under your Fallen garments the years are buried then there were days full of joy for the Buffalo covered the Prairie and the people were content warm dwellings had they then soft Robbers for coverings and the feasting was Without End here now you you Mountain Chief listen what I say to the mourning of the people their dwellings and their Rems now are made of strange thin stuff and the long days come and go without Feast for our buffo are gone warm dwellings had they then oh no excuse me unless indeed the drum for who would sing and dance while hunger gwed within him like an old blind man your people feel their way along falling over unseen things for the gods are angry in vain the usual offerings to the son wear now the hund tongues the Snow White robes which always were his share and because we cannot find them he turns away his eyes making our medicine and useless so then we fail and die and even as old men who cannot see the way here now who stand among the clouds are you who stand among the clouds pity I say your starving people give back those Happy Days cover once more the Prairies with our real food that your children may live again here I say the prayer of your unhappy people bring back those ancient days then our medicine will be strong then you will you be happy and the age die content and I I I was really struck by that in terms of a kind of reflection of of how our people were feeling and I kind of want to end with that but I don’t want to end with that in in terms of a of a sad note because one of the things in our culture and the way we believe and we have people to come visit us that we always like to show our respect for them and we like to to uh give them a gift and as this thing was was over and I was over at the uh over at the camps there waiting for the uh Opening Ceremonies I was talking to Tanya and I said you know we ought to get uh some of those Park Rangers and those people over there a gift that’s our way to do it and that’s an an an enduring trait in us to all is share and I think you’ve seen that all along the river as Lewis and clart came up and went back of our people that that opened their arms if you will and and help them out the best they could and so I went to U this sta here cuz I was this gentleman dick Basher who’s the American Indian Lason and I was explaining to her that he’s been going up along the up along the trail and back and works with the tribes to ensure that when we put on an event that is done with respect that we’re not doing a celebration we’re doing a commemoration we’re doing a opportunity for us to to have some reflection on these last 200 years and you you’re probably hear that and continue that and and uh he’s been doing a good job so I explained to this l that I was going I’m wanted to buy something from her but I couldn’t buy it I have have this budget and I was doing this purchase order deal and she was just listening to me and she she’s a member of our tribe I believe Tanya is she a member of our tribe and her name is Three Rivers she has a a stand there so she well what are you looking for so I saw this knife here I said well that’s not bad it’s pretty nice there it’s had a bone handle and I asked her how much that was and she said she was kind of looking at me she said oh $75 and uh oh I said really okay and I said well then she turned around and she T if you can just dick could you you come up and I’ll finish this story Antonio could you bring that up please and so this yeah that that one there and uh then if we can get is is Kevin around by any chance or Okay Kevin then you can go up but anyway I I was talking to the lady about that and so I was and she she had this behind her if you could just maybe hand that to me or come up T if you want and uh and uh I was explaining to her and I she pulled it off and then I said oh boy how much is this going to cost and she looked at me and she said you know I I listened to your story about this man he must be a good man and she said here I’ll give it to you she said that that’s our way and and uh dick I’m going to give you this on behalf of this lady or uh she has a a stand there I’m going to give you her card uh because there’s a little quid pro quo there she wants you to uh uh make sure you do a little bit of she gave me just one if you will and if I if I can’t find it really quick here I make sure I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll get it to you but I thought that was really nice I thought it was really a a a reflection if you will of of uh of where our people at today and and and that and so dick uh that’s from that lady there and I I’ll give you the card there and uh and she was really nice I was just blown away by her her generosity and and we in turn uh repaid the kindness uh not too long AG well Tanya and I went over there and and gave her some some gifts there and and it was all good and she she just wanted you to to have that and want you to keep up the good work and Kevin if you could come up we have some things we’d like to give to to your Rangers here um uh and uh I think they were worried that the black people are going to get the revenge and we’re were going to burn down the kbo and I think all the Indian Country would have cheered but uh we decided not to do that but we we have some uh uh we wouldd like to give you this here this is one of the pouches that uh that the uh Bicentennial uh did over the last three years they uh contracted tribes to do a lot of these pouches to put the ls and Co cork commemorative coin in and so we had a few left over and uh we just can pull that out you can put whatever you you think you might want one in there that’s uh you can show that to the audience there and that’s our way and we and we have some other ones now you’re going to be the the leader here and you’re going to have to make the determination of giving these to your staff and so if you’ve been good to Kevin you you’ll probably get a good one if you haven’t uh that that might not happen and also back there and we’ll just give you your staff Tanya made out some some some bread there and we’re going to just just share with you and that’s the way we are and I imagined as the Expedition came up they uh gave them things gifts were exchanged if you will and and they gave him something to eat or they showed him the way there and and and so I just kind of want to want to end with that and we’ll open up some questions so getting back to the thema of P perspectives uh basically that that’s that’s my perspective if you will so we may have the next time you run into one of our tribal members they’ll they’ll have their different perspectives but I think there’s some truths that uh run through this this uh this whole thing and that’s generosity uh just Humanity treating people good as as you would want to be treated there and after 200 years maybe we didn’t get uh we got the short stick of all that but can you imagine after 200 years who would have thought the bsh should people still have their Homeland their language their history and and their culture and that’s their strength and you and and and you you people come here to see that because you know I don’t uh you have St Patrick’s Day uh Columbus Day you have your days but we we have those 360 some days out of the year in terms of our history and remembering and and if you listen to darl Kip’s presentation a couple hours ago he was talking about the language our language immersion schools where our young people now are being immersed in our language to hold on to our language and they’re and they and they’re they’re building schools now they’re talking about building a high school so we’re very pleased that that uh our endurance our persever is is going to uh let us continue on and thank you very much so get open for questions thank you very much George heavyrunner and audience if you have some questions that you would like to ask please raise your hand I’ll come around with the microphone and feel free to ask questions this is your chance yes ma’am this morning Daryl referred to the the black foot tribe and uh I’ve always thought it was the black feet uh how do you um how do you use black foot and black feet in your speaking well we have uh A Confederacy called the Blackfoot Confederacy we have sister tribes up in Canada and at one time and when we were this this huge group if you will our organization we we were our land base we was from the Saskatchewan River down to the Yellowstone in order to have something like that you have to have a an organization and so we’re a lot of like in our language in our culture what have you and so that’s a blackoot Confederacy now the the the black fet and why are we called the black Creet getting back to perspectives again there are some that say they somebody saw us walking out of a out of a forest recent forest fire and our moccasins were black huh and then there there there’s other other other perspectives and I’ve been uh looking at them if you will but that’s the English word in in our own Lang language we know each other in in in our our own uh native tongue if you will there so black feet and there’s other tribes mostly all the other tribes have have the have the English version and do the fragile government and those type of things when they started to form reservations and all the Conformity and stuff there so so Blackfoot there you know to to to us is is all our tribes again that’s my perspective you might there might be somebody come up here and say no you’re wrong here how it’s done there so so there you know so there you go right we have another question right here what can you tell us about the peani black feet the what p piani is that am I saying that right p piani p p i i a n i p piani piani uh I don’t know what book you was reading well uh something we’re familiar with but well well we’re we’re the Pani you’re you’re you’re talking to one of them but I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a piani uh I’m not sure unless somebody else knows in the audience I’ve never heard of a of of that so maybe it’s just a spelling that was was was a little little different there some other questions for Mr heavyrunner with that thank you all very much for coming let’s please give George heavyrunner a a show of appreciation e

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