Review of Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians and Indian Agriculture in America

Authors

Paul A. Olson, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

1989

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly WINTER 1989. Copyright 1989 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

Abstract

The study of Native American agriculture has been revived recently by Gary Nabhan's Gathering the Desert, which concerns Southwestern Indian agriculture. The two books reviewed here deal more with plains agriculture. Wilson's book is an account of Hidatsa gardening practice in the nineteenth century as told to Wilson by Buffalo Bird Woman, a lady who continued to practice traditional ways long after most Hidatsa had adopted Western agriculture; the book gives a picture of traditional Hidatsa practices regarding com, sunflowers, squash, beans, tobacco, the tools used to grow them, their storage, their field culture, and the like. Hurt's book, on the other hand, is much more general, and tells very generally of the agriculture of the Mandan, Hidatsa, Pawnee, Omaha, and so forth. The book is useful to the beginning student or, in the case of the more advanced student, for its bibliography.