The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Before the Dam

Before European contact, the Missouri River bluffs above the Knife River were an address. The Mandan had been building permanent earthlodge villages there for more than a thousand years. The Hidatsa and Arikara joined them over time, and together the three nations created what became the commercial and diplomatic center of the Northern Plains.

An earthlodge was not a temporary shelter. It was a permanent structure, dug into the earth and framed with massive cottonwood beams, large enough to house an extended family and their horses. Villages of a dozen to forty lodges were surrounded by palisades and overlooked the river from high bluffs. The Mandan grew corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers in garden plots along the bottomland, and their surpluses fed the bison-hunting nations of the surrounding grasslands who had no comparable agriculture.

Lewis and Clark called the Fort Mandan winter the most cosmopolitan experience they had in two years of westward travel. They meant it as a compliment to themselves. What they were describing was a market town with centuries of established practice, where European goods had been arriving through Indigenous trading networks since before any of the captains were born.

The Garrison Dam flooded the heart of that world in nineteen fifty-three. Like-a-Fishhook Village and Elbowoods are beneath the surface of Lake Sakakawea. The MHA Nation is on the higher ground that remained.

Their language programs, cultural preservation work, and tribal governance are not preservation in the museum sense. They are continuation.