Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization, a study of an important horticultural Plains Indian tribe, synthesizes the rich material Alfred W. Bowers recorded in the early 1930s from the last generation of Hidatsas who lived in the historic village of Like-a-Fishhook. This documentary record of their nineteenth-century lifeways is now a classic in American ethnography. The book is distinguished for its presentation of extensive personal and ritual narratives that allow Hidatsa elders to articulate directly their conceptions of traditional culture. It combines archeological and ethnographic approaches to reconstruct a Hidatsa culture history that is shaped by a concern for cultural detail stemming from the American ethnographic tradition of Franz Boas. At the same time, its concern for the understanding of social structure reflects the influence of the British structural-functional approach of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. The most comprehensive account ever published on the Hidatsas, it is of enduring value and interest.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.

"Native foods are ubiquitous in America, but they often go unrecognized and unidentified. So too do the countless farms, gardens, and other places created by Native American people to feed and nourish their families and communities over generations. Over the last five centuries of settler colonialism, this inconspicuousness of Native American food and agriculture has helped configure Americans' imaginations of food and agriculture in ways that require critical identification. Drawing attention to this issue, Native Foods brings to bear approaches from the fields of food studies and Indigenous studies to explore how biophysical patterns of settler-colonial land use have worked as narrative frames for structuring historical views of Native agriculture. Following the lead of Indigenous food sovereignty advocates and activists, the book emphasizes the presence and persistence of Native American cuisine and documents how Native foods and agricultural techniques were never "lost" but only obscured by the peregrinations of colonialism, capitalism, and various other historical transformations"--

This that I now tell is as I saw my mothers do, or did myself, when I was young. My mothers were industrious women, and our family had always good crops; and I will tell now how the women of my father's family cared for their fields, as I saw them, and helped them. --Buffalo Bird Woman