HIDATSA SOCIAL AND CEREMONIAL 

 ORGANIZATION 



By Alfred W. Bowers 



INTRODUCTION 



Anthropologists are usually silent with respect to their field methods 

 and their manner of handling research data in the final preparation 

 of reports. When the researcher lives with the people he is investi- 

 gating and writes about a way of life that he is able to observe, one 

 may presume that most of what he records is the result of personal 

 observations supplemented by direct inquiry. When I studied the 

 Hidatsa Indians in 1932 and 1933, and for short periods thereafter, 

 little of their ancient way of life remained, and a description of what 

 I saw then would have told me little of the ancient culture that I 

 was endeavoring to reconstruct. 



The Hidatsa of the Fort Berthold Reservation provided an excel- 

 lent laboratory for the employment of the "creatively historical 

 method" so commonly used by those of us who have directed re- 

 searches in the Great Plains area. At the time I undertook this 

 study, the older Hidatsa men and women had lived much as their 

 grandparents had when the first fur traders and explorers visited 

 them at their ancient villages downstream on both banks of the 

 Knife River. This was the last chance anthropologists would ever 

 have to get first-hand information from those who had lived by the 

 ancient culture. 



Much had already been written about the Hidatsa. Some of this 

 information was very good; much of it omitted material we should 

 have about these important agricultm-al communities. They had 

 been variously known as Big Bellies, Gros Ventres, Ehart-sah, Min- 

 netarees, Minnetarees of the Willows, Wandering Minnetarees, 

 Minataries, Minitaries, Mahaha, Maxaxa, Awatixa, Amahami, Awax- 

 awi, Ahnahaway, Gens-di-foulers, Mirokac (collectively with the 

 River Crow), and by other names. This array of proper names for 

 various segments of the total population told us little of their original 

 community social organization. The first extensive study to employ 

 the name "Hidatsa" as a tribal designation was written by Wash- 



1 



