Bowers] HIDATSA SOCIAL AND CEREMONIAL ORGANIZATION 339 



and customs for which there is no origin myth were recently borrowed 

 from other tribes, we find them explaining the presence of Women's 

 Goose societies in the three Hidatsa villages as recent adoptions from 

 the Mandan. 



The unequal development of Corn rites between the Hidatsa and 

 the Mandan seems to have a direct relationship to the relative im- 

 portance of agriculture to the two tribal groups. The Mandan and 

 Awaxawi were considered more stationary than the Hidatsa by 

 most early explorers. Henry (1897, p. 338) wrote in 1805 that — 



The Mandanes and Saulteurs (Awaxawi) are a stationary people who never 

 leave their villages except to go hunting or on a war expedition. They are much 

 more agricultural than their neighbors, the Big BelUes (Hidatsas), raising an 

 immense quantity of corn, beans, squashes, tobacco. 



Of the Mandan and Hidatsa village groups on the Missouri, the 

 Mandan seem to have gone farther than their Hidatsa neighbors in 

 the development of Corn rites. Their exodus myth from under- 

 ground was ritually expressed through Corn and Fertility rites 

 associated with Good-Furred-Robe, Cornhusk Earrings, and Uses-His- 

 Head-for-a-Rattle, and their sister, Corn Silk, who taught that 

 gardens were sacred. The exodus of the Corn spirits and their 

 migrations were symbolically represented by the objects in the Sacred 

 Robe bundle. The Goose society, likewise, was definitely integrated 

 into these Corn rites. The Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies as "god- 

 dess" of fertility, on the other hand, was represented both by inde- 

 pendent rites closely resembling those practiced by the Hidatsa 

 groups and as fused or composite bundle rites associated with the 

 myths of the exodus from the ground. 



The Mandan believe that the Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies rites 

 and bundles represent the older rites of the Heart River area as 

 practiced there by the earliest population, the Nuitadi. They also 

 feel that the Good-Furred-Robe and Skull bundle rites reached the 

 region much later by migration of southern Mandan groups, the 

 Nuptadi and Awigaxa. The concept of the settlement of the Heart 

 River and Sanger region by successive migrations is substantiated by 

 the archeology of their traditional sites. (The outline of the Old- 

 Woman-Who-Never-Dies lodge is rectangular, similar to those found 

 at the Huff and Clark's Creek sites of early Mandan who have tradi- 

 tions of former rectangular lodges, but the Hidatsa have no such 

 traditions.) This concept seems reasonable in light of the fact that 

 there were traditionally never more than two of the Sacred Robe and 

 Skull bundles, both of which are still preserved, whereas the number 

 of Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies bundles was suflSciently great to 

 be represented in each aboriginal village. 



