Knife River
On Indigenous People’s Day, it seems fitting to publish an essay I wrote this summer after a once in a lifetime road trip to the Badlands of North Dakota with my sister. Thanks for reading!
Stanton, North Dakota, (population 360) has a Mobile service station where gas is cheaper than in the Chicago suburbs. On its web site, Stanton boasts that it was once the “largest shopping center in North America” having served as the hub of a vast trade region for indigenous peoples from Wyoming to the Great Lakes. I learn that several native peoples inhabited these lands for nearly three thousand years.
Just outside town is The Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, a two hour- drive from the North Dakota Badlands with its fantastical rock formations and painted canyons. Yet here the ancient landscape has been tamed into prairie grasslands crisscrossed by the Missouri River. There is rich history here, much of it sad and shameful. My sister Eileen and I decide that our journey from Chicago is worth the side trip to Knife River for a perspective beyond the white settler/rancher/Theodore Rooseveltian view.
Outside the visitor’s center is a replica of an earthen lodge- generous enough to shelter several families. Alongside the dirt path we follow are grassy depressions left by Hidatsa lodges that resemble giant papasan chairs, some as wide as forty feet. The brochure says there are 210 depressions on this site, 210 lodges that housed mothers and fathers and children. Smallpox brought by European settlers decimated the population in the 1830s. After having their lands stolen, the survivors were transported to the Fort Berthold Reservation some 100 miles north. I had never walked in the footsteps of others we had deported, along the streets of shuttered houses belonging to Japanese Americans sent to internment camps after Pearl Harbor. But here in the Great Plains I see with my own eyes remnants of a once vibrant community. I am haunted by the lives upended and futures stolen.
We continue along the path lush with vegetation and overgrown shrubs. With a phone app, I identify white sagebrush that smells of lavender, Russian thistle , also known as tumbleweed, and western snowberry with its dainty pinkish blossoms. The site is thick with wild cucumber vines whose seeds can be dried and made into beads. I wonder if the Hidatsa women made necklaces for their children?
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Not far from the Knife River site is the village of Awatixa, where Sakakawea first encountered Lewis and Clark, eventually agreeing to serve as their interpreter in their quest through the Rockies. Though her French fur trader husband also accompanied the explorers, it is Sakakawea history remembers. We put the image of this brave Shoshone woman and her infant son on a silver dollar, with a soaring eagle on the flip side. A small gesture – perhaps to right a grievous wrong inflicted on native peoples of the Great Plains.