Mandan Erotic

The Mandan built towns. On a plains landscape where most nations followed the bison, they lived for centuries in permanent villages of domed earth lodges on bluffs above the Missouri River, ringed by ditches and palisades, with the women working fields of corn, beans, squash and sunflowers on the bottomlands below. That settled life made their villages near the mouths of the Heart and Knife rivers, in what is now North Dakota, the trading floor of the northern Plains. Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine and Cree came in with meat and hides and left with corn, and later the traffic added horses moving north and guns moving south. Their own name for themselves is Nueta, or Numakiki, the people.

Mandan is a Siouan language, but a lonely one: it forms its own branch of the family and is not mutually intelligible with Hidatsa, the language of their closest neighbors and eventual partners. The last fluent speaker died in 2016, and it now survives through classes at the tribal college in New Town and in the mouths of learners. Society is matrilineal and organized by clans. The traditional religion centered on sacred bundles and the Okipa, a four-day summer ceremony that reenacted creation and a great flood. At the heart of every village stood a cedar post inside a small wooden palisade, the shrine of Lone Man, who was said to have built the wall that saved the people from the rising water. Young men in the Okipa fasted and hung from skewers through their skin, a rite that unsettled George Catlin when he painted it in 1832 and that federal agents suppressed by the 1890s.

Their history turns on disease. Smallpox in 1781 collapsed roughly nine villages into two. Lewis and Clark wintered beside those two in 1804 and 1805, and the chief Sheheke went east to meet Jefferson. Then the 1837 epidemic came upriver on a fur company steamboat and killed about nine in ten; the second chief Four Bears, painted by Catlin and Karl Bodmer, died cursing the whites he had befriended. Perhaps 125 Mandan survived. They pooled with the Hidatsa at Like-a-Fishhook Village in 1845, the Arikara joined in 1862, and the three became the Fort Berthold Reservation and eventually the MHA Nation. In 1953 the Garrison Dam drowned the river bottoms that held their farms, towns and cemeteries under Lake Sakakawea and scattered families to the uplands. The Bakken oil boom has since brought money and disruption in equal measure. Mandan identity today is chosen and worked at: a name kept, a ceremony reconstructed, a language relearned one class at a time.