Мандан тайпасы: Тарихы мен өмірі

Native American tribe of the Great Plains

The Mandan are a Native American tribe of the Great Plains who have lived for centuries primarily in what is now North Dakota. They are enrolled in the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation. About half of the Mandan still reside in the area of the reservation; the rest reside around the United States and in Canada. The Mandan historically lived along both banks of the Upper Missouri River and two of its tributaries—the Heart and Knife rivers—in present day North and South Dakota. Speakers of Mandan, a Siouan language, they developed a settled, agrarian culture. They established permanent villages featuring large, round, earth lodges, some 40 feet (12 m) in diameter, surrounding a central plaza. Matrilineal families lived in the lodges. The Mandan were a great trading nation, trading especially their large corn surpluses with other tribes in exchange for bison meat and fat. Food was the primary item, but they also traded for horses, guns, and other trade goods.

The Mandan population was 3,600 in the early 18th century. It is estimated to have been 10,000–15,000 before European encounter. Decimated by a widespread smallpox epidemic in 1781, the people had to abandon several villages, and remnants of the Hidatsa also gathered with them in a reduced number of villages. In 1836, there were more than 1,600 full blood Mandans but, following another smallpox epidemic in 1836–37, this number was estimated to have dropped to 125 by 1838. In the 20th century, the people began to recover. In the 1990s, 6,000 people were enrolled in the Three Affiliated Tribes. The Mandan have used differing autonyms to refer to themselves: Numakaki (Nųmą́khų́·ki) (or Rųwą́ʔka·ki) ("many men, people") was inclusive and not limited to a specific village or band. This name was used before the smallpox epidemic of 1837–1838. Gloria Jahoda in Trail of Tears states that they also call themselves the "Pheasant people." George Catlin said the Mandans (or See pohs kah nu mah kah kee, "people of the pheasants", as they call themselves)

The exact origins and early history of the Mandan are unknown. Early studies by linguists gave evidence that the Mandan language may have been closely related to the language of the Ho Chunk or Winnebago people of present day Wisconsin. Scholars theorize the Mandans' ancestors may have settled in the Wisconsin area at one time. This idea is possibly confirmed in their oral history, which refers to their having come from an eastern location near a lake. Some Ethnologists and scholars studying the Mandan subscribe to the theory that, like other Siouan speaking people (possibly including the Hidatsa), they originated in the area of the mid Mississippi River and the Ohio River valleys in present day Ohio. If this was the case, the Mandan would have migrated north into the Missouri River Valley and its tributary the Heart River in present day North Dakota. That is where Europeans first encountered the historical tribe. This migration is believed to have occurred possibly as early as the 7th century but probably between 1000 CE and the 13th century, after the cultivation of maize was adopted. It was a period of a major climatic shift, creating warmer, wetter conditions that favored their agricultural production. After their arrival on the banks of the Heart River, the Mandan constructed several villages, the largest of which were at the mouth of the river. Archeological evidence and ground imaging radar have revealed changes in the defensive boundaries of these villages over time. The people built new ditches and palisades circumscribing smaller areas as their populations reduced. What was known as Double Ditch Village was located on the east bank of the Missouri River, north of where present day Bismarck developed. It was occupied by the Rupture Mandan for nearly 300 years. Today the site has depressions that are evidence of their lodges and smaller ones where they created cache pits to store dehydrated corn. The name comes from two defensive trenches built outside the area of the lodges. Construction of the fortifications here and at other locations along the Missouri has been found to have correlated to periods of drought, when peoples would have raided each other for food. At some point during this time, the Hidatsa people also moved into the region. They also spoke a Siouan language. Mandan tradition states that the Hidatsa were a nomadic tribe until their encounter with the Mandan, who taught them to build stationary villages and cultivate agriculture. The Mandan were divided into bands. The Nup'tadi (does not translate) was the largest linguistic group. The Mandan gradually moved upriver, and consolidated in present day North Dakota by the fifteenth century. From 1500 to about 1782, the Mandan reached the height of their population and influence. Their villages showed increasing densities as well as stronger fortifications, for instance at Huff Village. It had 115 large lodges with more than 1,000 residents. The bands did not often move along the river until the late 18th century, after their populations plummeted due to smallpox and other epidemics. Aulneau was killed before his planned expedition to visit the Mandans could take place. The first European known to visit the Mandan was the French Canadian trade Sieur de la Verendrye in 1738. The Mandans carried him into their village, whose location is unknown. It is estimated that at the time of his visit, 15,000 Mandan resided in the nine well fortified the villages held a total of 1,000 lodges. In 1796 the Mandan were visited by the Welsh explorer John Evans, who was hoping to find proof that their language contained Welsh words. Numerous European Americans held that there were Welsh Indians in these remote areas, a persistent myth that was widely written about. Evans had arrived in St. Louis two years prior, and after being imprisoned for a year, was hired by Spanish authorities to lead an expedition to chart the upper Missouri. Evans spent the winter of 1796–97 with the Mandan but found no evidence of any Welsh influence. In July 1797 he wrote to Dr. Samuel Jones, "Thus having explored and charted the Missurie for 1,800 miles and by my Communications with the Indians this side of the Pacific Ocean from 35 to 49 degrees of Latitude, I am able to inform you that there is no such People as the Welsh Indians." British and French Canadians from the north carried out more than twenty fur trading expeditions down to the Hidatsa and Mandan villages in the years 1794 to 1800. By 1804 when Lewis and Clark visited the tribe, the number of Mandan had been greatly reduced by smallpox epidemics and warring bands of Assiniboine, Lakota and Arikara. (Later they joined with the Arikara in defense against the Lakota.) The nine villages had consolidated into two villages in the 1780s, one on each side of the Missouri. In 1825 the Mandans signed a peace treaty with the leaders of the Atkinson O'Fallon Expedition. The treaty required that the Mandans recognize the supremacy of the United States, admit that they reside on United States territory, and relinquish all control and regulation of trade to the United States. The Mandan and the United States Army never met in open warfare. In 1832, artist George Catlin visited the Mandan near Fort Clark. Catlin painted and drew scenes of Mandan life as well as portraits of chiefs, including Four Bears or Ma to toh pe. His skill at rendering so impressed Four Bears that he invited Catlin as the first man of European descent to be allowed to watch the sacred annual Okipa ceremony. During the winter months of 1833 and 1834, Prince Maximilian of Wied Neuwied and Swiss artist Karl Bodmer stayed with the Mandan.

18th century reports about characteristics of Mandan lodges, religion and occasional physical features among tribal members, such as blue and grey eyes along with lighter hair coloring, stirred speculation about the possibility of pre Columbian European contact. Catlin believed the Mandan were the "Welsh Indians" of folklore, descendants of Prince Madoc and his followers who had emigrated to America from Wales in about 1170. This view was popular at the time but has since been disputed by the bulk of scholarship. Hjalmar Holand has proposed that interbreeding with Norse survivors might explain the "blond" Indians among the Mandan on the Upper Missouri River. In a multidisciplinary study of the Kensington Runestone, anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe dismissed, as "tangential" to the Runestone issue this and other historical references suggesting pre Columbian contacts with 'outsiders', such as the Hochunk (Winnebago) story about an ancestral hero "Red Horn" and his encounter with "red haired giants". Archaeologist Ken Feder has stated that none of the material evidence that would be expected from a Viking presence in and travel through the American Midwest exists.

Sioux Indians attacked the Mandan village Nuptadi and set it on fire around 1785. The "turtles" used in the Okipa ceremony were saved. "When Nuptadi Village was burned by the Sioux ", recounted Mandan woman Scattercorn, " the turtles produced water which protected them ". The Sioux kept consolidating their dominant position on the northern plains. In the words of "Cheyenne warrior" and Lakota allied George Bent: " the Sioux moved to the Missouri and began raiding these two tribes, until at last the Mandans and Rees [Arikaras] hardly dared go into the plains to hunt buffalo". The Arikara Indians were from time to time also among the foes of the Mandans. Chief Four Bears's revenge on the Arikara, who had killed his brother, is legendary. The Mandan maintained the stockade around Mitutanka Village when threats were present. Major fights were fought. "We destroyed fifty tepees [of Sioux]. The following summer thirty men in a war party were killed", tells the Mandan winter count of Butterfly for 1835–1836. The big war party was neutralized by Yanktonai Sioux Indians. Mitutanka, now occupied by Arikaras as well as some Mandans, was burned by Yankton Sioux Indians on January 9, 1839. " the small Pox last year, very near annihilated the Whole [Mandan] tribe, and the Sioux has finished the Work of destruction by burning the village". In 1845, the Hidatsa moved some 20 miles north, crossed the Missouri and built Like a Fishhook Village. Many Mandans joined for common protection.

The Mandan were first plagued by smallpox in the 16th century and had been hit by similar epidemics every few decades. Between 1837 and 1838, another smallpox epidemic swept the region. In June 1837, an American Fur Company steamboat traveled westward up the Missouri River from St. Louis. Its passengers and traders aboard infected the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes. There were approximately 1,600 Mandan living in the two villages at that time. The disease killed 90% of the Mandan people, effectively destroying their settlements. Almost all of the tribe's members, including the second chief, Four Bears, died. Estimates of the number of survivors vary from 27 up to 150 persons, with some sources placing the number at 125. The survivors banded together with the nearby surviving Hidatsa in 1845 and moved upriver, where they developed Like a Fishhook Village. The Mandan believed that they had been infected by whites associated with the steamboat and Fort Clark. Chief Four Bears reportedly said, while ailing, "a set of Black harted Dogs, they have deceived Me, them that I always considered as Brothers, has turned Out to be My Worst enemies". Francis Chardon, in his Journal at Fort Clark 1834–1839, wrote that the Gros Ventres (ie. Hidatsa), "swear vengeance against all the Whites, as they say the small pox was brought here by the S[team] B[oat]." (Chardon, Journal, p. 126). In the earliest detailed study of the event, in The American Fur Trade of the Far West (1902), Hiram M. Chittenden blamed the American Fur Company for the epidemic. Oral traditions of the affected tribes continue to claim that whites were to blame for the disease. R. G. Robertson in his book Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian, blames Captain Pratte of the steamboat St. Peter for failing to quarantine passengers and crew once the epidemic broke out, stating that while

not guilty of premeditated genocide, but he was guilty of contributing to the deaths of thousands of innocent people. The law calls his offence criminal negligence. Yet in light of all the deaths, the almost complete annihilation of the Mandans, and the terrible suffering the region endured, the label criminal negligence is benign, hardly befitting an action that had such horrendous consequences. Some scholars who have argued that the transmission of smallpox to Native Americans during the 1836 40 epidemic was intentional, including Ann F. Ramenofsky who asserted in 1987: "Variola Major can be transmitted through contaminated articles such as clothing or blankets. In the nineteenth century, the U. S. Army sent contaminated blankets to Native Americans, especially Plains groups, to control the Indian problem." The Commissioner of Indian Affairs had refused to send the vaccine to the Mandans, apparently not thinking them worthy of protection. Some accounts repeat a story that an Indian sneaked aboard the St. Peter and stole a blanket from an infected passenger, thus starting the epidemic. The many variations of this account have been criticized by both historians and contemporaries as fiction, a fabrication intended to assuage the guilt of white settlers for displacing the Indians. "The blanket affair was created afterward and is not to be credited", notes B. A. Mann. Given trade and travel patterns, there were numerous ways for people to have been infected, as they had been in earlier, also severe, epidemics.

The Mandan were a party in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. They shared a mutual treaty area north of Heart River with the Hidatsa and the Arikara. Soon attacks on hunting parties by Lakota and other Sioux made it difficult for the Mandan to be safe in the treaty area. The tribes called for the United States Army to intervene, and they would routinely ask for such aid until the end of Lakota primacy. Despite the treaty, the Mandan received little protection from US forces. In the summer of 1862, the Arikara joined the Mandan and Hidatsa in Like a Fishhook Village on the upper Missouri. All three tribes were forced to live outside their treaty area south of the Missouri by the frequent raiding of Lakota and other Sioux. Before the end of 1862, some Sioux Indians set fire to part of a Like a Fishhook Village. In June 1874, there "was a big war" near Like a Fishhook Village. Colonel George Armstrong Custer failed to cut off a large war party of Lakota that was attacking the Mandan, although " the Mandans should be protected same as white settlers". Five Arikaras and a Mandan were killed by the Lakota. The attack turned out to be one of the last made by the Lakota on the Three Tribes. The Mandan joined with the Arikara in 1862. By this time, Like a Fishhook Village had become a major center of trade in the region. By the 1880s, though, the village was abandoned. In the second half of the 19th century, the Three Affiliated Tribes (the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara) gradually lost control of some of their holdings. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 recognized 12 million acres (49,000 km2) of land in the territory owned jointly by these tribes. With the creation of the Fort Berthold Reservation by Executive Order on April 12, 1870, the federal government acknowledged only that the Three Affiliated Tribes held 8 million acres (32,000 km2). On July 1, 1880, another executive order deprived the tribes of 7 million acres (28,000 km2) of land lying outside the boundaries of the reservation.

In the early 20th century, the government seized more land; by 1910, the reservation was reduced to 900,000 acres (3,600 km2). This land is located in Dunn, McKenzie, McLean, Mercer, Mountrail and Ward counties in North Dakota. Under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which encouraged tribes to restore their governments, the Mandan officially merged with the Hidatsa and the Arikara. They drafted a constitution to elect representative government and formed the federally recognized Three Affiliated Tribes, known as the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. In 1951, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction of Garrison Dam on the Missouri River. Developed for flood control and irrigation, this dam created Lake Sakakawea. It flooded portions of the Fort Berthold Reservation, including the villages of Fort Berthold and Elbowoods, as well as a number of other villages. The former residents of these villages were moved and New Town was constructed for them. While New Town was constructed for the displaced tribal members, much damage was done to the social and economic foundations of the reservation by the loss of flooded areas. The flooding claimed approximately one quarter of the reservation's land. This land contained some of the most fertile agricultural areas upon which their economy had been developed. The Mandan did not have other land that was as fertile or viable for agriculture. In addition, the flooding claimed the sites of historic villages and archaeological sites with sacred meaning for the peoples.

The Mandan were known for their distinctive, large, circular earthen lodges, in which more than one family lived. Their permanent villages were composed of these lodges. Constructed and maintained by women, each lodge was circular with a dome like roof and a square hole at the apex of the dome through which smoke could escape. Four pillars supported the frame of the lodge. Wood timbers were placed against these, and the exterior was covered with a matting made from reeds and twigs and then covered with hay and earth, which protected the interior from rain, heat and cold. It was sturdy enough so that numerous adults and children could sit on the top of the lodge. The lodge also featured an extended portico type structure at the entrance, to provide protection from cold and other weather. The interior was constructed around four large pillars, upon which crossbeams supported the roof. These lodges were designed, built and owned by the women of the tribe, and ownership was passed through the female line. Generally 40 feet (12 m) in diameter, they could hold several families, up to 30 or 40 people, who were related through the elder women. When a young man married, he moved to his wife's lodge, which she shared with her mother and sisters. Villages usually had around 120 lodges. Today, the Mandan live in modern dwellings. Villages were usually oriented around a central plaza that was used for games (chunkey) and ceremonial purposes. In the center of the plaza was a cedar tree surrounded by a vertical wood enclosure. The shrine represented the "Lone Man", one of the main figures in Mandan religion. He was said to have built a wooden corral that saved the people of a village from a flooding river in North Dakota. Villages were often situated on high bluffs above the river. Often, villages would be constructed at the meeting of tributaries, in order to use the water as a natural barrier. Where there were few or no natural barriers, the villages built some type of fortification, including ditches and wooden palisades.

The Mandan were originally divided into thirteen clans, which were reduced to seven by 1781, due to population losses in the smallpox epidemic. Ninety percent of the population died in the 1837 1838 smallpox epidemic. By 1950 only four clans survived. As early as the fifteenth century, the Mandan town Huff had enough storage pits to store seventy thousand bushels of corn. Besides buffalo, elk, and deer hides, the Mandan also used ermine and white weasel hides for clothing. Today, Mandan people wear traditionally inspired clothing and regalia at powwows, ceremonies, and other significant events.

The Mandan's religion and cosmology was highly complex and centered around the figure known as Lone Man. Lone Man was involved in many of the creation myths as well as one of the flood myths. In their creation myth, the world was created by two rival deities, the First Creator and the Lone Man. The Missouri River divided the two worlds that the beings created. First Creator created the lands to the south of the river with hills, valleys, trees, buffalo, pronghorn antelope and snakes. To the north of the river, Lone Man created the Great Plains, domesticated animals, birds, fish and humans. The first humans lived underground near a large lake. Some of the more adventurous humans climbed a grapevine to the surface and discovered the two worlds. After returning underground, they shared their findings and decided to return with many others. As they were climbing the grapevine, it broke and half the Mandan were left underground. According to Mandan beliefs, each person possessed four different, immortal souls. The first soul was white and often seen as a shooting star or meteor. The second soul was colored a light brown and was seen in the form of the meadowlark. The third soul, called the lodge spirit, remained at the site of the lodge after death and would remain there forever. The final soul was black and after death would travel away from the village. These final souls existed as did living people; residing in their own villages, and farming and hunting. The last Okipa ceremony was performed in 1889, but the ceremony was resurrected in a somewhat different form in 1983. The most recent addition to the New Town area has been the new Four Bears Bridge, which was built in a joint effort between the three tribes and the North Dakota Department of Transportation. The bridge, spanning the Missouri River, replaces an older Four Bears Bridge that was built in 1955. The new bridge—the largest bridge in the state of North Dakota—is decorated with medallions celebrating the cultures of the three tribes. The bridge was opened to traffic September 2, 2005, and was officially opened in a ceremony on October 3.

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