Squash Knives
Squash knives of bone were still in use when I was young. I have often seen old women using them but, as I recollect, I never saw one being made.
The knife was made from the thin part of a buffalo’s shoulder bone; never, I think, from the shoulder bone of a deer, elk, or bear.
The bone of a buffalo cow was best, because it was thinner. If the squash knife was too thick, the slices of squash were apt to break as they were being severed from the fruit. Bone squash knives, as I remember, were used for slicing squashes and for nothing else.
A squash knife should be cut from green bone; it would then keep an edge, for green bone is firm and hard. I do not think I ever saw anyone sharpening a bone knife so far as I can now recollect.
There was no handle to a bone squash knife, beyond the natural bone.
A bone squash knife lasted a long time. Old women in our village who used these bone knives, brought them out each summer in the squash harvest. It was their habit, I think, to keep the knives in the back part of the lodge, by the owner’s bed. Whether it was customary to keep the knives in bags, or in some other receptacle, I do not know.
My mothers used a white man’s steel knife for slicing squashes; but as I have said, there were old women in the village who still used the older bone knives.
Yellow Squash, I remember, was one; an old Hidatsa woman named Blossom was another; so also was Goes-around-the-end.
This model of a squash knife ([figure 35]) that I have had my son Goodbird make for you, is of rather dry bone; I have had him grease it, that it may be more like green bone.