Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation

by Waheenee; Gilbert Livingstone Wilson

We picked a good many squashes in a season. One year my mother fetched in seventy baskets from our field. I have known families to bring in as many as eighty, or even a hundred baskets, in a season.

The baskets, as they were brought in, were borne up on the drying stage, and the squashes emptied out on the floor for slicing and drying; squashes not cooked and eaten fresh were sliced and dried for winter, excepting those saved for seed.

Slicing the Squashes

Slicing squashes for drying began about the third picking. Sometimes, in good years, a few squashes might be sliced at the second picking; but at the third picking, slicing and drying began in earnest.

When the squashes, emptied from the baskets, made a great heap on the floor of the drying stage, the women of the family made a feast, cooking much food for the purpose; some old women were then invited to come and cut up the squashes with knives, into slices to dry. We regarded these old women as hired; and I remember that in my father’s family we hired sometimes eight, sometimes ten, sometimes only six. I think that at the time I was a young woman, when my mothers made such a feast, about ten old women came.

These old women ascended the drying stage, and sat, five on either side of the pile of squashes. Each of the old women had a squash knife in her hand, made of the thin part of the shoulder bone of a buffalo, if it was an old-fashioned one; butcher knives of steel are now used.

The squashes were cut thus:

An old woman would draw a robe up over her lap, as she sat Indian fashion, with ankles to the right, on the floor of the stage. She took a squash in her left hand, and with her bone knife in her right, she sliced the squash into slices about three eighths of an inch thick.

The squash was sliced from side to side, not from stem to blossom. An old woman slicing squash would take up a squash, cut out the stem pit and the blossom, then turn the squash sidewise and slice, beginning on the side nearest her. The cut was made by pressing the bone blade downward into the squash as the latter lay in her palm.

The first three slices and the last three of a large squash; or the first two and the last two of a smaller squash, the old woman put beside her in a pile, as her earnings for her work; upon this pile also went any squash thought too small to be worth slicing.