Review of Buffalo Bird Woman\u27s Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians and Indian Agriculture in America

The study of Native American agriculture has been revived recently by Gary Nabhan\u27s Gathering the Desert, which concerns Southwestern Indian agriculture. The two books reviewed here deal more with plains agriculture. Wilson\u27s book is an account of Hidatsa gardening practice in the nineteenth century as told to Wilson by Buffalo Bird Woman, a lady who continued to practice traditional ways long after most Hidatsa had adopted Western agriculture; the book gives a picture of traditional Hidatsa practices regarding com, sunflowers, squash, beans, tobacco, the tools used to grow them, their storage, their field culture, and the like. Hurt\u27s book, on the other hand, is much more general, and tells very generally of the agriculture of the Mandan, Hidatsa, Pawnee, Omaha, and so forth. The book is useful to the beginning student or, in the case of the more advanced student, for its bibliography