their catch to old men who no longer go out onto the land.
Possessions like sleds, fishnets, rifles, or snowshoes are also infused with luck. A man lamented to me that one of his high-caliber rifles had failed to kill a bear coming out of its den although it was at close range. He had to use another gun to finish the animal. This gun was “out of luck,” he explained, and he suspected that a young woman had rendered it useless by stepping over it.
Putting on another person’s mittens can either take away his luck or give him yours. Once I was traveling with a man whose hands became painfully cold, so I offered him my extra mittens. He finally took them, explaining that since I was leaving Huslia I could get along without luck in things like trapping. But a short while later he decided to take them off and endure the cold instead.
Luck is a finite entity, specific to each natural thing or even to certain activities. It can be lost, transferred, and recovered. Luck binds people to the code of proper behavior toward the natural world. And so success in living on the land involves far more than a mastery of technical skills. It requires that a sensitive balance be maintained between each person and the conscious forces of the environment ….
The Koyukon View of Nature
For traditional Koyukon people, the environment is both a natural and a supernatural realm. All that exists in nature is imbued with awareness and power; all events in nature are potentially manifestations of this power; all actions toward nature are mediated by consideration of its consciousness and sensitivity. The interchange between humans and environment is based on an elaborate code of respect and morality, without which survival would be jeopardized. The Koyukon, while they are bound by the strictures of this system, can also manipulate its powers for their own benefit. Nature is a second society in which people live, a watchful and possessive one whose bounty is wrested as much by placation as by cleverness and craft.
Moving across the sprawl of wildland, through the forest and open muskeg, Koyukon people are ever conscious that they are among spirits. Each animal is far more than what can be seen; it is a personage and a personality, known from its legacy in stories of the Distant Time. It is a figure in the community of beings, once at least partially human, and even now possessed of attributes beyond outsiders’ perception.
Not only the animals, but also the plants, the earth and landforms, the air, weather, and sky are spiritually invested. For each, the hunter knows an array of respectful gestures and deferential taboos that demand obedience. Violations against them will offend and alienate their spirits, bringing bad luck or illness, or worse if a powerful and vindictive being is treated irreverently.
Aware of these invisible forces and their manifestations, the Koyukon can protect and enhance their good fortune, can understand signs or warnings given them through natural events, and can sometimes influence the complexion of the environment to suit their desires. Everything in the Koyukon world lies partly in the realm beyond the senses, in the realm we would call supernatural.
Gilbert Wilson, Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden
While European and Euro-American conquerors preferred to see all Indians as hunters, in fact, many American Indians were also formidable agriculturalists. Indeed, a whole range of wild plants were domesticated by American Indians, and their legacy is with us today. Maize, most beans, squash (including pumpkins), tomatoes, avocadoes, chocolate, and tobacco – to name just a few – developed from centuries of careful effort by Indians, most of them women, to make wild plants more useful to people. Buffalo Bird Woman was of the Hidatsa people, from the upper Missouri River in what is now North Dakota. Her people lived in this region for centuries before their conquest by the United States. Her reminiscence of cultivating the river bottoms in the latter 1800s is more than just one woman’s personal story. It is testimony to centuries of planting and cultivating on the American continent. Various Native American peoples farmed and hunted along the Missouri River, in the well-watered eastern part of the continent, from southern Maine to Florida, and in the southwest, along the Rio Grande. To make a living by growing corn amidst the Great Plains, where a dry climate and ferocious winters conspire to frustrate even many modern farmers, was no mean feat. Many people lived by a mix of farming, hunting, gathering, and trade. Most appear to have thought about animals in ways similar to the Koyukon of the late twentieth century. Plants also had spiritual powers. Compare Buffalo Bird Woman’s account to the excerpt from Make Prayers to the Raven. The garden is a woman’s world. What conflicts did Hidatsa farmers have with one another? How did they resolve them? How did access to iron tools change Hidatsa farming?
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(Extract from Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians. St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987.)
Soon after they came to Like-a-fishhook bend, the families of my tribe began to clear fields, for gardens, like those they had at Five Villages. Rich black soil was to be found in the timbered bottom lands of the Missouri. Most of the work of clearing was done by the women ….
In old times we Hidatsas never made our gardens on the untimbered, prairie land, because the soil there is too hard and dry. In the bottom lands by the Missouri, the soil is soft and easy to work….
Dispute and Its Settlement
About two years after the first ground was broken in our field, a dispute I remember arose between my mothers and two of their neighbors, Lone Woman and Goes-to-next-timber.
These two women were clearing fields adjoining that of my mothers; … the three fields met at a corner …. [M]y father, to set up claim to his field, had placed marks, one of them in the corner at which met the fields of Lone Woman and Goes-to-next-timber; but while my mothers were busy clearing and digging up the other end of their field, their two neighbors invaded this marked-off corner; Lone Woman had even dug up a small part before she was discovered.
However, when they were shown the mark my father had placed, the two women yielded and accepted payment for any rights they might have.
It was our Indian rule to keep our fields very sacred. We did not like to quarrel about our garden lands. One’s title to a field once set up, no one ever thought of disputing it; for if one were selfish and quarrelsome, and tried to seize land belonging to another, we thought some evil would come upon him, as that some one of his family would die. There is a story of a black bear who got into a pit that was not his own, and had his mind taken away from him for doing so! …
Beginning a Field in Later Times
As I grew up, I learned to work in the garden, as every Hidatsa woman was expected to learn; but iron axes and hoes, bought of the traders, were now used by everybody, and the work of clearing and breaking a new field was less difficult than it had been in our grandfathers’ times. A family had also greater freedom in choosing where they should have their garden, since with iron axes they could more easily cut down any small trees and bushes that might be on the land. However, to avoid having to cut down big trees, a rather open place was usually chosen.
A family, then, having chosen a place for a field, cleared off the ground as much as they could, cutting down small trees and bushes in such way that the trees fell all in one direction. Some of the timber that was fit might be taken home for firewood; the rest was let lie to dry until spring, when it was fired. The object of felling the trees in one direction was to make them cover the ground as much as possible, since firing them softened the soil and left it loose and mellow for planting. We sought always to burn over all the ground, if we could.
Before firing, the family carefully raked off the dry grass
