Latest news with #Hidatsa
New York Times
6 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
What if Everything We Know About Sacagawea Is Wrong?
In a conference room in the middle of the Great Plains, 50 people gathered to correct what they saw as a grave error in the historical record. It was July 16, 2015, on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, not too far upstream from the camp on the Missouri River where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first met Sacagawea, the teenage girl who would accompany them to the Pacific Ocean and back. The story of that journey has been told many times: in the journals that Lewis and Clark kept; in more than a century of academic histories; and in countless more fanciful works that have turned the expedition, and Sacagawea's supposed role as guide to the Americans, into one of the country's foundational myths. The people in the conference room, members of three closely related tribes, the Mandans, the Hidatsas and the Arikaras, thought basically all of it was nonsense. Jerome Dancing Bull, a Hidatsa elder, took the microphone first. The day was warm enough that someone had propped the door open to the outside; the sun was blindingly bright, the prairie a labrador's scruff in the distance. 'They got it all wrong!' he told the people in the room, referring to the bare-bones, truncated life sketched out for Sacagawea by Lewis and Clark and the historians who followed them. In that telling, Sacagawea was born a member of the Shoshone tribe in present-day Idaho, was kidnapped by the Hidatsa as a child, spent most of 1805 and 1806 with the expedition and died in 1812, while she was still in her 20s. The Hidatsas insist that she was a member of their tribe all along and died more than 50 years later, in 1869. And not of old age, either: She was shot to death. History has always been a process; it has also long attracted partisans who insist that its judgments should be frozen in time. In March, the Trump administration released an executive order with the title 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,' which condemned the 'widespread effort to rewrite history' and called for 'solemn and uplifting public monuments.' It was a timeworn complaint turned into a wanton threat: Mess with our national symbols, and we'll pull your funding. Sacagawea long ago left the realm of the apolitical dead. Over the years, she has been pressed into service as an avatar of patient humility or assertive feminism, of American expansionism or Indigenous rights, of Jeffersonian derring-do or native wisdom. Her face is on U.S. currency, her name has been affixed to a caldera on Venus and there are statues of her spread throughout the nation, each incarnation seeming to pull her further out of context. The Trump administration has said it wants to include a sculpture of her in a planned National Garden of American Heroes, effectively claiming her as an honorary citizen — though to the federal government at the time, she was closer to being an alien enemy. 'The Hidatsas' portrait of Sacagawea is both richer and more ambiguous than the one found in standard histories.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Photo: Dire Wolf De-extinction
Dire wolves went extinct about 12,000 years ago. In April, biotech company Colossal Biosciences announced it had cloned three pups that resemble the long-dead creatures. Scientists used DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull to make 15 key edits to the gray wolf genome and recreate dire wolf traits. Expected to grow to twice the size of gray wolves, the pups have wider heads, larger jaws, and stronger shoulders. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation has expressed interest in providing them a habitat in which to roam freely once again. The post Photo: Dire Wolf De-extinction appeared first on
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Yahoo
North Dakota tribal national park to open Badlands to visitors
Jack Dura Associated Press BISMARCK, N.D. — A new tribal national park in North Dakota's rugged Badlands is opening a little-seen area of the dramatic landscape to hikers and other outdoors enthusiasts, part of a Native American tribe's efforts to preserve the land and encourage recreation. The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation established Three Affiliated Tribes National Park with the purchase of 2,100 acres (850 hectares) of a former ranch adjacent to the Fort Berthold Reservation's boundaries on the south side of the Little Missouri River. The area was in the tribe's original treaty lands but a government allotment act later reduced the reservation's size, said Mary Fredericks, director of the tribe's Parks and Reserve Program. The reservation's boundaries have expanded to include the park. Tribal Chairman Mark Fox said the goal is to establish a park for cultural and recreational purposes such as canoeing, kayaking and viewing wildlife. 'It's part of our history, our lands, very significant to us, the whole area,' Fox said. 'This is just another strong move to reacquire some of our lands and then do something very effective with it, so to speak' to aid tourism and the economy through recreation. Park officials are being careful with how they plan and develop the park to be thoughtful about impacts on the landscape. 'This place will be here in perpetuity and it will be better when we are done than it was when we got it, and that's what we're pushing for, that's where we're headed,' Park Superintendent Ethan White Calfe said. North Dakota's Badlands — the name denotes the difficult terrain — comprise a stark, erosive, colorful landscape with dramatic shapes, petrified wood and ancient fossils. The area draws hikers, campers, hunters, bicyclists and other outdoors enthusiasts. The park, which held a soft opening in September, is open only to foot traffic by a free permit online. Park officials require visitors to register their plans and hikers must park at a grass lot. By the end of the summer, organizers hope to have 10 miles (16 kilometers) of trails finished, Fredericks said. Plans to build a visitor center and campground are in the works. Park officials also intend to work on native prairie and soil restoration in the erosive environment where some native plants that thrive in the area have been pushed out by invasive species, White Calfe said. 'We're looking at it as how do we help this area look like it did 300 years ago? How do we help this area heal to where it is in a lot of more of a state of equilibrium,' White Calfe said. It's a beautiful and picturesque but deceptive and steep landscape, Fredericks said. The park is bisected by a state highway that drops from a flat into a rugged river bottom. People can see parts of the park while driving, but not its interior, she said. Eventually, the park could be a gateway for visitors to the reservation, Fredericks said. Outdoor recreation is available at Lake Sakakawea, which straddles the vast reservation, and nearby at Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the Maah Daah Hey Trail. The MHA Nation benefits from oil development on its reservation, which helped the tribe to afford the land for the park, Fredericks said. 'But in that we have to be careful and preserve and conserve,' she said. 'I'm very, very proud of our tribal council for having the foresight to buy this land with the intent of making it into a national park ... because we don't know what's going to happen 50 years from now and what our landscape is going to look like, but we can preserve this part of it.' The park neighbors Little Missouri State Park, which draws horseback riders to its 40 miles (64 kilometers) of trails in the Badlands. The rugged landscape 'kind of has that almost spiritual feel to it. It's peaceful,' state Parks and Recreation Department Director Cody Schulz said. State park officials have worked with the tribe for about two years on its plans and partnering together, such as connecting trail systems, Schulz said. Tribal park officials are collaborating with anyone willing, Fredericks said. White Calfe said the park is an opportunity 'to tell our own story, our own narrative from our own perspective in a place like this. That's pretty valuable.'
