Sakakawea Village: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site
Regions 3, 4, & 5 Park Cultural Landscapes Program. 1999. Sakakawea Village: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site. Cultural Landscapes Inventory Report. 450007. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. NPS Midwest Regional Office, Omaha, Nebraska / CRIS-CL Database
The Sakakawea Village is a component of the Knife River Indian Villages cultural landscape, defining the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site. The park unit is located in central North Dakota, sixty miles north of Bismarck and adjacent to the town of Stanton. Its location along the Missouri and Knife Rivers has shaped its character and use, and the villages continue to provide opportunity to interpret Hidatsa Indian tribal life. The Hidatsa used winter and summer villages, taking advantage of the resources of the surrounding plains landscape. Summer villages were located on terraces above the Missouri and near the Knife Rivers. The convergence of the waterways formed a fertile floodplain, well-suited for growing corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers. The positioning of these summer domiciles provided views to the expansive prairie, alerting Hidatsa to migrating food sources, raiding tribes, and tribes interested in trading. Imprints of summer earthlodge dwellings still remain evident. Temporary winter camps were constructed in the forested floodplain of the Missouri River, which provided ample wood, shelter, food, and water. Archeological evidence from all village sites helps suggest patterns of tribal life. Sakakawea was a summer village site occupied by the Awatixa sub-group after they vacated the Lower Hidatsa Village due to a small pox epidemic. The site has 31 surface depressions denoting the location of former earthlodges. In addition, travois trails, fortification ditches, cache pits, a small area for cultivation, village periphery zone, off-village activity area, and a cemetery define the site near the Knife River. The period of significance for Sakakawea Village is 1790 to 1834, representing the time of occupation. This is within the parent landscape period of significance (1000-1885). The village is part of a National Register nomination for a discontiguous archeological district that focuses on a period between 5,000 BC to 1861. The earthlodge remains and ethnographic documentation make the site unique. The villages also played an important role in trade networks across the plains, and later were strongly tied to the fur trade and American exploration in the west. Impacts of these changes and interactions, such as epidemics and material culture transformations, are still evident. The village also conveys plains history and culture, including the movement of groups, subsistence practices, and relations to the land. Overall, the condition of the component landscape is good. Based on the inventory and site visits conducted by the CLI team, the inventory units were found to retain integrity in areas of location, setting, feeling, and association dating to the time of Hidatsa occupation. Evidence to reinforce the integrity of the cultural landscape can be found in the many journal descriptions and artist renderings from the fur trade era. The Hidatsa earth lodges are no longer extant, yet the imprints left on the landscape provide modern visitors a sense of place similar to that experienced by traders, explorers, and artists who frequented the villages. Many of the landscape features documented for the CLI are previously studied surface archeological features, assessed for National Register documentation. The village landscape is important for the contextual setting it provides, retaining sufficient ground-surface expression to illustrate the physical spatial organization of the society and the relationships between the various villages and natural settings. Additionally, the landscape encompasses and protects historic use areas; some that are archeological, like travois trails and cemeteries, and others where the historic use is no longer evident. The landscape preserves the open character and associations with the Hidatsa tribal groups, even though the historic land uses are not intact.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Regions 3, 4, & 5 Park Cultural Landscapes Program
- Date of Issue
- 1999-08-31
- Publisher
- U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service
- Units
- KNRI , MWR
- Keywords
- Agriculture, Archeological District, archeological features, Archeology-Historic-Aboriginal, Archeology-Prehistoric, art, Awatixa, Big Hidatsa, Bismarck, burial grounds, ceremonial sites, Earthlodge, Epidemics, Ethnic Heritage-Native American, Ethnohistory of Indigenous American Populations, Expansion of the Colonies and the United States 1763-1898, Exploration-Settlement, Flood Plain, Fur Trade, Fur Trappers and Mountain Men as Pathfinders, Great Plains, Hidatsa Tribe, Hudson's Bay Company and the Northwest Coast Fur Trade, Hunting Grounds, Interpretive Landscape, John Jacob Astor and the American Fur Company 1808-1840, Knife River, Lewis and Clark Expedition, Linear Mound, Lower Hidatsa, Mandans, Mercer County, Metaharta Village, midden, Military-Indigenous Peoples Contact, Missouri River, Native American, North Dakota, Old Northwest and Mississippi Valley Fur Frontier 1763-1815, Painting and Sculpture, Plains Farmers, Post-Archaic and Prehistoric Developments, prehistoric archeology, Sakakawea, Seasonal Village, smallpox, Stanton, Taylor Bluff, Terrace, The Early Peopling of North America, The Northern Plains, trade, Travois Trails, Vernacular Landscape, village site