Encounters at the Heart of the World

[Dakota]

A beautiful book. Dr. Elizabeth Fenn invested years visiting the sites and befriending the people she writes about. Her work pushes the envelope back on the consensus of Mandan history to the origin of the Okipa (oh-GEE-pay) ceremony of the Mandan as the beginning of Mandan history.

This history begins at the Big River Village at the mouth of the Cannonball River. They lived there for a few hundred years. They defended their way of life there too, against XaNumak (Grass Men; or "Sioux"). They buried their dead about a thousand feet removed from the confines of their village too. This kind of thing is important when, after this book came out - with its meticulous research and bibliography - a certain state archaeologist would repeatedly claim there was nothing there when energy interests began developing the Mandan site. Of course there was nothing to see when it was wiped out. But I digress on this subject.

Fenn crafts a story that reaches back nearly a thousand years. She doesn't stop with the 1837 smallpox epidemic, nor the reservation era, but she brings the Mandan story into the twenty-first century. This is significant because of the misconception that the Mandan people died out.

Fenn tells readers that the Mandan are still here. That is a powerful narrative.

[Thomas]

OK, I have a question. Can this work be considered a model for writing native histories of the Greagt Plains? And is the model different for a white woman writing such a history as comparied to an indigenous woman writing it?