Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site

Superintendent of Knife River Indian Villages, Alisha Deegan describes her journey with the NPS for the 19th Amendment Centennial.

This historical background information explains arts, crafts, and clothing traditions for the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes. It details flint, pottery, basketry, painting, parfleche, quillwork, clothing, footwear, appearance, and singing and dancing. It also explains activity in a modern Hidatsa or Mandan home.

Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site protects upland woodlands and cottonwood forests along the Knife and Missouri rivers that provide foraging and roosting habitat for bats. The Northern Great Plains Inventory & Monitoring Network monitors bats at the park to detect long-term trends in bat populations.

Across six Northern Great Plains parks, education and outreach for bats was conducted.

The Big Hidatsa Village Site is part of the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site. Settled from 1740 until about 1850, Big Hidatsa Village is the largest of the Hidatsa communities near the Knife River. It was comprised of approximately 120 circular earth lodges that housed 20 to 30 individuals each. They were set close together, allowing for communal interaction among the inhabitants.

The Cenozoic Era (66 million years ago [MYA] through today) is the "Age of Mammals." North America’s characteristic landscapes began to develop during the Cenozoic. Birds and mammals rose in prominence after the extinction of giant reptiles. Common Cenozoic fossils include cat-like carnivores and early horses, as well as ice age woolly mammoths.

At Sakakawea, archeologists discovered hundreds of stone tools. The Hidatsa who manufactured them, however, were not the eighteenth-century villagers, but people who lived several decades earlier. The smallpox epidemics in 1781-1782 and 1837-1838 devastated the Hidatsa artisans, leading to new ways of making ceramic and metal objects and passing along the methodologies to the next generation.

In traditional Hidatsa society, women constructed, owned, and maintained the earthlodge, or awadi. The elaborately designed structure was home to between ten and twenty people, often sisters and their families spanning several generations. Today, shallow depressions mark the locations of the earthlodge villages at Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site in North Dakota.