HIDATSA

also called Minitari, or Gros Ventres Of The Missouri, American Plains Indian people of Siouan stock who lived on the upper Missouri River between the Heart and the Little Missouri rivers in semipermanent villages. The Hidatsa were a sedentary people who lived in circular lodges roofed with earth; they raised corn (maize), beans, and squash and made pottery. Except for tobacco, which was traded to other tribes, the women did all the farming. The men hunted bison and other large game on the grasslands and engaged in warfare. Hidatsa social organization included age-graded military societies in which membership was obtained by purchase; there were also various clan and social societies. They traced descent through the maternal line. As with other Plains tribes, the sun dance was the major ceremony, involving the practice of self-torture. The language of the Hidatsa is most closely related to that of the Crow (q.v.), with whom they were united before the historic period. Culturally they resembled the Mandan, a result of more than 200 years of continuous and peaceful association. In the latter part of the 18th century, there were more than 2,000 Hidatsa who, with the Mandan, occupied a central position in the extensive trading network on the northern plains. Horses, dressed hides, and buffalo robes, obtained from the nomadic warrior peoples to the west, were exchanged with European traders for guns, knives, and other manufactured goods. In 1837 a smallpox epidemic so severely reduced their numbers that they consolidated into one village. Continual harassment by their Dakota enemies forced them to move the village to Ft. Berthold, banding together with the Mandan in 1845 and with the Arikara in 1862 for purposes of defense. Since the establishment of a permanent Indian bureau in 1868, the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara, collectively known as the Three Affiliated Tribes, have lived together on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. The Hidatsa reservation population was approximately 1,000 in the late 20th century.