I need you to see through our eyes. You need to rethink your ingrained understandings of place, of people, community, and belonging. In 1833, Karl Bodmer and Prince Maximilian entered the world of the Nueta, People of the First Man, and the Hidatsa, the People of the Red Willow. They traversed a place that stands as more than a geographic locale, a place to point to on a map; it was and remains a peopled and storied landscape. Meandering along the strip of blue that is the Missouri River, they passed through the history of my people. Wholly unaware of the intricate dance of this swirling plethora of centers and peripheries, Bodmer and Maximilian were unknowingly following our story, that of collapse and reconsolidation. Our epicenters and our origin points. The Heart River and the Knife River complexes.

We follow Maximilian and Bodmer’s western trajectory, and we privilege those perspectives. But to understand the people who they encountered; the perspective must transition. The Mandan and Hidatsa villages along the Knife River are not in the West. They are not in the East, nor the North or South. They are in the center. They are at the center of our world. In this place, we came to find ourselves. What Bodmer and Maximilian observed along their journey was the flora and fauna of the Missouri River trench, the topographic features along the waterway. But, from our perspective, every bend of the river and every major topographic point was imbued with stories, with songs, with spirits, showcasing the episodes from our history. With those stories came process, the process by which we came to find ourselves as People of the First Man and the People of the Willows. Our medicines were derived from this place.

Western perspective places man on a pedestal. That we create, we foster change, we even stand as stewards of landscape. A hierarchical system where man is at the apex, he is the master of his world and all else is secondary. The Mandan and the Hidatsa understood that we as people do not make the land sacred, it does not derive its sacredness from us or is afforded this status from our words but that the land is inherent in this characteristic. It is an inseparable element. The spirits of animals and plants reside in these places, and they help us. The land taught us how to live, it shaped us and in due course we worked to shape it. This symbiotic relationship stands as a foundational component in our culture. There are spirits imbued within all things and we work to retain balance in the universe. Our medicines, our ceremonies, our knowledge, is not ours. It is all borrowed. There are progenitor figures that obtained these rites from the sacred and it was in this process of acquisition that they suffered and sacrificed on behalf of the people. Among the Mandan, a progenitor figure, Black Wolf, received the rites of the Black Bears and he did so by sacrifice. He labored so that the people may have this knowledge, that their lives were made better. We honor this process of knowledge acquisition.

As Bodmer and Maximilian traveled up the Missouri River in this unfamiliar domain they were following our history. Along this seemingly endless expanse of wilderness were our paths of origin, the story of the acquisition of agricultural production, the transition of our historic people from hunters in the late Pleistocene to agriculturalists. Passing the historical Mandan villages of the Heart River complex. Villages that had been abandoned not but a generation before, due to population loss from epidemic disease. The Mandan who were once in thirteen historic villages soon found themselves by the 1830s in two villages. 1781 is the first recorded smallpox epidemic among the Hidatsa and Mandan. This wave of epidemic disease inflicted substantial losses to the village populations, including medicine leaders, practitioners, knowledge holders, and artisans. This type of abrupt population loss represents the loss of knowledge. The Hidatsa subgroups, out of necessity, migrated from the peripheral territory and consolidated their villages in the epicenter along the Knife River. It led to the abandonment of the Heart River complex. For the first time in their history, the Mandan were forced to leave their heartland. They moved up the river and built villages near the Hidatsa for mutual defense. Mandan and Hidatsa are moving, from their peripheral territory to the epicenter.

Despite the intense cultural loss experienced in the post-epidemic years, something incredible happens. Instead of abandoning their medicines, losing faith in the practices of their fathers, the Hidatsa and Mandan respond to the epidemic with new ceremonial fervor and rigor. An intense process is underway, the Mandan and Hidatsa are fervently participating in a communal-wide introspection, beckoning the question, who are we? As Mandan and Hidatsa in this moment, who are we? They seek these answers in the Okipe and the Naxpike, the Sundance. A ceremonial practice imparted by Lone Man, the progenitor figure who established laws and practices, all members of Hidatsa and Mandan village life are participants in this ceremony. They respond to loss and near cultural collapse by reinforcing their ideas about place, about self, and about purpose. There is a reinvigorated ceremonial movement. With their re-instilled faith, the Mandan and Hidatsa again become certain of their world and their place in it. The Sundance is a reflection, a process by which the community retells their history through song and dance and reaffirms their position as Lone Man’s people. This is the world that Bodmer and Maximilian enter.

When we view Bodmer’s watercolors, what do we see? Reflections into the past, the fluid movement of dancers, the prominence and prestige of our leaders, the quiet calm of the interior lodge. We see normalcy. Bodmer provides for us a lens into our past, a small view into this period, our people in their natural state. That natural state is devoid of our contemporary dysfunction. Today, our people are mesmerized by this imagery because we have this longing to reconnect with this past. The feeling conjured by these images is difficult to describe. We have a nostalgia but there is with it a feeling of recognition, a spilling forth of that embedded cultural memory within all of us, a reawakening. My grandma Mary Yellowwolf describes this feeling in the Hidatsa language as “mii ooca xaawish.” This feeling we get, this standing of hairs on end, a call back to this embedded cultural memory. Viewing the imagery we think, “I know this, this is familiar.” Contemporary Indigenous communities have been shaped incredibly by the colonial process. The era of Americanization, Acculturation, and Assimilation accelerated cultural loss for Indigenous communities, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This reprogramming by the Federal Government led us to believe and think in a western mindset. We have appropriated foreign values, conceptions of space, belonging, and place. Everything has been thrown into disfunction. The loss of our Indigenous languages and cultures created a barrier for us, blocking us from our ways of thinking and conceptualizing. It blinded us. Looking through Bodmer’s lens, we feel the barrier begin to fade. And we know why: Bodmer rendered this imagery based on observations. He tried to capture village life as it unfolded. Still, there is an integral element that is missing from Bodmer’s images of Mandan and Hidatsa villages, and that is our essence. The people. And we are still here. We have striven to retain what we still have. Rarely have we been afforded the opportunity to tell our own histories and perspectives. We see something different. Our eyes perceive differently because of that cultural perspective. Viewers may see the imagery of our prominent leaders and their regalia, the might of their power. Their material culture represents far more than meets the eye. It is, by extension, their story. It expresses their belonging. Concentric circles of being from the lodge groups to the age-grade societies to the clan to the tribal group. A parallel in our own understanding about place.

The material culture expressed in the watercolors was created by people. People of their lodge grouping, women who worked and labored. Materials collected by men and women, animals hunted and prayed over, plant dyes foraged, and paints accumulated. Everything that these images show is a byproduct of an intricate prayer process and showcases the reciprocal nature of gift giving. All was paid back to the natural world. With the introduction of Judeo-Christian thought, we have formalized our prayers and entered them into a rigid structure. The people of the Knife River understood a deeper understanding of prayerful action. Material culture is imbued with the prayers and good feelings and intentions of the creators. One cannot create something successfully in a poor mindset. From the process of collecting materials to the creation of the material culture itself, there is a prayerful process. Artisans imbued these products with their essence and by extension, the material culture has a spirit. This is especially meaningful and tragic when you reflect on the boarding school era when children were forcibly taken by the government and their parents and grandparents wrapped them in material culture. To these government schools, they were bringing those prayers with them. Their families came with them. These concepts carried on from these earlier periods. In Bodmer’s images, we see the finery of prominent individuals, but we also see the richness of the culture at large and the strength of the bonds of kinship. We must move away from individualism and back to an understanding of communalism. We are all a product of our history and are shaped by our families. We have intricate layers of belonging. Individuals were by extension representatives of their lodges, clans, societies and tribal groups. They all had belonging. Seemingly individual actions through their war deeds were not for the elevation of the self but the elevation of these tiers of belonging. There was a larger communal understanding is that if you succeed, then we all succeed. They acted for the sake of the larger common good. These are not individuals depicted in Bodmer’s portraits, they are members of extended households, they are Lone Man’s people, people of the earth and the sky and that mystery of what is below.

Bodmer works through the process of creating this imagery, however, imagery creation is understood differently in our society and worldview. He was hoping to represent these individuals from the vantage point of science, the creation of an accurate depiction of what he was witnessing. What Bodmer is missing is the cultural component. He can only see from his vantage point. We cannot fault Bodmer and Maximilian for their misinterpretations or misunderstanding. They only have within their toolbox, their preconceived notions about native people and must use their language, their culture, their worldview, to explain what is unfolding in front of them. This is not enough for Bodmer and Maximilian to understand the concepts of cultural complex, the society, the kinship, the values. They fail to understand the depth of this historic moment, the apex culture at the Knife River. A people who have responded in such a way to historical nadir and have chosen to revitalize and retain their culture. Bodmer and Maximilian are witnessing a cultural renaissance unfolding in front of them. This is why the imagery is so powerful for our contemporary community. We draw strength from it, and we learn about ourselves. Today, we find ourselves in our own moment of cultural renaissance. Now we are afforded the opportunity to speak our languages without fear from government reprisal, we practice our ceremonies, and we share our perspectives. What Bodmer created is a tool for us to reacquaint ourselves with our past and gives a visual imagery to our belief systems and existing knowledge base. We can work to breathe life into this imagery. Our voice is the vital component in understanding this work. We work to become reacquainted with our histories, our cultures and languages. By sharing our stories and learning, we break the barrier of colonialism, the veil thins, and our eyes can see what they were always intended to see. With this, we become reacquainted with our place in the world and reflect on our purpose as Hidatsa and Mandan people, our community connections, and our threads of belonging. We reinforce our place as Nueta, People of the First Man and Hidatsa, The People of the Willows.