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by Elizabeth A. Fenn (no photo)

A Mandan-style lodge at North Dakota's Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. © TOM BEAN/CORBIS

We mainly know of the Mandan Indians—iconic plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were for centuries at the center of the North American universe—because Lewis and Clark wintered in their midst in 1804-1805. But these prosperous villagers had a rich history, and in Encounters at the Heart of the World, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves it, piecing together not only archeological and anthropological findings but also relevant new work in geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science. Her pathbreaking account of centuries of Mandean prosperity and productivity gives us a new perspective on early American history, a new interpretation of the American past.

By 1500, some twelve thousand Mandans were established on the northern plains, and their commercial prowess, agricultural skill, and reputation for hospitality became famous. Recent archeological discoveries show how they thrived, and then how they collapsed. The damage wrought by imported diseases such as smallpox and the havoc caused by the arrival of horses and steamboats were tragic for the Mandans, yet, as Fenn makes clear, their sense of themselves as a people with distinctive traditions endured.

Fenn’s remarkable study of Mandan history, landscapes, and people is enriched and enlivened not only by her scientific and historical research but also by her own encounters at the heart of the world.

-- from the publisher

Encounters at the Heart of the World: Mandan Survivance

Peter d'Errico
6/11/15

When the jury and judges awarded Elizabeth Fenn the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, their citation described the book as "an engrossing, original narrative showing the Mandans, a Native American tribe in the Dakotas, as a people with a history."

Strange phrase, "a people with a history." Is there a people without a history? Or did the judges perhaps mean"a people with a recorded history"? If we set these questions aside, we encounter a further conundrum: Under the rules for the Pulitzer Prize in History, the award goes to "a distinguished and appropriately documented book upon the history of the United States." But this is a book about the Mandan.

Notwithstanding questions about how the Pulitzer judges and juries understood what they were doing, Fenn's remarkable and remarkably well-written book richly deserves the Pulitzer Prize. United States history cannot be understood apart from its entanglement with the Indigenous Peoples of the land. In "Encounters at the Heart of the World," Mandan history illuminates American history, from at least the 17th century to the present.

The title—Encounters at the Heart of the World—reflects first of all Mandan self-understanding. Two Mandan creation stories—one of migration led by Good Furred Robe, the other of Lone Man and First Creator making land—each convey the position of the Mandan at the center of the world. The Mandan sense of centrality coincides with a geographic fact: the Mandan homeland occupies an area about 100 miles south of the geographic center of North America.

Peoples in their homeland often express this sentiment: we are at the center. A sense of centrality characterizes the phenomenon of being at home, in "ones place." But the significance of the title—Encounters at the Heart of the World—goes beyond Mandan self-understanding and geography. Fenn documents the ways in which the Mandan People and their homelands were at the confluence of global events. The colonizers' search for the Northwest Passage to India, the international trade in furs, the competition between France and Britain—and later, the U.S.—for control of the continent: the Mandan were at a crossroads of these world-changing processes.

The Mandan occupied a central economic and political position well before contact with Christian Europeans. They were go-betweens and partners for exchange of agricultural, hunting, and craft products among Native Nations on all sides.

After colonial contact, these relations of centrality exposed the Mandan to another form of traffic: the spread of the colonizers' diseases. Smallpox especially, but also measles and whooping cough, broke out in waves of epidemics—repeated, virulent episodes of sickness and death. Outsider diseases devastated the Mandan. We speak of "decimation," but that means killing one in ten; the mortality rate among the Mandan from the 1837 smallpox epidemic alone was 90%. All that were left was one in ten.

Fenn writes about Mandan spiritual life at the heart of their relations with one another, other peoples, and the world. She explains how Mandan ceremonial practices—principally the Okipa, a four-day ceremony to restore balance among the People—"evolved continuously, embracing new practices, spirits, and ceremonies as they emerged and abandoning others when they outlived their sustainability or usefulness."

Fenn's understanding of the fluidity of Mandan spiritual practices stands in contrast to what so many other observers fail to understand when they disparage Native traditions and ceremonies as not authentic (whatever that may mean) because they change. She comes to understand that "adaptability, ironically, created continuity. It allowed the Mandans to preserve their identity in the face of change, both before and after 1492." Insisting on the present tense—because the Mandan are still here—Fenn writes, "It would … be disrespectful—even treacherous—to ignore the spiritual dimensions of Mandan life."

Fenn's work is rooted deeply in archival research—ninety-one pages of endnotes, nearly a quarter of the book—yet the writing is never dry and sparkles with personal insights. She ponders the basic question: "How can I understand the Mandans I am writing about when they inhabited a world so different from my own? Every historian faces this problem. We hardly talk about it, but is the crux of our work. Can I even begin to describe the Mandan universe?"

Her effort to understand and portray the Mandan universe pushes her to explore far beyond standard historical sources. She delves into archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and even nutrition science. In each of these fields she does more than sample or dabble. Her endnotes compare and contrast competing views in these fields, and explain how she comes to her conclusions.

The result is a page-turner of a book. Arranged roughly chronologically within a topical framework—a kind of mosaic—the book opens with Mandan creation stories and daily life and proceeds to tell a complex narrative of contact, upheaval, reorientation, and survival. Though she does not use the term, her presentation is an example of what Asnishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor calls "survivance": "Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry."

"Encounters at the Heart of the World" is a portrayal of Mandan survivance, in the face of Christian missionaries, proto-capitalist traders, Old World plagues, colonial usurpers, new technologies, and American military force. In Fenn's hands, the interwoven episodes of trade, war, and pestilence force the Mandan more than once to their last resources and yet fail to eradicate them as a People. Again and again, the Mandan suffer; but even as they reel with the various onslaughts, interventions, and devastations, they learn and improvise and carry forward their unique ways in new circumstances.

Fenn closes her powerful book as she opens it, with spiritual considerations. She recounts the revival of the Okipa ceremony at On-A-Slant Village in June 2011: "Lone Man made his entry, and all the creatures came back. From morning to midnight, we danced and we danced, pausing to smoke, pray, tell stories, and ponder the Mandan way through the world."

"Encounters at the Heart of the World" springs from the heart of the author. Fenn's energy and deep attachment to the Mandan as a living People inform the book from the first page to the last. She tells us in the first paragraph of the Preface that the Mandan "have lived here...for centuries." Not once does she slip into the past tense so often used by writers about Indians. In the Acknowledgements section at the end, she refers to "my little sisters in the Goose Society" and gives thanks "for gifts at once physical, spiritual, and intellectual."

The reader of Encounters at the Heart of the World encounters the heart of the Mandan, and through their iconic history as a people of the plains learns something of the history of the world.

Peter d’Errico graduated from Yale Law School in 1968. He was Staff attorney in Dinebeiina Nahiilna Be Agaditahe Navajo Legal Services, 1968-1970, in Shiprock. He taught Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1970-2002. He is a consulting attorney on indigenous issues.


Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork...

Source: Indian Country Today - Media Network

Book Discussion on Encounters at the Heart of the World
Elizabeth Fenn talked about her book, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People.

She spoke in the History Pavilion of the 15th annual National Book Festival, held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C

Link to Discussion: http://www.c-span.org/video/?327838-1...

Review: Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People
Elizabeth A. Fenn tells the story of North Dakota's Mandan tribe

By Sandra Dallas
Special to The Denver Post

In long-ago times, the Mandan Indians had an oracle stone, a rock outcropping about 20 feet across, that was covered with lichen. Each spring, they spent days washing the stone, smoking, singing and fasting, as they waited for designs to appear in the lichen that would predict the future.

If the designs spoke true, the Mandans must have been horrified at what they saw, because their future was the worst of any tribe along the Missouri River.

They were attacked by warrior tribes and beset by Norway rats transported to America on European ships, which decimated their grain stores.

Worst of all, they fell victim to the white man's diseases. Some 90 percent of the Mandans were wiped out by measles, whooping cough and smallpox in the 1830s. The Mandans still exist but only as one of three tribes that make up the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota.

Most of us know the Mandans through the sketches and paintings of 19th-century artist George Catlin that were made just before the smallpox epidemic hit. Especially striking were Catlin's paintings of a Sun Dance-like ritual called Opika, complete with self-torture and sexual exploits. Other than that ceremony, not much is known about the tribe, especially in its earlier days.

That's why "Encounters in the Heart of the World" (the Mandans referred to the land as the heart of the world) is such a welcome book. Elizabeth A. Fenn, an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, combed early narratives, one going back to 1689, written by explorers and traders, to piece together this sweeping history of the Mandans. One early visitor complimented the tribe's honesty, modesty, cooking ability and abstinence from liquor. But he also noted their indolence and wastefulness.


Unlike their enemy, the Sioux, the Mandans were not a nomadic tribe. They were farmers who lived in earth-covered lodges that looked like giant sloping hogans, structures so sturdy that as many as 50 people could stand on a roof. The dwellings needed to be large, because in early times, when a Mandan man married a woman, he married her sisters as well, and they all lived together under one roof. The women, of course, did most of the work — cooking, growing corn, caring for stock and skinning and cutting up buffalo.

A Mandan treat was "float buffalo," greenish-hued putrid meat from a buffalo that had drowned during the winter. The Mandans thought it a great delicacy, although a white man called it "intolerable."

The women were also offered to guests. One traveler noted their "almost total want of chastity," a claim that was so well known that he had little trouble recruiting men for his exploration party. The women's sexual license, he wrote, "was almost [the men's] sole motive for their journey hereto."

The Indian men hunted, fought enemies and carried on traditions.

As a relatively peaceful group that lived close together in their villages, the Mandans were susceptible to contagious diseases. The first smallpox epidemic hit Missouri tribes in 1781, spread in part by warriors who took the scalps of infected enemies. The plague wiped out entire clans, although it left a few of the people immunized. They survived the later smallpox outbreak that killed so many of their tribe.

By the 1830s, the Mandan faced problems of survival.

"Their corn was too meager, the Sioux were too close, and the bison were too far away," writes Fenn. Then came the 1838 smallpox outbreak, which turned the upper Missouri "into one great graveyard," according to an Indian agent.

"Great Father, look over the prairie, when it is covered with grass and dotted with beautiful flowers of all colors, pleasant to the sight and the smell," a Mandan chief said to Abraham Lincoln in 1864. "Throw a burning torch into this vast prairie, and then look at it, and remember the life and happiness that reigned there before the fire. Then you will have an image of my nation."

The Mandans never recovered.

Source: The Denver Post

A Kirkus Best Book of the Year:

KIRKUS REVIEW

A nonpolemical, engaging study of a once-thriving Indian nation of the American heartland whose origins and demise tell us much about ourselves.

Along the Missouri River in North Dakota, the Mandan people flourished in the warming period between ice ages, circa A.D. 1000, drawn to the alluvial richness of the river as well as the bison hunting ranges of the Western grasslands. In her thorough mosaic of Mandan history and culture, Fenn (Western American History/Univ. of Colorado; Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82, 2001, etc.) writes that these were an immensely adaptable people, migrating upstream when weather patterns changed, mastering the cultivation of corn and other edibles and the art of trade, often in competition with other horticulturalist tribes nearby, like the Arikara and Lakota. Elaborate Mandan defense fortifications indicated a vulnerability to attack, perhaps by the fierce, nomadic Sioux. Mandan homes were sturdy and numerous, solid earthen lodges built by the women, who also cultivated the fields, dried the meat and tanned the hides, revealing a strong maternal society where the husbands and the children were shared by sisters in one house due to the scarcity of men, perhaps due to mortality from war and hunting. At the time of the Spanish conquistadors, Fenn estimates there were 12,000 Mandans in the upper Missouri River; it was “teeming with people.” Gradually, contact with outsiders beginning in the 17th century and continuing with the famous interaction with Louis and Clark’s expedition up the Missouri in 1804 led to Mandan decimation by disease as well as by the Norwegian rat, which devoured their corn stored in cache pits. In addition to her comprehensive narrative, Fenn intersperses throughout the narrative many helpful maps and poignant drawings by George Catlin and others.

An excellent contribution to the truth telling of the American Indian story.

Mandans gathering buffalo berries, 1908. Photograph by Edward S. Curtis

Against the Grain - Source: The Nation

Elizabeth Fenn, the Mandans and a renaissance in historical writing.
By Richard White MARCH 5, 2014

http://www.thenation.com/article/agai...

The Mandan story is a reminder that even the most flourishing societies can be brought low, in virtually an instant, by the unpredictable workings of the natural world (to say nothing of human foes). But Fenn’s account tells us also that cultures can persist and even recover in the wake of such awful devastation.
—-Andrew Graybill, The Daily Beast

Most of us have never heard of the Mandans, and yet the Mandan villages of the upper Missouri were a bustling, prosperous, hub of trade and commerce by the middle of the 18th century. Food, trade, and culture; Native American and European visitors, all passed through their densely settled towns. Commercial ties stretched from New Mexico to Hudson Bay. Lewis and Clark wintered with the Mandans in 1804 on their way west and a Mandan chief, Sheheke, accompanied them back to Washington in 1806.

Encounters at the Heart of the World revises what we think we know about early American history by shifting our attention from the English-speaking east coast and revising our understanding of the Native American past. Venturing into the period before Lewis and Clark, it offers us a vision of a people that will enrich the way we think about ourselves and our history.

In this innovative and illuminating book, Elizabeth Fenn reorients early American history toward the geographic center of the continent. There, long before the arrival of colonists on the Atlantic coast, the Mandan people built one of the most important and enduring trading centers in America. Using tools from archaeology, anthropology, and epidemiology, Fenn reconstructs their remarkable story and recounts it in absorbing and transparent prose.
—-Claudio Saunt, University of Georgia, author of West of the Revolution

Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize

http://www.unl.edu/plains/bookprize/b...

Thanks, Bentley!

OKIPA

The Okipa was the most powerful religious ceremony of the Mandan people of North Dakota. The four-day ceremony was performed every year during the summer. It retold the history of the creation of the Earth and all living things. The main characters are the Okipa Maker, or Lone Man, who created the Mandan and gave them their rituals; Hoita, or Speckled Eagle, who created the animals; and Oxinhede, the Foolish One, who did not believe in the power of Okipa and was cast out of the village at the end. These three dancers are joined by others impersonating buffalo, bald eagles, holy women, swans, snakes, grizzly bears, night, day, wolves, coyotes, meadowlarks, and antelopes. They are supported by drummers playing sacred turtle drums.

The dancers performed inside the Okipa lodge, which was filled by men fasting, praying, and seeking visions. Sacred bundles, containing objects such as buffalo hair, a stuffed raven, a porcupine headdress, buffalo teeth, and a warbonnet of raven and swan feathers, were also presented. These objects represented key elements in the history of the people. The younger men generally underwent torture to demonstrate their bravery. Long wooden skewers were pushed through cuts in the skin on their backs or chests, and they were hung by ropes from beams. Their bodies were weighted down with buffalo skulls hung from other skewers thrust into their thighs and calves. The torment was extreme, but crying out was a sign of cowardice, and those best able to stand the pain became Mandan leaders. Women were not allowed inside the lodge, although some would sit on the roof, where they would fast.

The purpose of the ceremony was to rea. rm the bond between the people and the natural world and to unify the Mandans through a ritual of suffering and bloodshed. The Okipa had been performed for hundreds of years when the artist George Catlin witnessed the ceremony in 1832. The Okipa was probably last held on Fort Berthold Reservation in 1889 or 1890, after which it was suppressed by the United States.
(Source: Encyclopedia of the Great Plains | University of Nebraska - Lincoln)

Here's a great video discussing smallpox and the Mandan:

Small Pox Outbreak of 1781 | Tribal Legacy Project

If you've enjoyed this book and want to learn more about the Mandan, you may want to read:

by Cedric Red Feather (no photo)

When reading about the Okipa ceremony, I was reminded of a scene from A Man Called Horse, which I have posted below:

https://m.youtube.com/?client=mv-goog...