The Earthlodge
How the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara built and used the earthlodge. This reading leaves out the video tour, the field trip information, and the section “Earthlodges Today,” which covers the 1800s and later.
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The tribes of the Upper Missouri River Valley were skilled farmers. They lived in one place. So they developed a special kind of home made of earth and wood. The round earthlodge of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples took hundreds of years of new ideas and changes to develop. It was the perfect home for life on the Northern Plains.
Construction
In traditional Hidatsa society, women owned the earthlodge and took care of it. The Hidatsa word for it is “awahte.” An older woman ran the whole building project. She had both sacred and practical knowledge about how to build an earthlodge. The women cut four cottonwood posts and beams. With help from the men, they raised a central support structure. Next, the women set up an outer circle of posts and cross beams. They leaned split logs against it to form a wall. They lifted the rafters into place. On top of this frame, the women laid bunches of willow branches, dried prairie grass, and thick sod. This finished the structure.
A finished earthlodge was thirty to sixty feet in diameter and ten to fifteen feet high. It took about seven to ten days to build from start to finish. The women rebuilt the earthlodges about every ten years.
Inside an Earthlodge
An earthlodge was home to ten to twenty people. They were usually sisters and their families. Beds stood around the outer ring, in the spaces between the support poles. People kept their personal items under the beds. Items that everyone used were kept on raised platforms, like bed frames. A typical earthlodge also had a corral on one side of the door. It held the family’s most valued war and hunting ponies.
The center of the earthlodge was the fire pit. Smoke escaped through a hole in the roof. In heavy rain or snow, people turned an old bullboat over the hole. They propped it up so smoke could still escape. The people in the lodge sat around the fire on reed mats. One seat was the atuka. It had high sides and was saved for the oldest man of the household. The atuka was also offered to visitors as a sign of respect.
Food Storage
The cache pit was a large, bell-shaped hole in the floor. It was lined with willow and dry grass. It was filled with dried corn, beans, squash, and sunflower. The women built several cache pits, both inside and outside the earthlodge. They covered the pits over to hide where they were. Parfleches hung from the ceiling. People used them to store many things, such as clothes, dried foods, trade items, craft materials, and hides.
A Sacred Structure
The tribes along the Missouri River thought of the earthlodge as a sacred structure. The Hidatsa believed that the spirit of the earthlodge lived in the four central posts. They wrapped the posts in a hide or trade cloth as an offering. At the back of the earthlodge there could be a shrine with sacred objects. Only the men who owned the objects were allowed to enter the space near the shrine.