Fort Berthold Community College

RESERVATION BACKGROUND INFORMATION The Fort Berthold Reservation was established for the Arikara, Hidatsa and Mandan Tribes by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Located in central North Dakota, the Reservation occupies sections of six counties: Mountrail, McLean, Dunn, McKenzie, Mercer, and Ward.

The total area within the boundaries of the Reservation is approximately one million acres of which about one-half is trust land. The topography of the west and south segments is rough grassland and "badlands". This is primarily used for livestock production. The flat to rolling grasslands in the north, east, and northeast segments contain areas of desirable cropland.

The original major Indian communities on Fort Berthold were inundated with the construction of the Garrison Dam on the Missouri River in 1954. Lake Sakakawea, covering 155,000 acres of Reservation land and with approximately 600 miles of Reservation shoreline, splits the Fort Berthold Reservation into five parts. While there are Indian families living throughout the Reservation, the majority live in the local communities of Mandaree, White Shield, Twin Buttes, Four Bears (location of the Tnbal headquarters), and the incorporated towns of Parshall and New Town (location of the Bureau of Irdian Affairs headquarters). The current resident Indian population of the Reservation is estimated to be 3,776 persons.

The Tribal Government is a representative, democratic form. Six members (elected from each segment) and a Chairman (elected at large) form the Tnbal Business CounciL The six political subdivisions called 'Segments' are: Mandaree (West) Segment, New Town/Little Shell (North) Segment, Twin Buttes (South) Segment, White Shield (East) Segment, Four Bears Segment, and Parshall/Lucky Mound (NorthEast Segment)

RESERVATION/TRIBAL HISTORY

The Fort Berthold Reservation is the home of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikaran Tribes, under the tribal government structure known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. These three tribes were formally joined together as the Three Affiliated Tribes under the regulations specified in Indian Reorganization Act of June 18, 1934. They operate under a Constitution and By-laws approved June 28, 1936 and a Federal Corporation Charter ratified April 23, 1937. Both have been subsequently amended.

All three tribes lived in permanent earth-lodge villages for many centuries before the coming of the white man. Despite a basic similarity of economic and social life, these village people's differed remarkably in language and custom The Mandan and Hidatsa speak a, Siouan dialect, while the Arikara are members of the Caddoan linguistic group being related to the Pawnee.

When first visited by traders and explorers in the middle 18th century, the Mandan, Hidatsa lived very near their present location. The Hidatsa had three earth-lodge villages at the mouth of the Knife River, north of the present town of Stanton, North Dakota, and the Mandan had a half dozen or more villages near the mouth of the Heart River at Mandan, North Dakota. The Arikara were located in central South Dakota with some of their villages ranging as high as the Grand River area.

On the basis of the latest evidence, the village people seem to have been moving slowly upstream in a long-term migration that began well back in prehistoric times. In the latter third of the 18th century, this migration was sharply accelerated because of the ravages resulting from the smallpox epidemic. This influenced the Mandan to a greater degree than the other tribes, so that at the beginning of the 19th century they had moved to a location a few miles south of the Hidatsas. The Hidatsa controlled the hunting to the north and the Arikara controlled the hunting to the south.

The Mandan and Hidatsa were the 'Farmers, Merchants and Bankers, of the Northern Plains. Evidence has been found which indicates that these people were dealing with the Indians of the deep southwest. The Arikara, however, insisted on acting as a broker between the agricultural Hidatsa and Mandan in their bartering with the Mexican and deep southwest Indians in trading for corn during the recurrent droughts, which plagued the southwest.

The year 1937 marks the last of the violent smallpox epidemics, which hit the general area. This epidemic resulted in the decimation of the Mandan to the point where it could no longer e]dst as an independent unit. The Hidatsa were also hard hit But, inasmuch as members of this tribe were out on the prairies for their annual summer buffalo hunts, the Hidatsa were affected to a lesser degree by the ravages of smallpox.

The Arikara , who had been increasingly harassed by the Sioux coming in upon them from both south and east, chose this time to abandon their villages. When the Arikara found the Mandan's villages empty, they moved in the hastily abandoned houses. The Mandan and Hidatsa, in the meantime over a period of years, continued to move slowly upstream where they constructed a new village in a beautiful bend on the Missouri River. This location was the famous "Like-A-Fishhook Village."

Recorded history relating to the Fort Berthold Reservation area dates back to the 1790's when early explorers traversed the area and slightly later when Lewis and Clark expedition traveled on their Missourri River voyage through the Lousiana Territory. However, definitive history of the reservation begins with the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851, which defined the boundary of the GrosVentre (a misnomer for the Hidatsa), Mandan and Arikara Indian nations, now called the Three Affiliated Tribes.

The Fort Laramie Treaty established a vast area of land vaguely desscribed as the entire right bank of the Missouri River from the mouth of the Yellowstone River and from the mouth of the Powder River to the headwaters of the Heart River. This territory which included parts of Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota, was named Fort Berthold in honor of an American Fur Company founder, Bartholomay Berthold.

Between 1851, when the Fort Laramie Treaty was signed, and 1891, a succession of executive orders and congressional acts changed the size of the reservation from a maximum of roughly 13,500,000 acres to a gross area (including white-owned land) of approximately 930,000 acres. During 1954, the reservation lost an additional 152,300 acres of land to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the filling of the Garrison Reservoir (Lake Sakakawea). The waters of Lake Sakakawea inundated most of the well-built-up bottom and aacces roads and fractionated the reservation into five isolated segments which are not contiguous with the other. The flooding of the bottom lands destroyed the long-established Indian population centers, with the Tnbal Agency itself being moved to the city of New Town. In recent years several small communities have since sprung up, the principal ones being White Shield, Mandaree and Twin Buttes.

The immense loss of natural resources occasioned by the flooding of Lake Sakakawea was cause for only a part of the adjustments that have had to be made by the Indian people. No attempt was made to reestablish duplicates of the small Indian villages that existed, thus Indian families were forced to relocate on isolated holdings scattered throughout the reservation. Consequently, social and clan lines were crossed and recrossed with former neighbors becoming widely separated, most often times in isolated segments of the reservation. This extreme stress on the Indian people has been partly responsible for movement off the reservation.

The 1890s