Arikara

Arikara, also called Sahnish, North American Plains Indians of the Caddoan linguistic family. The cultural roots of Caddoan-speaking peoples lay in the prehistoric mound-building societies of the lower Mississippi River valley. The Arikara were culturally related to the Pawnee, from whom they broke away and moved gradually northward, becoming the northernmost Caddoan tribe. Before American colonization of the Plains, the Arikara lived along the Missouri River between the Cannonball and Cheyenne rivers in what are now North Dakota and South Dakota.

The Arikara traditionally lived in substantial semipermanent villages of earth lodges, domed earth-berm structures. Their economy relied heavily upon raising corn (maize), beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco; Arikara households used these products and traded them with other tribes for meat and processed hides. Arikara women were responsible for farming, food preparation and preservation, clothing production, lodge building, and the rituals associated with their work; Arikara men hunted deer, elk, and buffalo, provided defense, and performed rituals related to these practices.

The most important items in Arikara material culture were the sacred bundles. These collections of objects were treated as living connections to the divine, and many village activities were organized around the perceived needs of the bundles and the sacred beings who communicated through them. Each bundle had a bundle-keeper, an office that tended to be the hereditary prerogative of a few leading families. Lower leadership positions were associated with organized military, dancing, and curing societies. The Arikara shared with other Plains tribes the practice of self-sacrifice in the Sun Dance.

The Arikara were seen as an obstacle by white trading parties moving up the Missouri River; in 1823 a battle with traders under the aegis of William H. Ashley’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company resulted in the first U.S. Army campaign against a Plains tribe. In response, the Arikara left their villages and adopted a nomadic equestrian lifestyle for a period of years.

Although the Arikara had numbered between 3,000 and 4,000 individuals near the end of the 1700s, wars and epidemic disease had severely reduced their population by the middle of the 19th century. In the 1860s they joined the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes. These tribes coalesced, becoming known as the Three Affiliated Tribes (or MHA Nation), and a reservation was created for them at Fort Berthold, North Dakota. By 1885 the Arikara had taken up farming and livestock production on family farmsteads dispersed along the rich Missouri River bottomlands.

In the 1950s, construction of the Garrison Dam flooded the Missouri River bottomlands, creating Lake Sakakawea. More than one-fourth of the Fort Berthold reservation lands were permanently flooded by the rising waters. This and the discovery of oil in the Williston Basin forced another removal, this time to new homes on the arid North Dakota uplands, where farming was difficult. As a result, reservation communities suffered an economic depression. However, by the end of the 20th century, the Three Affiliated Tribes had regained a level of prosperity through buffalo ranching and other tribal businesses.

Early 21st-century population estimates indicated more than 1,000 individuals of Arikara descent.