“The songs the Lakota women sang to the mice rang through the forest,” an elder told Linda Black Elk, ethnobotanist and science education instructor at Sitting Bull College on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. (An ethnobotanist studies how people of a region or culture use plants native to their homeland.)
The elder almost cried as she recalled walking with her mother in the now gone cottonwood forests to gather mouse beans from the rodent’s caches, according to Black Elk.
Meaty, filled with protein and low in fat, mouse beans were once an important, reliable food source for the Oceti Sakowin peoples, Lakota, Dakota and Nakota living along the Missouri River. Their near-extinction in that environment is a metaphor for the devastating impact of U.S. development of tribal lands on Native peoples and cultures.
[For more of this story, written by Mary Annette Pember, go to https://indiancountrymedianetw...eliable-food-source/]
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