I have decided to share this Hidatsa mystique as it is fascinating. What interested me is the skin from a buffalo's heart was used as a plastic bag to keep a sunflower ball like a Twinkie is today.
For sunflower-seed balls I parched the seeds in a pot in the usual way put them in a corn mortar and pounded them. When they were reduced to a fine meal I reached into the mortar and took out a handful of the meal, squeezing it in the fingers and palm of my right hand. This squeezing it made it into a kind of lump or ball.
This ball I enclosed in the two palms and gently shook it. The shaking brought out the oil of the seeds, cementing the particles of the meal and making the lump firm. I have said that frosted seeds gave out more oil than unfrosted; and that baby sunflower seeds gave out more oil than seeds from the big heads. In olden times every warrior carried a bag of soft skin at his left side, supported by a thong over his right shoulder; in this bag he kept needles, sinews, awl, soft tanned skin for making patches for moccasins, gun caps, and the like. The warrior's powder horn hung on the outside of this bag. In the bottom of this soft-skin bag the warrior commonly carried one of these sunflower-seed balls, wrapped in a piece of buffalo-heart skin.
When worn with fatigue or overcome with sleep and weariness, the warrior took out his sunflower-seed ball, and nibbled at it to refresh himself. It was amazing what effect nibbling at the sunflower-seed ball had. If the warrior was weary, he began to fed fresh again; if sleepy, he grew wakeful. Sometimes the warrior kept his sunflower-seed ball in his flint case that hung always at his belt over his right hip. It was quite a general custom in my tribe for a warrior or hunter to carry one of these sunflower-seed balls. We called the sunflower-seed ball mapi', the same name as for sunflower.
Lesson today is you learned that the skin from a buffalo heart if not all bovines makes a plastic bag for food. You learned that freezing nuts brings out the oils in them........and you learned if you had a brain that a nut ball snack is a quick energy food.
You try figuring that out when the world is a bad place and trying to kill you.
agtG
