The Digging Stick

Stanley traces women's inventions in five vital areas of technology worldwide--agriculture, medicine, reproduction, machines, and computers.

Author Paul Campbell reveals the knowledge he has spent 20 years learning and reproducing from California natives. Included are sections on the basic skills of survival, the tools of gathering and food preparation, and the implements of household and personal necessity, as well as the arts of hunting and fishing. Sample topics include: shelter; greens, beans, flowers and other vegetables; meat preparation; how to make and shoot an Indian bow.--From publisher description.

In 1916 anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson worked closely with Buffalobird-woman, a highly respected Hidatsaaborn in 1839 on the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota, for a study of the HidatsasOCO uses of local plants. What resulted was a treasure trove of ethnobotanical information that was buried for more than seventy-five years in WilsonOCOs archives, now held jointly by the Minnesota Historical Society and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Wilson recorded Buffalobird-womanOCOs insightful and vivid descriptions of how the nineteenth-century Hidatsa people had gathered, prepared, and used the plants and wood in their local environment for food, medicine, smoking, fiber, fuel, dye, toys, rituals, and construction. From courtship rituals that took place while gathering Juneberries, to descriptions of how the women kept young boys from stealing wild plums as they prepared them for use, to recipes for preparing and cooking local plants, "Uses of Plants by the Hidatsas of the Northern Plains" provides valuable details of Hidatsa daily life during the nineteenth century, a "