Arikara

ETHNONYMS: Pandani, Panimaha, Ree, Ricari, Ricaree, Sanish, Starrahhe

The Arikara are a group of Caddoan-speaking American Indians who in historic times lived along the Missouri River in northern South Dakota and west-central North Dakota. The Arikara are culturally related to the Pawnee. They are believed to have originated in the Southeast and migrated north along the Missouri River before reaching the Dakotas sometime around 1770. At that time they numbered between three thousand and four thousand people. In 1837 the Arikara were severely affected by a smallpox epidemic, and in 1862, their numbers much reduced, they joined the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes. In about 1870 all three groups were settled on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. In the 1980s they numbered about one thousand.

The Arikara were primarily an agricultural people living in permanent villages of semisubterranean earth lodges located on bluffs overlooking the Missouri River. They cultivated maize, beans, squash, pumpkins, and sunflowers and also hunted bison, deer, and antelope and gathered wild foods. Politically, the Arikara were organized into a loose Confederacy of villages led by a head chief assisted by a tribal council of village chiefs. Religious life and ceremonies centered around the planting, cultivation, and harvesting of maize, the principal food resource.

See alsoHidatsa; Mandan

Bibliography

Abel, Annie Heloise, ed. (1939). Tabeau's Narrative of Loi-sel's Expedition to the Upper Missouri. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Macgowan, E. S. (1942). "The Arikara Indians." Minnesota Archaeologist 8:83-122.

Meyer, Roy W. (1977). The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri: The Mandans, Hidatsas, and Ankaras. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Pawnee Caddoan-speaking tribe of Native North Americans. They are related to the Arikara, who once occupied the Central Platte and Republican River areas in Nebraska. In the mid-1990s, some 1,500 lived on reservations in Oklahoma.