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Merlin Red Cloud Jr. Transcripts
Why did the Ho Chunk come to La Crosse?
Because the land is so rich. Probably because the bottomlands, there’s a
lot of things there. There was the muskrat, the beaver, the otter, a lot of elk.
I think the elk were more popular more than the deer were at that time. I think
there were more elk around there and it was a great hunting area. [There was
also] wild rice and Indian potato. So the food supply was really good right
there and that would be the reason they just keep going back and using it over
and over. Because the food supply never seemed to end right there. It was a
great place.
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Sites Page
Gardens
So the gardens were, I don’t know, I think they called them raised gardens;
I’m not sure. But they piled the dirt up, the base probably being maybe a foot
and a half or two feet wide and raised up maybe about a foot. In the center they
would dig a little trench and this was used to catch water. Whenever it rained
the water wouldn’t all run off, it’d go inside this little trench that they
built on top of the plants that were planted. Some of the gardens, where it was
possible, they would take flat rocks and they’d put it against the edge of the
rows because this would capture the heat and make the ground warm up faster,
which would give you a better, earlier starting time for planting.
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Who plants, weeds and harvests the fields?
If you’re fortunate and have got kids, they can do it. But, right now [it’s]
just my wife and I, so my wife and I we take care of the garden. We plant, and
we take care of the weeds, and we harvest, we do the canning, we do the drying.
So it’s all right within the family. Years ago when the villagers were more
tightly gathered, the population, they would have like community gardens. So the
gardens would really, really be large and everybody would help out.
Mostly the womenfolk would be in the gardens back in the old days. Yeah, the
womenfolk and the children. The men would be out doing their hunting or their
trapping. They were the ones that covered more ground. The women would actually
take care of the gardens. And all this stuff that had to be done, the drying and
the stuff like that, was all done by the women.
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What kind of corn is grown today?
The corn is kind of different today because a lot of people don’t grow
their own. I got my seed from my grandmother, who got it from her dad. So I have
a pretty old, pretty good strain of Indian corn that I have and that I use in my
family. I’m very protective. I don’t grow it by no other corn so it’s not
pollinated by something else. It’s a real strong corn. It’s very hardy. If
you grow Indian corn in the same forty-acre field of sweet corn, or field corn,
or another kind of corn, they will get their color into another corn. It won’t
be vice-versa. The sweet corn can’t affect Indian corn. Indian corn will
affect the sweet corn.
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How do you dry squash?
The squash, we dry some of that. We just cut it up in chunks about, oh, take
a Hubbard squash, we’ll cut it in half and then we’ll cut it in strips of
about an inch, and we’ll just set it out in the sun to dry it. If you’ve got
some good drying days, it takes about five days for the squash to dry up really
nice so we can keep it. And then we just put in a bag and put it up in one of
the closets over where it’s dry.
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How do you dry corn?
The corn is a long process, it’s a hard process. You bring it back home and
you husk it. You boil it, give it about a ten minute boil, a hard boil. Then you
take it back out of the hot water and let it cool it off a little bit. You take
a tablespoon and then you just work yourself down the rows of the corn and take
the kernels off the cob. Then we’ve got a big screen that we have and we put
it on top. The bottom of the screen, we have a white cloth that we lay there.
Then we put the corn on top of that and spread it out as thin as possible. And
then we put another screen on top to keep the bugs out. That takes about two and
half or three days if we have good sun for drying. It’s a long process and it’s
a lot of work. But it tastes great.
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Strawberries
Here we have strawberries that we use. There’s elderberries. A lot of
people don’t use elderberries because in our language they call them ghost
berries. So a lot of our older folks used to be afraid of them and I don’t
know the reason for that, but I know they taste good. They’re all dried. We
never made jams or jellies or anything like that back in the old days.
Everything was dried, kept in a pouch, and kept high so it stayed dry. You could
either eat them the way they are when they’re dry, or mix them in with, like
the meat I was talking about or mix them with a soup I was talking earlier
about. It would give them more freshness, and whatever the body needs I suppose
comes out of what we ate like that.
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