Mandaree woman clings close to her roots
By Ashleigh Plemper
Farmer Staff Writer
As Avalon Jane Hale grew up 18 miles east of Mandaree. Today, she’s a resident of Watford City who likes to reminisce on her family’s indigenous roots of farming and ranching and harmonizing a sacred way of life.
“Everybody in my family really had to work,” Hale says. “You had respect for your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.”
After a bad case of smallpox nearly ravaged the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes in the mid-1800s, surviving members, such as Hale’s grandparents, migrated to the west side of the Missouri River and became the first Native Americans to set foot on North Dakota’s Northern Plains.
“It was a very agricultural tribe,” says Brenda, her older sister. “A lot of furs were traded to us for food.”
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