ABSTRACT
For Native American farmers the natural resources of the North and South Dakota stretch of the Missouri River trough required subsistence and community strategies that mediated the tension between the centripetal pull of a linear distribution of tillable soils and the centrifugal force of dispersed reserves of huntable and harvestable natural foods. The valley of the Missouri proper hosted Native American farming communities for the greater part of a millennium (Cooper 1949, 11953; Wedel 1947) but the tough sod cover, scant surface water and unpredictable rainfall restricted farming to the river’s alluvial bottomlands, and farming commu-
nities to the immediately adjacent strip of terrace and plain. However, Native American farmers did utilize the full range of the region’s dispersed floral and faunal resources in a mixed economy, emphasizing both hunting-harvesting and crop-growing (Krause 1972: 12-14). In other words, the region’s prehistoric inhabitants struck a balance between extractive practices that treated the natural environment as an instrument of labour and those that treated it as an object of labour (Marx 1977 [1867]: 284-5).
