01 Erik Holland Early Work

I’m Eric Holland I’m the curator of education with the State Historical Society of North Dakota I’ve worked here for about 10 years but I started my career with the State Historical Society of North Dakota in the 1970s I was trained as an archaeologist and my first job with a society was to run for Clark State Historic Site which was an archaeological site still is 95 acres where the Mandans lived in the 1830s and there was a fur trading fort there that’s why it’s called fort Clark but some people call it Makuta honk oh Sh which means eastern or downstream village in Mandan that’s their name for the village it’s an important village because in 1837 smallpox was on board the steamboat that was bringing supply upstream and the Mandans were nearly annihilated from that village went from 2,000 to less than 200 in four months so you think of a population change like that and what happens to permanent structures earth lodges when they’re depopulated the following spring the Arikara another group of people living in earth lodges downstream a little further who were feeling pressure from the south moved into a basically abandoned land and village next to a fur trading fort and lived there until 1860 so pretty interesting historic site because you’ve got these perspectives of different native cultures living in the same place interacting with the Europeans of a whole change in time from pre steamboat to the Industrial Revolution in the 1860s in the military coming onto the plains and the changing of life in North Dakota moving on you know so it’s an important place it’s the center of my universe still is and I lived there for nine years and talked with people in the middle of the night native peoples would come and honk their horns at the gate my job was to protect the site gates are locked at night what do you do when your site manager and somebody’s honking horn at your gate you go and call the cops and send them away or do you go out and see what the story is and if it’s five men and elder women coming out to pray before sunup gate so I lived through a bunch of that kind of interaction as an adult in my first career and after eight or nine years the Historical Society decided that they couldn’t afford to keep me on the site and so then I moved to Knife River Indian villages National Historic Site and interpreted for them for six years so 16 years of work talking about agriculturally based people on the Missouri trench in North Dakota is kind of mine where I come from and why I am Who I am