The White Clay People: A History of the Gros Ventre Nation
By Daniel Redfield Hollis
Length3h 48m
About this audiobook
Two nations, two languages, one wrong name. Eighteenth-century traders heard the Cree and Assiniboine call a people of the northern plains by a word they took to mean "big bellies," and the French wrote it down as Gros Ventre. The same label was pinned on the Hidatsa of the upper Missouri, a separate nation speaking an unrelated language. The people themselves have always had their own name: A'aninin, the White Clay People.
The name comes from the clay itself, dug from particular grounds and painted onto faces and bodies at ceremonies of grief, healing and naming. The old men said the people were made from that earth. Their stories place them far to the northeast, generations back, before they fought and traded their way west onto the buffalo plains and parted from the relatives who became the Arapaho. Iron knives and horses reached their country ahead of the traders, and so did the first epidemics.
Here are the buffalo road and the horse, the alliance with the Blackfeet Confederacy, the traders on the river and the treaty council at Judith River in 1855, then the famine years and the reservation at Fort Belknap in Montana, which the A'aninin share with the Assiniboine. It carries on through the twentieth century and the Red Power years to the nation of today.
The traders' name has lasted more than two hundred years on paper. The white clay is older.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length3 hrs 48 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The White Clay People
2Chapter 2: The Buffalo Road
3Chapter 3: The Horse and the Long Hunter
4Chapter 4: The Blackfeet Confederacy
5Chapter 5: Strangers on the River
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 6: The Treaty at Judith River
7Chapter 7: Famine Years
8Chapter 8: Fort Belknap
9Chapter 9: The Century of the Little Wagon
10Chapter 10: Red Power, White Clay
11Chapter 11: Where the White Clay Dries
12Chapter 12: What the Grass Remembers
13About the Author
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