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The Pawnee are not one tribe but four: Skidi, Tsawi, Kitkehaxki and Pitahawirata. These tribes were sedentary farmers, growing maize, beans, pumpkins and squash and only hunting twice each year for buffalo. Their villages were semi-permanent and made up of large earth lodges, each housing 30 to 50 people. Buffalo hunters used small versions of the Plains tipi for temporary hunting camps.

The Pawnee women were mainly responsible for agriculture and they were extremely good at their jobs; over time they developed 10 varieties of maize (including sweetcorn, rikis-karus), 7 kinds of pumpkins and squash (pahuks in Pawnee) and 8 varieties of beans (patit), all of which were carefully segregated to ensure that the varieties remained pure.

Together with buffalo meat, most of these products could be dried to preserve them. Dried maize, beans, strips of pumpkin and the dried inner lining of buffalo stomach or intestine made a wholesome soup; sometimes large thin sheets of dried buffalo meat and a sheet of fat were boiled to make a stronger soup.

Corn flour baked in ashes made a kind of bread, sometimes with beans added to the mix.

When additional items became available from traders, the diet expanded to include coffee and sugar, with wheat flour made into "grease bread" fried in a pan of lard.

After the two annual buffalo hunts, which provided huge amounts of meat to be dried for storage, some was eaten freshly boiled or roasted, or made into sausages.

Wild plant foods do not seem to have been gathered by the Pawnee tribes.

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13y ago

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