While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Sickness, Witchcraft, Doctoring, Burial, After
Death
Sickness may be caused by a witch90 who has sent something into
your body-horse hair, an insect, a bit of cloth, an arrow. Your doctor (konah')
would draw out91 this thing and send it back into the witch who sent
it. Then a fight would be on "between the two witches," i.e. your doctor and the
one bewitching you. The one who has the more power will win.92 If the
curing doctor is stronger than the witch doctor, he will make a cure, otherwise
the witch doctor will send the sickness into the curing doctor.93 The
curing doctor has
first of all to learn who is the witch doctor in the case. If he finds that the
witch doctor is one with greater power than himself, he ill not take the case.
Some doctors are witches and some are not. Witches are mostly men. A doctor
would teach his or her grandchild, especially a daughter's child. A woman doctor
might teach her grandson.
In discussing the removal of the witch-sent object, White Moon was
uncertain how it was done, whether or not by sucking.94 For a bruise
or sprain the flesh is cut in a cross, and a horn or bottle in which paper is
burned is applied to draw out the blood. This is, of course, a form of cupping.
It has also a curious resemblance to sucking as performed by the early Choctaw
who cut and then through a horn sucked out the blood and, sometimes, a bit of
wood or bison wool or insects alleged to have been the spell of a witch.95
sucking by horn (or tube) is Indian and was practiced throughout the Southeast;
exhausting the air is European,96 but the resemblance of extraction
may have been a source of confusion to White Moon.
Of a witch operating with arrows White Moon gave the following account. A
woman saw through the window of a house a short, blood-stained arrow fall down
from the air and an old man pick it up. More arrows similarly fell and were
picked up. The old man would blow on them and they would disappear, soon to
reappear. He was sending these arrows into some one, and he was so powerful that
he could send them a hundred miles. A party organized to kill this witch. They
shot him through the back and as they shot, he kept jumping into the air. They
cut the body up into pieces but the pieces would join together.97
This occurred five times, the sixth time they cut his heart crosswise; that
killed him. Witches could hit you with their magic arrows over long
distances-one thousand miles (Pardon)-in fact they could send their power over
any distance.
A witch can kill you immediately or let you suffer for three or four days
or for years. Witches can not kill a White man, except through his food; the
White man has too much pepper and salt in him.
Witches may turn into a screech owl98
(kaietsi) or may get their power from the owl or be partner with him (p'it'oniwahna
ku kaietsi).99 After bewitching, the screech owl will be sent by
the witch to the invalid's house to spy out how he is doing. Accordingly,
whenever people see a screech owl about the house, they try to kill it. Whenever a bird is shot, there in the
corresponding part of the witch's body will be a hole or bruise.100
If the owl is killed and boiled in a kettle, the witch will die. According to
Ingkanish this witch-sent owl can not be killed. "Bad luck" is foretold by Owl,
also by Coyote through his cry (Pardon).101
90 neiidi' (White Moon); naite (Ingkanish). 91di'm..aGa' (R.), take it out of him. 92 Cp. Dorsey 2: 44. 93 Once, reports Fray Francisco Casaņas de Jesus Maria, a
medicine-man "by his tricks tried to prevent me from baptizing a woman. I hurled
an exorcism against him. and, all at once, he ran away as if I had tried to kill
him. There was another along who tried by certain ceremonies to throw fat and
tobacco into the fire in order to do me some harm. I hurled an exorcism at him
in the presence of more than thirty persons. So great was his fright that he was
not able to hold the bow and arrow which they always carry in their hands; but
he ran away from me and the others assembled there. Next morning they went in
search of him to get him to cure the sick; but they found him dead in a valley.
Since that time all the medicine-men whom they call canna, are afraid of
me and give me a free path, praising what I do. They tell the sick that it is
very good for them to permit themselves to have the water applied." more-over,
five medicine-men themselves applied for baptism (Hatcher, XXX, 295-296).-Little
did the otherwise very understanding friar realize how well he had proved
himself to be superior witch doctor, one to be greatly feared! 94 Into the eighteenth
century Caddo doctors did practice sucking (Hatcher, XXX, 296,
XXXI, 165). 95 Swanton 3: 228, 236. 96 The Choctaw did this
also with their sucking horn. 97 For this resurrection
pattern, cp. Caddo, Dorsey 2: 19, also Kiowa, Parsons, 116. 98 Cp. Creeks, Swanton 1:
632. 99 Cp. Shawnee (Voegelin); Kiowa, Parsons, 115. 100 Widespread belief in the Southwest. 101 See pp. 7, 59.
