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!
Eagles are shot,145 not snared. If you picked up the feather
dropped by a live eagle, there would be a death in the family (Ingkanish). After
shooting an eagle, or finding a dead eagle, you must notify your people,
"otherwise something awful will happen to you;146 eagles have
wonderful power."147 Ritual must be performed, by any older man. Then
the bird may be plucked, after which it is buried like a person. The eagle
killer is bathed all over with warm water and tobacco, and smoked with cedar
fumes. The eagle feathers may be given away after they have been smoked (like
any property of the dead). Eagle feathers are used "in medicine."
There is no restriction upon bear hunting--"Caddo, not like Kiowa who are
afraid to kill a bear they think is a man." In fact Caddo were great bear
hunters (like Shawnee). They would go bear hunting in a party, choosing an
honest man, not a liar, to build the camp fire and keep it up. This, in order
that the bear would not get away, i.e. would stay near the camp. The party
shared evenly in the game. The husband of a pregnant woman may not go hunting,
he has to stay at home.148 Women eat bear meat, but a pregnant woman
would probably not eat it.
Nowadays there is no hunting. The Wichita Mountains are a government
reservation. Nowadays "there is nothing to do but work" was Grayson Pardon's
lament.
This rite150
is performed, as we shall note, in Peyote ceremonial--when a participant returns to the ceremonial tipi after having had to leave it
during the night, and, by all the participants at the close of the ceremony.
Any one who would enter the room where a patient is being cured has first
to be smoked.
The property of the dead is smoked, at the grave, before it is given away,
and the mourners themselves are smoked. Feathers plucked from a dead eagle have
also to be smoked before they are given away. Eagle killers are smoked.
In the Peyote fumigatory rite eagle feathers are used to waft the smoke,
ordinarily a person merely stoops over the smoke, no covering being used.
___________________________________________________________ 145 Cp. Mooney, 992. 146 Cp. Mooney, 1100-1101. Formerly only the medicine-men who knew
the eagle-killing ritual killed eagles. "Should anyone else kill an eagle, his
family would die or some other great misfortune would come upon him." The
eagle-killer took with him a robe or other valuable offering. He covered the
body of the eagle with the robe (as dead deer are covered by Pueblo Indians).
The dead eagle was not brought home. Mooney continues, "The last man of the
Caddo who knew the eagle-killing ritual died some years ago, and since then they
have had to go without eagle feathers or buy them from the Kiowa and other
tribes. Since Sitting Bull (of the Arapaho) came down and `gave the feather'
(see p. 49) to the leaders of the (Ghost) dance the prohibition is removed, and
men and women alike are now at liberty to get and wear eagle feathers as they
will."--And yet, not quite.
This reverence for the eagle is much like that of the Shawnee, in general
tone. Eagle feathers, until they were "cured," were highly dangerous; if a man
wore an "uncured" feather he would die (Voegelin). 147 Among Shawnee membrane from inside the quill had to be removed
before the feather could be worn; otherwise it was too powerful (Voegelin). 148 Formerly a pregnant woman was not allowed to cooperate in
planting lest it spoil the crop (Hatcher, XXXI, 156). 149 Cp. Hatcher, XXX, 214; Pawnee, Maurie, 625-626, 637; Dorsey 1:
79; Dorsey 3: 30. 150 Hits'iushnuha, I was smoking myself.
