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!
An eagle killer is bathed with warm water and tobacco. Mourners bathe in
a stream.
River bath or the sweat bath, which is in general use in the Southeast, is
preliminary to participation in Peyote ceremonial.
He prayed or gave thanks (t'umbakauutsihadina) is the term used
for the initial prayer of the Peyote leader; also for the ceremony to ask
forgiveness151 from your supernatural helper (p. 58), where it is
described as "to pray or make offerings."
The hunt leader would build a fire and in the middle of it put an
offering of buffalo tongue. This offering was to the fire itself, which was kept
up for the duration of the hunt camp. Today when a beef is killed a piece is
cast on the fire. Some of the first of the crop-potatoes, pumpkin, corn-is cast
on the fire. When White Moon has been away, his grandmother will keep against
his return the first meal of something new,152 putting a bit of it on
the fire.153 At the meal eaten at the grave154 to dispatch the dead and
at memorial meals food is offered on the grave. The property of the deceased is
hung on a pole, one of the regular early ways of making offerings.'-15 There are
always crumbs for ghosts156 (see p. 60).
Fasting from salt is observed in Peyote ceremonial. Compare p. 33 for the
idea that salt in the body precludes being affected by magical or supernatural
influence-possibly a clue to the widespread taboo on salt in connection with
ceremonial.
The Peyote ceremony opens with ceremonial smoking, the leader holding the
cigarette over Father Peyote, and puffing the smoke upward. Puffing in the
directions on any occasion was unfamiliar to my informants, although into the
eighteenth century Caddo did smoke in the directions.157 A gift of tobacco to a doctor who accepts it is binding.
The circuit is
sunwise, beginning in the east, as seen in ritual at the grave, in Peyote
ceremonial and in the kak'it'imbin dance. The Ghost dance circuit is
anti-sunwise and so is that of a pleasure "stomp dance." As among Pawnee,158
the head of the ceremonial group sits at the west side, and north and south
lines are distinguishable.159
The "road," presumably for the Spirits, runs east and west.
The Sky father to whom the dead go lives in the west.
It is six;160 as White Moon puts it, "they always do it six
times.161 Curing ceremonial lasts six days. The mourning period is
six days. There are six tallies in the hand-game. The cardinal directions are
accounted six. In describing how women used to pound corn Ingkanish said there
would be as many as six women working together at the mortar; in previous
accounts no more than four are described.162
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151 Hakuts'iats'a, I am sorry.
152 Formerly, at least at a ceremonial meal, "something of
everything" was offered (Hatcher, XXX, 212); now it is only something of
anything new.
153 Cp. Harrington, 267; Hatcher, XXX, 212-213; Creeks, Swanton 1:
517, and general in the Southeast (Swanton 2: 708).
154 One Shawnee division set the food for the final burial feast on
the grave first, then brought it back and served it to the guests, at the
dwelling house (Voegelin).
155 Hatcher, XXX, 214.
156 Food, also tobacco,
was offered to the scalps at the victory celebration (Joutel, 380). Inferably
the tobacco was to bind the Spirits (see below).
157 Hatcher, XXXI, 166,
172. Creeks used color-directions associated with water (Swanton 1: 623-624).
158 Murie, 628.
159 Murie, 628, 636, 642.
160 Cp. Pawnee, Murie,
629 n. 1.
161 See pp. 33 37, 40,
41, 61, 67, 68, and cp. Dorsey 2: passim.
