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!
In the war dance (R. GucuuwiGaocan, Gu, where, cuuwi,
men, braves, Gaocan, dance), the men bunch around the drum and move
dancing around the dance floor. They carry a tomahawk or a scalp on a stick, and
wear the typical war bonnet of eagle feathers fastened to a strip of cloth. On
the face is painted the characteristic mark of the dancer's supernatural partner Coon, Fox, Lightning.196 (Fig. 4.) The women, wearing their
buckskin dress, stand together, on the outside, moving slightly.
Fig 4. Face painting of war dancers
a. Coon
b. Lightning
Fig. 5. Head ornament in Turkey
dance
If a feather falls out of the bonnet of a dancer or off the decorations of
his person, some senior with war experience has to pick up the feather and "tell
an old story of some place where they had a fight and won it.197 At
the end of the story everybody who has a drumstick beats once on the drum, then
the dance goes on. ________________________________________
195 Said by Absentee Shawnee to have been borrowed about 1888 from
the Caddo they visited. The Caddo borrowed this "bunched" or "round" dance from
Winnebago, say Shawnee. "The Caddo went up to the Winnebago and caught all these
songs of the Winnebago scalp dance and brought them back" (Voegelin). 196 Tattooing, universal in the Southeast, was formerly practiced.
Men tattooed themselves with birds and animals or, half the body, with zigzag
lines [?to represent lightning]. Women used geometrical designs (Joutel, 349,
363). The fact that the Frenchman whom Joutel found living in a Caddoan group
just like a "savage" was tattoed suggests that he had been
