Part 12

In the early days they just had a good time for one night. It was not used as a curing ceremony then.... At first they wanted to have good visions, that’s what they were after. But then, recently, they began to use it as a medicine for sick people.... If a sick person comes in the tipi, they see what is the matter with him. Perhaps a witch has shot something into him, a bone or something like that. It is seen. Then the sick one rolls a cigarette and gives it to someone there who he thinks can cure him. Perhaps some man says, “I think I can take that out with the help of peyote and these other men.” So he does his ceremonial work in there and extracts what is bothering the patient.... He sucks it out usually with his own lips, not with a tube. It is nasty work right there. It might be dirty and full of pus. But the medicine man doesn’t think of it in that way. To them it is just as if they were sucking nice juice out of something. Yet it will look terrible to others.... All the bad things have to go into the fire and burn down to ashes.... Sometimes they suck out things like insects which have been shot into people and these things pop. Sometimes when they throw the evil object in the fire it blazes up blue but does not pop.

Northern Cheyenne and Shawnee patients sit in special places in the peyote tipi, as in the sweat lodge, suggesting that older patterns of doctoring are involved; as we have seen, the sweat lodge is an integral part of the Osage peyote round-house plan. That associations of curing by peyote and curing in the sweat lodge lie close to the surface finds affirmation in an interesting Arapaho case:[124]

One of the recent modifications of the peyote ceremonial was devised by a firm devotee, to cure a sick person. The originator of this new form of the worship believes himself to have been cured by the drug. In this ceremonial, which was repeated four times, the tent seems to have represented a sweat house, and a path led from the entrance to a fire outside, as before a sweat lodge. The ritual, while remaining a peyote ceremony, conformed more or less to the ordinary processes of doctoring a sick person.

One could easily over-emphasize the novelty of such a procedure, considering the widespread use of peyote in doctoring, yet even the Caddo, who do not doctor with peyote, often have four meetings to pray for the recovery of the sick person; certainly cures by peyote do not rest entirely on the “technological” procedure of the patient’s eating and drinking peyote, but others present “help” by eating in the name of the sufferer and praying. This is not at all unlike the presence of relatives and others in the sweat bath praying for the patient’s recovery; the various uses of sage, the fire pits in some altars, and the ritual necessity for a fire even on the hottest summer nights further suggest sweat bath parallels.[125]

Peyote is a panacea in doctoring. A Cheyenne woman was cured of a cancer of the liver which had been pronounced hopeless at a White hospital. Such invidious distinctions between White and peyote doctoring are common; for the former represents merely human skill, and is not the unmodified herb the direct creation of God? Belo Kozad, himself a well-known Kiowa peyote doctor, spoke as follows:

When my sick wife was in there I chewed peyote for her. Her skin got like wood bark—the hair come out. The doctors couldn’t make it. We give it up, can’t do anything. [It was] diabetes, and we shoot him every time she eats. That spoils the people; they lose the mind and the skin gets bad. That morphine for Howard [Sankadote, who was ill the night of the meeting and could not be present] make him talk funny. It just ruin the people in the mind. _Come_ to peyote! God knows more than any people!

Perhaps Belo had every “pragmatic” right to talk thus: had he not himself cured a boy’s hemorrhage by eating one hundred green peyotes for him? Peyote indeed is a famous cure for tuberculosis and respiratory diseases.

John Bearskin (Winnebago) knew of two cures by “Sister Etta” in meetings: one a woman with goitre, the other a boy who had previously been dumb.[126] Pneumonia also readily yields to peyote, producing beneficial perspiration when thirty buttons are drunk over a period of hours in two quarts of water. The writer has seen doctoring with peyote for a crushed thigh, tuberculosis, and malnutrition (?) in a two-year-old child; this last cried fretfully in the early part of the meeting, but was fed “tea” until it was blue and quiet in strychnine tetanus by morning. The wife of our Quapaw host had also been “operated on in church.”

A Sioux doctor, who had gotten his power from a vision in which peyote turned into a man, doctored at Taos; but an acquaintance of Dr. Parsons imputed his trachoma to witchcraft on the part of “foreigners” who came to large meetings. He found that peyote water prevented the inflammation of his eyes. Another boy’s leg was “all gone, rotten,” and the boy himself emaciated. Peyote men prayed over him for a month, whereupon he became well and fat, though his leg remained drawn up because he had taken too much White man’s medicine. The wife of a peyote man, herself cured of neck sores by the plant, asserted that witch sickness is lacking nowadays in Taos because of the power of peyote in exorcizing witchcraft; a peyote chief, however, holding a button in his hand, had had to remove a porcupine quill which some witch had shot into her nose. At Taos even anti-peyotists consider it good for cures, and Dr. Parsons, no doubt with some reason, makes the query: “Will peyote find its character of witch prophylaxis an introduction to the southern pueblos?”[127]

Peyote is equally successful in treating mental cases. An Oto informant told of four successive meetings held for a man who had “gone crazy” when his wife left him. Formerly under observation at Norman, he was afraid people were coming for him during the meeting; he could hardly talk, wanted to run out and people had to wrestle with him. Old Man White Horn gave him a peyote and told him it would protect him; finally, in the third successive meeting the man “came to” and asked what had been happening. Another Oto patient chopped wood incessantly, rolled and unrolled strings, etc., and used to have “meetings” by himself, drumming, singing and eating peyote all alone. An Oto told me of a Taos boy who had “gone crazy”; some said it was peyote that was doing this. But a doctor from west of Albuquerque came and pulled a snake and a dead water dog out of him; these had been his medicines, taught him by his father, and it was decided that he had clearly broken some taboo surrounding his father’s medicine.

“_Preaching._” An interesting feature of peyotism, probably deriving from earlier patterns, is the moral lecture in the morning. In one Caddo “moon” the leader “talks to the boys, teaches them, just like a preacher, telling them to do the right thing through life, and the consequences if they didn’t do the right things.” White Wolf (Comanche) says Quanah Parker lectured younger people in the morning; so too did Kickapoo, Carrizo, Shawnee and Wichita leaders.

After passing peyote, the Delaware leader “addresses the peyote and the fire, prays, and often delivers a regular sermon or moral lecture.” In the Iowa meeting:[128]

The peyote chief ... leads in the preaching and Bible reading.... The leader (or, as the writer understands it) perhaps some visiting preacher of the faith, gets up and delivers a sermon, while the cedar chief casts some more incense on the fire. [He commonly exhorts them to confession.] The leader then calls on other preachers to talk, and then asks the fire chief [to pass the peyote again].... Meanwhile he continues to read the Bible and exhort all sinners to repent. He points out that all the old ways have been given up, and with them their “idols,” such as the great drum of the religious dance.

John Wilson ordinarily began his meetings with a talk by himself; the Oto are commonly addressed in meetings by their “tribal priest.” The estrangement of the lively J. S. (Kiowa) and his young wife was composed through moral homilies delivered by older relatives in a peyote meeting—a typical occurrence.

At the end of the Pawnee meeting[129]

the members ... sit in their places and talk over their experiences.... The leader closes the meeting at noon with a lecture, or sermon, on ethical matters, speaking especially against the use of alcohol.

Possibly Osage “testimony” may have some relation to this.[130] The Winnebago[131]

ceremony is opened by a prayer by the founder and leader, this being followed by an introductory speech.... During the early hours ... speeches by people in the audience [are made], and the reading and explanation of part of the Bible.

The midnight sermon, after the midnight water, also occurs:[132]

Then the leader asks anyone he desires to make a speech. This may emphasize any point in regard to peyote.

The moral harangue is no doubt derived from earlier Plains patterns, though it is a Southwestern feature as well, among the Rio Grande Pueblos and elsewhere.[133]

_Prophecy._ The gift of prophecy has often been claimed by individuals in native America. The first well-known such was Popé of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, but his successors were many: Wabokieshiek, or “White Cloud,” the Winnebago-Sauk prophet of the Black Hawk War; the Delaware prophet of Pontiac’s Conspiracy (1762); Tenskwatawa, twin brother of Tecumseh, and the well-known “Shawnee Prophet” (1805); Kanakuk, the Kickapoo[134] reformer (1827); Smohalla, the Sokulk dreamer of the Columbia (1870-1885); Tavibo, the Paiute; Nakaidoklini, the Apache (1881); Wovoka, or Jack Wilson, the Paiute prophet of the Ghost Dance of 1889 and later; Skaniadariio, or “Handsome Lake,” the Seneca teacher, etc.[135]

Save for the revelations of the Caddo-Delaware John Wilson, and the teachings of John Rave and Jonathan Koshiway, this tradition has become much attenuated as regards peyotism. Large-scale prophecies can no longer be made to skeptical and disillusioned audiences, but prophecy in minor matters still occurs via peyote (e.g., the Delaware case in which a serious industrial accident might have been avoided if he had only been able to interpret correctly a warning peyote gave him). Old-time Comanche could hear the enemy while still away off when they ate peyote, and in making raids could discover the whereabouts of horses, etc. White Wolf, again, visioned Charley Seminole’s face all bloody at a peyote meeting, but was unable to interpret the prophecy; somewhat later, sure enough, the Seminole accidentally shot himself under the eye.

In the origin story of peyote, when the Kiowa or Comanche were on the war-path, the Apache leader knew of their leader’s approach to the tipi where they were having a meeting, and told his fireman to invite him in, whence the visitor brought peyote back to his tribe; this story is known all over the southern Plains. Around 1870 the only Kiowa who ate peyote was Pabo, or Big Horse. When he wished to find the whereabouts of an absent party he would go into a tipi and say “gʸäʰgūṇboṇta” (I am going to look for medicine), and would drum and rattle and eat peyote, and tell the results of his inquiry afterward. Pabo’s power was from the eagle, but Kiowa owl-doctors had clairvoyant powers in pre-peyote times. Another Kiowa user miraculously predicted the coming of telegraph lines and the railroad to Anadarko, having previously never seen either, and a Wichita predicted the World War.

_“Baptism” and Other Morning Ceremonies._ The “curing” ceremonies of Mexico and the Southwest still find a reflex in the Plains “baptism” in the morning ceremonies. The leader in the tipi whistles for the water as in the midnight ceremony, and a smoke is made for the bearer, the only difference being that this time it is a woman, often symbolically costumed,[136] who some say represents Peyote Woman of the legend. Many groups, however, have a ritual “baptism” in this morning ceremony, which is lacking at midnight.[137] The Arapaho,[138] for example, untie the drum and pass it around the circles; each man wrings out the wet drum head, makes a loop of the lacing-rope and throws it lasso-fashion over his foot to symbolize the roping of horses, presses the seven marbles of the drum to various parts of his body, and drinks a little of the drum water. The worshippers then wash the paint from their faces, and comb their hair, a towel, a mirror, a comb and water making the round of the tipi; then finally the drinking water is passed around.

The Delaware file out behind the fireman to greet the rising sun with prayer, and, standing in the same relative positions they occupied in the tipi, wash their faces with the water which the fireman pours on their hands; those who fall down at this time are said to be visiting heaven. The rest re-enter for the ritual breakfast. The Caddo similarly file out to wash and comb their hair, and preserve the same order even at the secular meal at noon. The Iowa wash with soap and water as they sit in the tipi; “the peyote chief himself carries the water to show his humility, because of Biblical references to the washing of feet.” The Shawnee are marshalled outside in two lines at sun-up to wash their faces and “do arm exercises.” The Kickapoo, Wichita, Oto, Northern Cheyenne and others pass the drum and sometimes all the ritual paraphernalia around to be handled; some lick the drum stick dipped in the water and touch it to various parts of their bodies. The Ponca leader, using a feather, shakes water on participants both at midnight and in the morning, and as in some other groups, waters the drum also.[139]

The ritual “quitting songs” are sung by the Pawnee just at dawn, as the first rays of the sun strike the altar through the opened door; the last song is sung five times, and each member then prays in turn to God. The “baptism” ceremony of the Winnebago John Rave cultists (derived from the Oto) is more Christian in tone than that of the Jesse Clay rite (of Arapaho origin). Rave dipped his fingers in a peyote infusion, and passed them over the forehead of a new member saying, “God, His holiness,” (or, as some say, “God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”).[140] A little water is also poured on the ground as a sacrifice. The well-nigh universal mode of disposing of the remaining water in the drum is to pour it along the earthen “moon.”

_Peyote Breakfast._ The foods in the ritual breakfast in the tipi are so standardized as scarcely to allow comparative treatment. They are merely minor variations on the theme: water, parched corn in sweetened water, fruit and dried sweetened meat.[141] From the Lipan (roasted corn, yucca fruit, wild fruit and meat, according to Opler) to the Ute (canned corn, canned peaches and corned beef, as reported by Mrs. Cooke) the uniformity is striking. These foods are eaten from a common set of four vessels,[142] which are passed around with a single spoon in each. Sometimes ground hominy or parched corn mush is substituted, and Hoebel reports the Northern Cheyenne use of Cracker Jack for the parched corn. Beef is the usual meat, in boneless chunks or dried, pounded and sweetened, but pork (tabooed for the Comanche) is reported for the Ponca and Northern Cheyenne.[143] Wild fruits are somewhat preferred to canned varieties, but are not always obtainable. Although the original meanings and connections with agricultural, gathering and hunting ceremonies have long since been lost sight of, the feeling for the proper foods in a peyote breakfast is still quite strong in the Plains, a remarkable instance of culture continuity.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For convenience of reference I have followed with all possible care the sequence of the development and appearance of elements laid down in the Kiowa-Comanche type-rite (above), of which the following paragraphs are largely comparative discussions.

[2] Mooney, _Miscellaneous Notes_, 40.

[3] Opler, _Lipan Apache Field Notes_.

[4] Erminie Voegelin, _Shawnee Field Notes_.

[5] Ritual gathering of plants is not unknown elsewhere; see Mooney, _The Sacred Formulas_.

[6] See G. A. Dorsey in _Handbook of the American Indians_, 2:650a (Sun Dance), as well as Spier’s _The Sun Dance of the Plains Indians_.

[7] Hoebel says the Comanche formerly did not have all night meetings because of the danger of attack while under the influence of the drug.

[8] Opler’s data suggest that even the vision-seeking motive is recent among the Lipan.

[9] The Lipan prayed for protection from their enemies as well as for health and long life.

[10] Petrullo, 48. The mourning council meeting was not unfamiliar in pre-peyote times. One such council was held for Tarhe, chief priest of the Wyandot, at Upper Sandusky, in the old days, attended by all the tribes of Ohio, the Indiana Delaware and the Seneca of New York (_Handbook of the American Indians_, 2:294).

[11] Four older men pray and the child is passed clockwise around the tipi as every one present calls out its name.

[12] Meetings are held _for_ the corpse, which is present “facing east” (head west) in the meeting; at the funeral next day he faces west. The writer omitted to attend an Osage meeting at Hominy because it was a funeral meeting.

[13] Cf. the uses of datura.

[14] La Flesche, _Peyote as Used in Religious Worship_, 21.

[15] A favorite Indian holiday in Oklahoma is Memorial Day, when graves are lavishly decorated.

[16] Densmore, _The Peyote Cult_.

[17] Parsons, _Taos Pueblo_, 12 ff.

[18] Only two cases are known of women who fully participated in meetings: Dog-woman (deceased), wife of John Red-turtle (Cheyenne) sang and beat the drum; a woman at Taos, Apekaum says, sings in meetings like men.

[19] Kroeber, _The Arapaho_, 398-99; Opler, _The Influence of Aboriginal Pattern_; Parsons, _Taos Pueblo_; the rest field investigation.

[20] Skinner, _Societies of the Iowa_, 725.

[21] One William Richard Nebuchadnezzar West ate peyote with the Kiowa for years. Petrullo mentions one Pat Noonigan who ate with the Delaware, and the Shawnee had a white participant for some twenty years. Early white familiarity with peyote in Texas must be postulated to account for its use by Texas Rangers in the Civil War (Lumholtz, 1:358).

[22] A Negro brought by the Kiowa drummed and sang along with the rest in a Shawnee meeting; the former existence of a Negro “peyote” church near Tulsa argues for a considerable amount of such contact.

[23] Again excepting the Caddo, who are over-suspicious for reasons discussed later.

[24] The most homogeneous meeting I attended was a special tribal Wichita one which, nevertheless, was attended by three Kiowa, four Comanche, and two Whites, beside fourteen Wichita.

[25] Radin, _The Winnebago Tribe_, 415.

[26] Murie, _Pawnee Indian Societies_, 638; Densmore, _The Peyote Cult_.

[27] Radin, _A Sketch of the Peyote Cult_, 2; _The Winnebago Tribe_, 388.

[28] Hoebel, _Northern Cheyenne Field Notes_.

[29] Kroeber, _The Arapaho_, 399; Smith (Mrs. Maurice G.), _A Negro Peyote Cult_, 452, note 10; see also _Handbook of the American Indians_, 2:661.

[30] Kroeber, _The Arapaho_, 404-405; see also Petrullo, _The Diabolic Root_, 101. Shawnee sometimes paint their temples; Oto use red bars below side burns. Delaware examples from Speck: red hair-part, red-blue-red-blue-red horizontal lines over the bridge of the nose and cheeks (Wilson’s Big Moon meetings); red and blue lines below and at corners of eyes (“crying for repentance”); green zigzags in yellow cheek spots, two red and one blue line at corner of eyes; all red chin bounded by a blue semilunar arc on the upper lip and up the cheeks (representing the altar “moon”); and blue red-bordered dots on each cheek-bone and forehead representing peyote-buttons (a woman’s design).

[31] Radin, _Crashing Thunder_, 182.

[32] Kroeber, _The Arapaho_, 403, 405.

[33] Opler, _Lipan Apache Field Notes_.

[34] Skinner, _Ethnology of the Ioway Indians_, 261.

[35] Densmore, _Winnebago Songs of the Peyote Ceremony_.

[36] Parsons, _Taos Pueblo_, 119.

[37] Speck, _Notes on the Ethnology of the Osage_, 163.

[38] Radin, _Crashing Thunder_, 186-87.

[39] Anhalonium means “without salt.” The salt-taboo is a common Southwestern one, unconnected with peyotism there (e.g., Kroeber, _The Seri_, 45) but associated in Plains peyotism with such borrowed Southwestern traits as the water-drum.

[40] Kroeber, _The Arapaho_, 400.

[41] _Idem_, 398. “The slight variations in pattern,” writes Opler of the Mescalero, “... undoubtedly owe their existence to the fact that there are a number of peyote shamans, each eager to assert his own individuality and ‘way’ by some minor departure or ‘rule’.”

[42] The peyote shaman in Mexico was certainly no figurehead, and the peyote leaders of the Carrizo, Tonkawa, Lipan and Mescalero were important in preventing rivalry.

[43] The authority of the leader finds ritual reflection throughout the John Wilson “moon”: e.g., only the leader might smoke and pray, and others calling for smokes were frowned upon as presumptuous. Further, John Wilson’s “moon” contains his “grave” alongside that of Jesus Christ, and his initials W. (Wilson) or M. (Moonhead). The altar, indeed, represented Moonhead’s face; he even prescribed face-painting styles with his initials in them. A man equated with Jesus Christ is scarcely a negligible person. Koshiway (Oto) performed marriages and baptisms and conducted funerals in the Church of the First-born. The point is just as well demonstrated by the negative cases of those who aspired to peyote leadership and failed. Even the local Pawnee President of the Native American Church, James Sun-eagle, does not lead meetings.

[44] Delaware meetings appear to have had only road-man and fire-guard (Harrington, _Religion and Ceremonies_, 188) but this may be an error of omission. The Kiowa, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Iowa, and Taos all have the “cedar-man” in addition.

[45] Radin, _A Sketch of the Peyote Cult_, 3; _The Winnebago Tribe_, 388. Densmore (_Winnebago Songs of the Peyote Ceremony_), lists only three leaders but may not be counting the fireman. See Skinner, _Societies of the Ioway_, 724; Parsons, _Taos Pueblo_, 62 ff.

[46] Schultes, _Peyote and Plants Used_, 129-31.

[47] Excessive prices for peyote have been reported elsewhere. Mooney says (_Miscellaneous Notes_, 30) an Oklahoma White dealer once charged 25 cents a button, though they cost him only $5.00 a thousand. Hoebel says a Comanche once traded a fine horse for five hundred buttons. See Bennett and Zingg, _The Tarahumara_, 291-92; Lumholtz, _Tarahumari Dances_, 453-55.

[48] Diguet, _Le Peyote et son usage_, 28.

[49] Parsons, _Taos Pueblo_, 60; Bennett and Zingg, _The Tarahumara_, 293, xiv; Mooney, _Miscellaneous Notes_, 60 ff.

[50] Big Moon leaders apparently required fees; Speck (Peyote MSS.) says the Seneca were too poor to pay more than the leader’s carfare when the cult was brought to them. Wilson himself met his death when some horses given him by the Quapaw and tied to the back of his wagon pulled backward at a crossing as a locomotive approached, and some of his enemies assert that this was in punishment for his avariciousness and economic exploitation of peyotism. He even charged money for sweatbaths he prepared in connection with meetings.

[51] Cf. Kroeber, _The Arapaho_, 410. A Shawnee gave the meeting-tipi to two old men the next morning, and the writer has exchanged gifts with several tribes, notably the Oto and the Kiowa.