Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/74

 62 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920

in the morning, from each set of kaan they go out, two by two, to each of the four directions, and with each set goes a ''war captain." The kaan carry with them corn pollen which they sprinkle in the fields and the prayer-sticks known at Laguna as chasumi and used there by the war captains, a befeathered reed to which are attached netted shield, and miniature bow, arrow and club the war god offerings. These things are buried in the fields. About four in the afternoon the kaan return, and that night they cure the people.

To each estufa 1 there are two rooms, an outer room and an inner. The people remain in the outer room together with the food which they have prepared according to their moiety, while in the inner room the kaan sing four or six songs. Then the war captain brings into the inner room those who are to be treated. The patients sit together, the kaan in the middle of the room. On this occasion the kaan will visit, one group the other, six kaan going from the Flint Society to visit the Fire Society and vice versa. In curing the kaan will look into a bowl of water on the surface of which "powder" is spread, in order to see into the machinations of the witches, senders, as always, of disease. The disease-causing things the witches have sent into the body the kaan take out with their eagle wing feathers a familiar Pueblo Indian curing rite and from the feathers are seen to drop into the ollas pebbles, bits of cloth, etc., 2 and cactus points. 3 This curing or exorcising motion (luati\ Keresan, kukats)* is a motion of sweeping in, "like catching a fly," and then shaking down, shaking the things caught from the feathers to the olla. 5

Besides the clan heads and the kaan there is at Isleta the warrior organization which existed among the Keresans as u'pi* and still

Eleventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology; "Notes on Cochiti," pp. 204-5. At Laguna, at the all-night solstice ceremonials every one present is given a drink of medicine.

J The tula are referred to on this occasion, I think, but, the kaan have their own ceremonial rooms.

2 An identical rite of the Ant or Flint society of Zufii.

3 My informant insisted that these objects had been sent not into the body but into the clothes of the victim, next the skin, and "like germs" caused disease. Truly the Pueblo Indian is unsurpassable as a pourer of new wine into old bottles!

4 Tsyukats, he has been cleaned; tsaaukashana, cleansing or "treatment."

5 Cp. "Notes on Cochiti," p. 156.

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