Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/194

 THE "DREAMERS" OF THE MOHAVE-APACHE TRIBE [].

BY BARBARA FREIRE-MARRECO, SOMERVILLE COLLEGE, OXFORD.

(Read at Meeting, April 17th, 1912.)

[The following abstract is made by permission of the Ethnologist-in-charge of the Bureau of American Ethnology, to whom a report on the Mohave-Apache will shortly be submitted.]

The Mohave-Apache, or Yavapai, are a small disorganised tribe of Yuman speech, of whom a certain number (less than two hundred) are settled on the M'Dowell Reservation. Their social organisation is slight; they live in camps of one, two, or three families, each camp ruled by one of the married men. There is no council; the war chieftainship is obsolete; one or two men, heads of large camps, are influential in an informal way. The people are much preoccupied with questions of health and disease. Agriculture is little developed, and their wars have come to an end, so that they have few common interests except health. Consumption is prevalent. The most important persons are the "doctors," kithié.

Certain of these are "little doctors," kithié kádye, who own songs to treat special cases; one has a song for snakebite, another a war-song to confer invulnerability, and another has a song for fractures and also keeps a stock of splints to set them; another man supplies the rarer medicinal roots.