Page:The American Indian.djvu/275

Rh is the flat, curved rabbit stick, in fact, a kind of boomerang. Drives of rabbits and antelope were practised. The principal wild vegetable food was the pinon nut. Of manufactured foods, piki bread is the most unique. In former times, the villages often traded for meat with the more nomadic tribes. Taos, Pecos, and a few of the frontier villages used buffalo robes and often dressed in deerskins, but woven robes were usual. Men wore aprons and a robe when needed. In addition to cloth robes, some were woven of rabbitskin and some netted with turkey feathers. Women wore a woven garment reaching from the shoulder to the knees, fastened over the right shoulder only. For the feet, hard-soled moccasins, those for women having long strips of deerskin wound around the leg. Pottery was highly developed and served other uses than the practical. Basketry was known, but not so highly developed as among the non-Pueblo tribes. The dog was kept, but not used in transportation, and there were no boats. The mechanical arts were not highly developed; their stone work and work in wood, while of an advanced type, does not excel that of some other areas; some work in turquoise, but nothing in metal. Art flourished chiefly as pottery decoration and in ceremonial painting; the latter tended to be symbolic but usually bordered upon the realistic; a complex social grouping in. which felationship is usually maternal, but the unity of the system is apparent in that the same group names can be traced throughout the different villages; each village independent with an elective governor and a war chief, the final sanction, however, resting with a supreme religious officer; ritualism very complicated; universal offerings of maize meal and other objects at shrines; extensive use of sand painted altars; purification by emetics and headwashing; two sets of priests and ceremonies, one for summer, the other for winter; many societies or cults; a snake dance among the Hopi and a rain ceremony at Sia are special demonstrations; the most common are the kachina ceremonies, part of which are masked dances; mythology characterized by migration tales.