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Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

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oiBKECHTs] THE SWIMMER MANUSCRIPT 89<br />

Having a knowledge of myths and stories in a primitive community<br />

implies being conversant with tribal history, legendary and fictional<br />

as well as actual and real, and some of the medicine men have even<br />

incorporated short historical notes in their daybooks containing their<br />

formulas.<br />

As far as aboriginal religion is concerned, again we find the medicine<br />

men—often exercising the profession of priest at the same time as<br />

that of disease curer—remaining true to beliefs and traditions which<br />

the community at large is gradually losing, or exchanging against a<br />

slight and superficial veneer of Baptist or Methodist Christianity.<br />

But not only do the medicine men excel in the higher intellectual,<br />

idealistic pursuits, such as those above named, but also as far as<br />

material culture is concerned they usually rate a good deal higher than<br />

even an intelligent layman. Nobody knows so much about fish<br />

traps and the way to build them and the wood to be used by preference<br />

none knows more about the best periods for hunting different kinds of<br />

game, or all the artifices used to decoy them; nor can anybody make<br />

rattles, or wooden masks, or feather wands better than they can.<br />

All this knowledge, however, is far from codified. I have often<br />

made a point of it to tiy and find out in how far it was systematized,<br />

or as we would call it, rationally ordered in their minds. This has<br />

always brought very disappointing though interesting results.<br />

Such a medicine man who was universally acknowledged as being<br />

the one "who knew most," as Og. was, when asked to write down all<br />

the different diseases he knew, and when given five days to think it<br />

over, managed to find only 38 more or less different ones.<br />

Another one, when asked to enumerate them offhand, could not<br />

get past a dozen, this in spite of the fact that both of them must have<br />

known upward of a hundred, since a compilation made by me from<br />

oral information obtained from several individuals, and gleaned from<br />

three manuscripts, the Ay., Ms. II, and Ms. Ill, revealed that some<br />

230 different ^^ diseases were known.<br />

The same remarks hold for their botanical knowledge, and could<br />

even be made to apply to their knowledge of religion and mythology.<br />

One prominent medicine m.an, and at the same time the most prominent<br />

priest, T., was very anxious toward the end of my stay to act as<br />

informant, but was withheld by the fear that he would not be able to<br />

tell me anything of interest, as "he did not know much." When I<br />

had managed to convince him that anything he told me would be<br />

interesting, he came and stayed a week, telling me about fifty stories,<br />

and giving me very valuable information on sundry subjects.<br />

Continuing an experiment along the same lines with another medi-<br />

cine man, this time with reference to the religion, afterlife, the spirits<br />

he invoked in the formulas, I could not get him by this method to tell<br />

63 "Different" from a Cherokee point of view.<br />

;

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