Untitled - Smithsonian Institution
Untitled - Smithsonian Institution
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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