Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

Olmechts] the swimmer MANUSCRIPT 107
The fine shades of meaning expressing doubt and even a tinge of
blasphemous irony, which many of these words convey when used in
this connection, are almost impossible to render in any but a very
free and colloquial translation, which would run somewhat like this:
"This has never been proved, but the old people, none of whom, by
the way, we have ever seen, are reputed to have believed it. Maybe
it isn't a joke, after all; anyway, what's the harm of trying it."
Also from personal contacts I have received similar uupressions.
Once I asked a medicine man whether he was absolutely sure about
a particular subject I was discussing with liim, and which he ex-
plained according to current orthodox and traditional views; I also
asked him if he would accept another medicine man's views if they
happened to be diametrically opposed to his own opinions and to
tradition; he answered: "Yes, I would, if he could prove that he was
right."
Good old Og. once confidentially told me that he had lost all con-
fidence in the divinatory powers of the "brown stone"; as often as
he had tried it he had been disappointed. He believed in other
modes of divination and practiced them, but for "brown stone"
divination he had no use at all.
Some more facts that are related to those discussed in this paragraph
will be found on page 113.
Attitude Toward White Culture
Although as a rule the medicine man is strongly opposed to the
influence of white culture in his domain, and very hostile to the
wliite physician and his medicine box, this feeling is much less pronounced
in some localities than in others. The Indians living in the
neighborhood of the agency, who know by experience that the "white
medicine" is so much superior to theirs, are breaking loose from their
medicine men and their doctrines, and the medicine man feels that
he is fighting a desperate and hopeless battle.
Some means he employs in this we would call hardly fair, but I
am convinced that the medicine men themselves are quite honest
about them, e. g., when they allege that white doctors willfully cause
disease (see p. 39) so as to always have clients. "You see," one of
them told me once, "your white doctors are out after money. We
will treat a sick man for weeks and weeks and cure him, even though
we know that he has nothing to pay us with. And if he recovers, we
are just as glad as if he had been a rich man and could have given us
yards and yards of cloth, and beads and money. But your doctors,
if they do not get money, they will not cure; and how can they get
money if the people do not become ill. So they make healthy people
ill on purpose, that they may cure them and get rich."
What is there to be answered to such sound dialectics?