Read Ebook: The Religion of the Indians of California by Kroeber A L Alfred Louis

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The Wintun occupy a territory which is of much greater extent from north to south than from east to west. The northern and southernmost members of the family therefore differ considerably. In the north there is a well defined conception of a creator who dwells above, and to whom Coyote forms an antithesis. In the south, where everything shows the Wintun and Pomo to have influenced each other considerably, he is replaced by Coyote. In both regions a world-fire is prominent in the mythology. In the north the shaman is inaugurated in his career in a ceremony in which he is assisted by his older colleagues. The southern Wintun may prove to have been the people who largely developed the dances and ceremonies characteristic of a large part of the Sacramento valley. They show much in common with their western neighbors the Pomo, and with the Maidu who adjoin them on the east and who themselves declare that they have derived the Hesi and other dances from them.

None of the groups so far discussed, with the possible exception of part of the Wintun, practiced any distinct mourning ceremony. On the other hand, all that follow, with the possible doubtful exception of one or two tribes on the outskirts of the state, held mourning ceremonies as among the most important of all their religious practices.

The Maidu everywhere possessed a secret society. Their system of dances becomes less and less developed as one proceeds farther from Wintun influence. Among the mountain tribes almost all ceremonies were much less developed than in the Sacramento valley. Shamanistic beliefs and practices also varied, although there was everywhere a clear idea of spirits personally acquired and controlled by the medicine-man. Among the northeastern Maidu every shaman's son invariably became a shaman, although only through his own acquisition of spirits, which might be those of his father. In the Sacramento valley spirits were acquired by involuntary dreaming without much regard to heredity. Puberty ceremonies for girls were performed both among the northwestern and northeastern Maidu, perhaps among those of the south also. The mythology of the several Maidu divisions is much more uniform than their religious practices. The creator is always opposed and his beneficent work rendered incomplete by Coyote. It is clear that the mythology of the Maidu is distinctive and much less under Wintun influence than their ceremonies.

Among the Miwok the Coyote largely takes the place of the creator. As among their northern neighbors the Maidu, the mourning ceremony was important, and the two stocks held at least certain dances in common. The individual mourning practices and restrictions of the widow were elaborate and severe. Nothing is as yet known of a secret society, but as both the southern and northern neighbors of the Miwok performed initiation ceremonies, it is likely that they also possessed them.

Among the Yokuts, who occupied the head of the San Joaquin-Tulare valley south of the Miwok, there are no traces of the ceremonial system of the Sacramento valley, which is replaced by public shamanistic ceremonies, in which contests and exhibitions of magic were conspicuous. The annual rattlesnake ceremony which has been described is of this type, as is the Ohowish, a ceremony in which medicine-men from different villages or districts; directed their powers against each other. There seem to have been also certain animal dances among the Yokuts. Medicine-men usually acquired their power by dreaming, sometimes by visions while alone. Bear shamans were known, but were not so much dreaded as farther north. Rain doctors, who could control the weather, were important. Their power was bound up with certain stone amulets evidencing a fetishistic development. Formulae, some with ritualistic accompaniment, were spoken, but differed from those of the Northwest in being short direct prayers or supplications instead of mythical narratives. The creators in Yurok mythology are several animals, the chief of whom is the eagle and among whom Coyote always finds a place. A favorite mythological personage is the prairie-falcon, and a myth which has found a particular development relates the visit of a husband to the world of the dead in pursuit of his wife.

Very little is known of the ethnology of the coast tribes west of the Miwok and Yokuts. Among the Southern Costanoan peoples creation myths resembling those of the Yokuts are found. Coyote is at once a trickster and a giver of civilization and arts to man. Similar ideas probably prevailed among the Salinan tribes. As regards the Esselen and Chumash nothing is known.

Tribes belonging to the great Shoshonean family held almost all the eastern border of the state as well as a large part of the southern desert and coast region. The former inhabited the Great Basin, and are culturally entirely distinct from those of Southern California, of whom alone is there any considerable knowledge extant as regards religion. Certain of the northern groups, such as the Mono, lived on the western or California slope of the Sierra Nevada, in contact with the Yokuts and Miwok, and partook more largely of the culture and presumably religion of these people than of the tribes of the Basin.

Among the Shoshoneans of Southern California, such as the Gabrielino and Luise?o, the so-called Mission Indians, mourning ceremonies were more important than any others, and were held both on the death of a person, sometime afterwards, and again in a still more public manner at large gatherings. At some of these ceremonies images representing the dead, and recalling those of the Maidu far to the north, were burned. One form of mourning ceremony was the Eagle dance, performed with an eagle that was slowly killed as the ceremony went on through the night. Many of the songs of the mourning ceremonies are of mythological content, referring to the great leader or culture-hero Wiyot. The puberty ceremonial for girls was elaborate and contained symbolic actions. The initiation of males was intended for boys, and therefore also took on largely the character of a puberty ceremony. This character was heightened by the presence of numerous ordeals. Part of the initiation of boys consisted of the drinking of jimson-weed. Sand paintings of a very simple type, evidently influenced by basket patterns, but thoroughly symbolic in meaning and therefore essentially of the same nature as those of the Pueblos and Navaho, were made in connection with this initiation. On the whole religious symbolism was more developed than in Central California or even among the Yuman tribes to the east, who are geographically so much nearer the Indians of the Southwest. The shaman acquired his power by dreaming, and the pipe with which he sucked as well as smoked was of the utmost importance to him. Paraphernalia were much used by the shamans, especially boards or wooden swords, which were swallowed and worn as head-dresses. These, however, were not purely fetishistic objects, but of potency rather through symbolism and association. The mythology of the Shoshonean Mission Indians was not essentially different from that of the other Indians of Southern California.

The Yuman family, which is so much represented in Arizona and Lower California, occupied the southernmost portion of Southern California. The Diegue?o in the coast mountains and on the coast were culturally similar to the Shoshonean Luise?o, with whom they are generally included as the present Mission Indians. Along the Colorado river the physical and ethnic environment was quite different, but as has already been said, there was much closer resemblance to the Mission Indians in matters of religion than in almost any other phase of culture. The principal Yuman tribes in this Colorado region are the Mohave and the Yuma. The religion of only the former is known, but the two give every evidence of having been very similar. The religion of the Shoshonean Paiute or Chemehuevi in the desert adjoining the Mohave has been largely colored by the influence of the latter. The most distinctive feature of Mohave religion is the insistence upon dreaming as the source of everything religious, although this dreaming must be interpreted rather as a belief in the presence of the individual in spirit form at the great events of mythic times. All myths that are at all of sacred character are believed not to be handed down by tradition, but to be dreamed by each narrator. The shaman receives his power by dreaming ritualistic myths, which reveal to him his practices. The lengthy series of songs which are the essence of all ceremonies, and the mythical narratives connected with them, are also learned in dreams. It is probably a result of this importance of the dream-world and of the identification of myth and ceremony, of religious belief and religious practice, that ritualism is so slightly developed among the Mohave. Their geographical nearness and intercourse with the Hopi and other southwestern tribes, among whom ritualism and symbolism find perhaps their highest development on the continent north of Mexico, would certainly justify a contrary expectation. Both ceremonial actions and ceremonial paraphernalia and dress are developed only to a very slight extent. There is no initiation or society. The singing ceremonies, which with the exception of a few minor observances such as that for a girl's puberty, constitute all the Mohave ceremonies other than mourning ceremonies, are quite numerous, more than twenty being known. Some of these ceremonies are acknowledged to have been borrowed from other Yuman tribes, especially the Yuma, and these Indians no doubt have also acquired Mohave ceremonies. Some of the ceremonies are primarily mythical in character, others somewhat shamanistic. All are also sung in mourning. In addition there is a distinctive mourning ceremony held annually for important men.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Much of the material on which the statements in the preceding essay are based is information collected by the University of California's Ethnological and Archaeological Survey of California since 1901 and as yet unpublished. Of old accounts dealing with the religion of the Indians of California, the best is by the Franciscan missionary Boscana, entitled Chinigchinich and published in the 1846 edition of a volume by A. Robinson called Life in California. It deals with the Shoshonean Indians of Mission San Juan Capistrano. An occasional reference of value may be found in other works, such as Venegas' History of California. The series of translations and republications of early explorers in California and the Southwest, published in the Land of Sunshine, later Out West, beginning in 1899, is also convenient, though naturally it deals but incidentally with religion. Reid's account of the Indians of Los Angeles county, published in an early Los Angeles newspaper and republished by Alexander Taylor in the fourteenth volume of California Farmer in 1861, is particularly good, though less so on the side of religion than on most others. Stephen Powers' Tribes of California, issued in 1877 as the third volume of the Contributions to North American Ethnology, a government series, deals with the Indians of the greater part of the state and contains many references to their religious life. Powers is however often very inexact, and the value of his work is in its comprehensiveness rather than in its reliability. An important work is Creation Myths of Primitive America, by Jeremiah Curtin, which consists of a collection of myths from the Wintun and Yana of Northern California. The differences of form which these myths show from most Indian myths that have been published in translation are apparently chiefly due to the method of their presentation by the author. Curtin's introduction is very suggestive but exaggerated. Professor R. B. Dixon has brought out a paper on Maidu Myths, and another, a great part of which is devoted to religion, on the Northern Maidu, both in the seventeenth volume of the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. These two contributions are among the most careful studies as yet made by a trained observer in any part of the state. The same author has also published briefer articles on Some Coyote Stories from the Maidu Indians of California, System and Sequence in Maidu Mythology, and Some Shamans of Northern California, in recent volumes of the Journal of American Folk-Lore, and on The Mythology of the Shasta-Achomawi in the American Anthropologist for 1905. Professor P. E. Goddard has published Life and Culture of the Hupa, the last portion of which refers to religion; and Hupa Texts , almost all of which are religious in character. These two papers constitute Volume I of the University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology. In the Journal of American Folk-Lore for 1906 is a paper by the same author on Lassik Tales. Miss Constance Goddard DuBois has published a number of valuable papers on the Mission Indians, mainly concerning the mythology of the Diegue?o, in the volumes of the Journal of American Folk-Lore for 1901, 1904, and 1906. In the American Anthropologist for 1905 Miss DuBois has an article on the Religious Ceremonies and Myths of the Mission Indians, while another paper on The Mythology of the Diegue?os appears in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Congress of Americanists. From the present author there have appeared, in the second and fourth volumes of the series of American Archaeology and Ethnology, of the University of California Publications, Types of Indian Culture in California, in part treating of religion, and Indian Myths from South-Central California; in the Journal of American Folk-Lore between 1904 and 1906, A Ghost Dance in California, Wishosk Myths, and Two Myths of the Mission Indians; in the American Anthropologist for 1902, A Preliminary Sketch of the Mohave Indians. In the American Anthropologist for 1905 and 1906 the late Major H. N. Rust has two brief articles on The Obsidian Blades of California and A Puberty Ceremony of the Mission Indians. The Journal of American Folk-Lore has contained a rather confused article on The Cosmogony and Theogony of the Mojave Indians, by Capt. J. G. Bourke, in 1889, and others by G. W. James, on myths of the Mission Indians of Southern California, in 1902 and 1903. In the same Journal appeared in 1902 An Indian Myth from the San Joaquin Basin by J. W. Hudson, and A Composite Myth of the Pomo Indians by S. A. Barrett in 1906. Since 1906 the Journal has contained a series of Notes on California Folk-Lore.

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