Chapter Fourteen—
Eastern North America and the Great Plains

To the extent that hallucinatory drugs make the visions they induce predictable or even stereotyped, it is not in the Amazonian tropics that the quest for an indeterminate transcendence found fullest realization south of the Arctic, but among the mobile hunters and gatherers of eastern and central North America, where the solitary vision quest practiced in parts of the Pacific Northwest took on an importance in tribal religious life perhaps unparalleled elsewhere in the world.

Ritualism and Vision in the Southeast

The tribes of southeastern North America possessed, in economic, political, and ceremonial terms, "the richest culture of any native people north of Mexico" (Hudson, 3)—a culture strongly influenced by Mesoamerican civilizations. Most tribes combined hunting and gathering with intensive farming of maize, beans, and squash; their societies were hierarchically ranked by age or achievement (203). These linguistically diverse but culturally similar peoples were organized into highly centralized chiefdoms: "not only as King," Captain John Smith wrote of the Virginia Powhatan chief (31), "but as half a god they esteem him." The Natchez of the lower Mississippi, who venerated their hereditary leader as the "Great Sun," may have been perpetuating a tradition of "truly powerful chiefdoms or primitive states" (206) that had flourished centuries before de Soto set out in 1539 to explore these territories for the King of Spain.

Ritual specialists exercised great powers. Although often called "prophets," "doctors," and "shamans," they are properly designated priests (337) because they were valued for their training "rather than for

some innate ability or power." Office was often hereditary (Adair, 81), but sometimes, as among the Chickasaw of Mississippi and Tennessee, a priest was elected for life (Speck 1907, 51). Candidates underwent long study to gain the knowledge of sacred mysteries that qualified them for office (Adair, 364), and some tribes, like the Creek (or Muskogee) of Georgia and Alabama, recognized degrees of expertise marked by distinctive insignia. The procedure was ritually formalized with much emphasis on tradition and sacred formulas excluding as far as possible the variable and unexpected.

Bartram (390) summarized a priest's functions in the 1770s, noting that he exercises great political influence, particularly in military affairs, communes with invisible spirits, can "foretel rain or drought, and pretend to bring rain at pleasure, cure diseases, and exercise witchcraft, invoke or expel evil spirits, and even assume the power of directing thunder and lightning." Captain John Smith (29) reports that priests, like chiefs, when dead, "go beyond the mountains toward the setting of the sun, and ever remain there . . . doing nothing but dance and sing, with all their predecessors. But the common people they suppose shall not live after death, but rot in their graves like dead dogs."^[1]

This priestly religion was practiced in the most elaborate sanctuaries north of Mexico. At Cofitachequi in South Carolina de Soto visited (and plundered) an immense elevated temple decorated with shells and pearls and containing statues, armor, and chests with "remains of dead notables" (Hudson, 111). Sanctuaries like those depicted in Hariot's Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia of 1588 (Lorant, 267–69) contained "idols" or embalmed bodies of dead chiefs displayed on a high scaffold; some of these sanctuaries were so holy, both Captain Smith (27) and Bartram (360n.) report, that only chiefs or priests could enter them. Apart from grand structures such as these and the Natchez temples (Swanton 1911, 158–67), every important town appears to have had its holy place for performance of ceremonies intended to promote fertility of the crops on which tribal livelihood depended.

The Natchez celebrated each new moon with a ceremonial feast, and throughout the region major rites were associated with ripening of the corn. Among the Waxhaw of North Carolina, as early as 1701, Lawson (33) attended a feast commemorating the harvest, and Adair (99–111) later described "the grand festival of the annual expiation of sin" at the first ripening of the corn. As Bartram (399) summarized the annual "busk" (a Creek word), or green corn dance, the people cleansed their houses and the whole town of filth, which they burned, extinguishing

[1] From Generall Historie of Virginia (1624); cf, the version in A Map of Virginia (1612), rpt. in Barbour, 2:368–69.

the fire after three days of fasting. The high priest then lighted a new fire, and women brought newly harvested grain from the fields; after a public feast the people danced, sang and rejoiced all night for days thereafter. Ceremonial lighting (as in ancient Mexico) of the new fire signified tribal renewal through "the beginning of a new year with a purified social order" (Hudson, 318; cf. Swanton 1946, 775). The near universality of the Green Corn Ceremony throughout the known history of southeastern tribes (and most others of the eastern United States) makes this "by far the most important of their seasonal ceremonies" (Hudson, 366).

Human sacrifice, rarely attested (except for captives in war) elsewhere in North America, is another parallel with Mexico. Even allowing for horrified exaggeration and possible confusion of initiatory with bodily death, accounts are too frequent to be dismissed. Thus the artist Le Moyne affirms (Lorant, 103) that Florida Indians "offer their first-born son to the chief," clubbing him to death on a stump around which "the women who have accompanied the mother dance in a circle . . . with great demonstrations of joy." And Henry Spelman, after capture by the Powhatan and Potomac Indians of Virginia, reports (Swanton 1946, 743) that "once in the yeare, ther preests which are ther coniurers with ye men, weomen, and children doe goe into the woods, wher ther preests makes a great cirkel of fier in ye which after many obseruanses in ther coniurations they make offer of 2 or 3 children to be giuen to ther god." Many Natchez submitted to be strangled to death, or strangled their children to death, at the funeral of a Great Sun or a member of his family.

So dominant was communal ritualism that even healing, the shaman's pre-eminent domain, was often a priestly activity. Most important to successful treatment, Swanton asserts (1946, 782)—along with the usual herbal medicines, sucking, and blowing—was "repetition of the proper magical formulae," such as the invocations meticulously recorded by Cherokee doctors (in the script devised by Sequoiah) and published by Mooney (1891 and 1932). The priestly Chickasaw "shaman" administered an emetic and sang a formulaic song, then blew medicine on the patient's head, a treatment "kept up with little variation for three days" (Speck 1907, 55). In the Chickasaw Picófa, or "fast," a communal curing ceremony mainly consisting of propitiatory songs and dances performed in unison, the formulaic ritualism of southeastern Indian life reached an apex, all but precluding any ecstatic quest to recover a wandering soul from the uncircumscribed beyond.

Traces of shamanistic beliefs survived, however, as they did in the priestly cultures of the Southwest, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. The

southeastern cosmos consisted of an orderly Upper World, an Under World epitomizing disorder and change, and a world between (Hudson, 122, 125). To the extent that emphasis fell not on celestial deities widely worshiped throughout the Southeast (Swanton 1942, 210) but on man's intermediate position in this world and potential connection with the others above and below, the quest for transcendence remained a possibility not wholly foreclosed.

Origin myths of the Caddo (Swanton 1942, 25) and Choctaw (Swanton 1931, 5), like those of the Southwest, told of the people's emergence from the earth, but some tribes, including the Creeks (Swanton 1928, 480), told also of descent from the sky, a transcendent world potentially accessible to the human. Several myths of the Alabama (Swanton 1929, 138–43) recounted celestial journeys. In one, people descended from above in a canoe, singing and laughing, played ball on earth, then returned to the sky; a man who observed them seized one of the women, married her, and had children by her. When the wife and children reascended, the father attempted to follow but fell and was killed. In a Choctaw myth from Bayou Lacomb, Louisiana (Bushnell, 35), two brothers set out together at age four to follow the Sun; as men, they traversed a wide water and entered his home. Sun asked "why they had followed him, as it was not time for them to reach heaven. They replied that their only reason for following him was a desire to see where he died." Even in priestly societies of the Southeast, the ancient quest to surpass humankind's given limits thus remained a theoretical possibility, at least for heroes of myth.

Although curing remained primarily a priestly function, early writers often noted a distinction between priests and "conjurers or wonder workers" (Swanton 1946, 743), also called sorcerers, prophets, soothsayers, or medicine men. Creek "Knowers" could prophesy and diagnose diseases; their abilities were inborn, and members of certain groups, such as twins, were most likely to join their number (774). Seemingly ecstatic behavior was not unknown: in North Carolina around 1700 a doctor, after chanting and sucking, began "to cut Capers and clap his Hands on his Breech and Sides," with "Grimaces, and antick postures, which are not to be matched in Bedlam" (Lawson, 227). The "juggler" (jongleur ), the eighteenth-century French traveler Bossu reported (Swanton 1928, 616), entered a skin-covered cabin entirely naked and spoke incomprehensible words to invoke the spirit: "after which he rises, cries, is agitated, appears beside himself, and water pours from all parts of his body. The cabin shakes, and those present think that it is the presence of the Spirit."

The contrast between two types of specialist is illustrated by two of de

Bry's engravings: in one (Lorant, 235) an elderly priest stands dignified and erect, in the other (247) a "sorcerer" or 'juggler" runs making "strange gestures" as if possessed: "For they are very familiar with devils, from whom they obtain knowledge about their enemies' movements." Le Moyne described a sorcerer consulted by a Florida chief who whispered unintelligible words and made animated gestures: "his appearance became so frightful that he looked scarcely human; he twisted his limbs until the bones snapped out of place and did many other unnatural things" (Lorant, 59). Not expertise in ritual but direct access to the divine was the source of such prophets' knowledge.

Shamanistic visions were not limited to sorcerers or soothsayers, moreover, but might be required of priestly doctors also. A novice priest of the Creek was expected to have a dream (Swanton 1928, 619), and in some tribes a visionary quest may have been essential to a priest's calling. A Chickasaw candidate went into the woods for three days, naked and alone, and kept the knowledge he gained secret (Speck 1907, 56), and among the ritualistic Natchez, according to the anonymous early eighteenth-century "Luxembourg Memoir" (Swanton 1911, 178), a novice fasted alone in a cabin for nine days. Shaking his rattle,

he invokes the Spirit, prays Him to speak to him and to receive him as a doctor and magician, and that with cries, howls, contortions, and terrible shakings of the body, until he gets himself out of breath and foams in a frightful manner. This training being completed at the end of nine days, he comes out of his cabin triumphant and boasts of having been in conversation with the Spirit and of having received from Him the gift of healing maladies, driving away storms, and changing the weather.

Southeastern ritualism had thus not altogether obliterated the ancient tradition of direct communion with the divine.

In at least one tribe, the Chitimacha of Louisiana—and fuller observation before the forced removal or extinction of southeastern peoples might surely have revealed similar practices elsewhere—not only the shaman (whether "priest" or "sorcerer") but "Each youth underwent solitary confinement in some house until he obtained a guardian spirit, and this is also affirmed of each girl" (Swanton 1946, 781). However important communal ceremonies, public sacrifices, and standardized formulas had come to be for peoples of these hierarchically structured agricultural societies, they remained hunters, gatherers, and warriors, too, and had not entirely relinquished the need for individual quests by their leaders, or even by all, for visionary experience of a never wholly predictable or communicable reality transcending the established routines of their everyday world.

Communal and Personal Quests of the Northeastern Woodlands

Largely subordinated to priestly ritual in sedentary cultures of the Southeast, the shamanic quest remained central to more mobile peoples of the northeastern United States and adjacent regions of Canada. As early as 1612 the Jesuit Father Pierre Biard described the wild Montagnais and other Algonquian tribes of a newly discovered New France (Kenton, 1:23–24) as practicing a religion of "incantations, dances and sorcery" in which "medicine men . . . consult the evil Spirit regarding life and death and future events." Other Algonquian and especially Iroquoian peoples lived in settled communities and cultivated corn, beans, and squash; for the Iroquois League, Morgan recognized (199), hunting had become "a secondary, although a necessary means of subsistence." Yet even in their sturdy longhouse villages the restless mobility of a recent past lingered on, especially for more nearly nomadic males who prided themselves on dominion in war. Communal values were strong, as in all tribal societies, but many northeastern peoples, especially in the Algonquian hunting tradition, were nonetheless strongly individualistic: the traditional Ojibwa, Landes observes (1968, 14), "brooked no laws that clashed with his whims" and took joy "in sabotaging the social game."

Collective ceremonies played a major role here as elsewhere in North America. The Iroquois in particular mapped out a familiar trail amid the uncertainties of daily existence in an ancient cycle of calendrical rites renewed in the early nineteenth century by the Seneca prophet Ganeodiyo, or Handsome Lake. Among less complexly organized Algonquian tribes communal festivals were seldom so elaborate, but some, like the annual Big House of the Delaware (or Lenape), with its representation of the soul's journey along the Milky Way after death and its kindling of new fire symbolizing renewal of life, were highly developed (Speck 1931).

Both Iroquoian and Algonquian rituals prominently included public ceremonies by curing societies. The Iroquois Company of False Faces not only healed individually but "conducted a public exorcism of disease . . . and ill luck of all kinds" each spring and fall, shouting terrifying cries as they visited each house in grotesquely carved masks and frightened away disease spirits (A. Wallace 1970, 81–82). The Huron, who seem never to have practiced regular calendrical rites (which the kindred Iroquois may have adopted from southeastern tribes since the seventeenth century), devoted the winter Ononharoia, or "upsetting of the brain," to curing illness by communal enactment of dreams, and several societies performed public dances to heal disease (Trigger 1969, 96–99).

Such collective rites, bearing clear traces of ancient shamanic practices, continued to be performed by the Iroquois despite the initial opposition of Handsome Lake, into whose reformed religion they were eventually assimilated.

Among Algonquian peoples, who almost entirely lacked fixed agricultural ceremonies, communal ritual centered on the society the Ojibwa called the Midéwiwin, whose initiatory rites climaxed in shooting each candidate with the sacred shell that killed and revived him. Midé priests inscribed their myths in pictographic characters on birch bark scrolls (see Dewdney), and these, like the sacred formulas of the Cherokee, gave written sanction for ceremonies held to date back to the origin of the world.

Communal ritual, though much less developed than in the southern United States and Mesoamerica, thus played an important role in the Northeast, but both agricultural and curing rites may in fact have been recent developments. The supposedly ancient Algonquian Midéwiwin may have been a relatively late codification of ancient shamanic practices in response to European dislocations. Among many peoples, including Chippewa,^[2] Ottawa, and Fox, evidence suggests that until the eighteenth century, when the Midéwiwin emerged as a solidifying tribal tradition for Ojibwa groups dispersed by the European fur trade, "medicinal and magical practices were in the hands of shamans, individual practitioners" (Hickerson, 76–79). Iroquois medicine societies, too, give ritual form to "shamanistic behavior once free and innovative," as described in seventeenth-century accounts of the Huron before such societies regulated individual shamans (Fenton 1978, 318). The communal rituals recorded during the last three centuries by white observers may therefore have been in large part a defensive response to disruptions introduced by the whites themselves.

Major central Algonquian rites unmistakably suggest shamanistic affinities. The Delaware traced their Big House ceremony to dreams revealed to ancient tribal leaders (Speck 1931, 18), and recitation of dreams was central to it (85). Its leader, as observed by M. R. Harrington in Oklahoma (1921, 92), was not a hereditary custodian of tradition but a visionary "in communication with the supernatural world." The Midéwiwin, too, not only seems to have originated later than the guardian spirit quest among the Ojibwa (whose northern tribes seldom performed it), but retained important affinities with it. Hoffman (1891, 192) noted that its songs, far from being fixed, vary with the singer's inspiration,

[2] "Chippewa," a corruption of "Ojibwa" accepted by the Bureau of American Ethnology, is either a synonym for Ojibwa or more specifically designates southwestern Ojibwa tribes living in the United States.

and Densmore remarked (1910, 13) that exactness is not obligatory in a ritual whose details vary in different localities. The Midéwiwin, Landes suggests (1968, 42), was thus "an academy of shamans" whose prestige rested mainly on visions (79).

Even the relatively fixed agricultural rites of the Iroquois may have been originally dictated by dreams and could be altered by them (Tooker 1970, 33), and despite its sacrosanct "code," Handsome Lake's Gospel has no one canonical text but varies with each recitation (Deardorff, 101). But the mobility—and the impulse to transcend the socially given—of the shamanistic quest survived above all, among the Iroquois, in rites of the curing societies which Handsome Lake's reforms could not abolish. The grotesque masks of the Falseface Company were modeled on dreams, and like sacred clowns elsewhere, these performers delighted in saturnalian inversion of their culture's values. In this masquerade, Edmund Wilson remarked (238), young and old, male and female, inseparably mingle with "a certain sense of liberation."

In a ceremony observed by Wilson (290–307) on the Tonawanda Seneca reservation in June 1959, the questing impulse of shamanism manifests itself still more clearly. Members of the Little Water Company, keepers of a medicine able to revive the dying, sing together several times a year to keep up its strength. Suddenly the lights are switched off: "The room with its Corn Flakes had vanished: you were at once in a different world." A man and a woman are searching for the Little Water by which the animals have brought back to life the mythical Good Hunter known for kindness to them, and taught him a wonderful song in their language. The animals congregate, and in "the climax of the symphony" guide the questers to a mountaintop from which the marvelous song emanates: "at the top they find a great stalk of corn growing out of the barren rock, and from this stalk comes the song that has drawn them." Its bleeding root instantly heals, and the seekers learn from the animals to mix the miraculous medicine. "In each of the first two sequences, the songs all follow a pattern; but in the third, they begin on unexpected notes and follow unfamiliar courses. This is magic, a force beyond nature is tearing itself free," and with this climactic liberation "a paean is let loose: it fills the room with its volume. One finds oneself surrounded, almost stupefied."

The quest for the Little Water thus ritually enacts a people's continuing transcendence of its given condition through communal search for its deepest sources. The adepts of this ancient medicine society whose rites Wilson found flourishing in twentieth-century New York State "have mastered the principle of life, they can summon it by the ceremony itself. Through this, they surpass themselves" (310).

Wilson remarks (310) on the closeness of the Iroquois, even today, to

the animal world, and many forms of hunting magic, including bear ceremonials, have been widespread, as among the Ojibwa (Hallowell 1960, 159), throughout the Northeast. Transformation between human and animal was thought to have frequently taken place, at least in mythical times, as enacted in masked dances and curative rites of secret societies such as those, among the Iroquois, of the otter, buffalo, and bear. Healing as well as hunting might derive from identification of humans, through ritual propitiation, with beneficent animal powers; this too was a common form of the quest for transcendence.

French Jesuits repeatedly marvel at the credence given to dreams in New France. Father Brébeuf, in the Jesuit Relation of 1636 (Kenton, 1: 264–65), calls the dream the "oracle" and "principal God of the Hurons." Among both Huron and Iroquois, dreams were thought to express wishes of the soul, and attempts were made to carry out their commands to the letter, sometimes by curative ceremonies whose overt sexuality dismayed French visitors. In the Huron andacwander ceremony recorded by Father Lalemant in 1639 (Kenton, 1:388–89; cf. Trigger 1969, 118–19), a dying old man's dreams were fulfilled by public copulation of twelve girls and young men, with a thirteenth girl for himself. Dream spirits, often in animal form, were sometimes thought to transport the soul to distant lands, but even when the soul did not leave the body, dreams gave vent to its desires in accord "with the theme of freedom in the culture as a whole" (A. Wallace 1970, 74). Variation was continually introduced into communal ritual by individual dreams, introducing a "vibrant and creative" dimension into cultures such as the Huron (Trigger 1969, 118). Through the mediation of dream, ritual itself shared in the mobility of a soul forever being formed and transformed.

Father Le Jeune reports in the Jesuit Relation of 1639 (Kenton, 1:377–78) that the Indians of Canada distinguish several souls. "Some of them imagine a Paradise abounding in blueberries. . . . Others say that the souls do nothing but dance after their departure from this life; there are some who admit the transmigration of souls, as Pythagoras did"; but all believe it is immortal. Among some tribes the journey to the land of the dead became a dangerous quest across a roaring river bridged by a slender tree trunk (Blair, 1:377–78), past a giant strawberry and over a shaking log bridge (Kohl, 214–16), or through other perils. Spirit realms were potentially accessible not only to souls of the dead but, on rare occasions, to a daring few of the living, whose mythical quests bear eloquent witness to continuation among recently migratory peoples of the search for knowledge and power through personal communication with the unknowable beyond.

"Tales of the recovery of a beloved person from the land of the dead are common in North American mythology," and however much they vary in detail, "they are one and the same story," Gayton contended (1935, 263). In a Huron legend recounted by Brébeuf in 1636 (Kenton, 1: 258–60), three months after her death a man seized his reluctant sister's soul in the underworld and corked it into a pumpkin, placing her brains in another. Returning home, he retrieved her body from the cemetery and had almost revived it when a curious onlooker broke the prohibition against raising his eyes: "At that moment the soul escaped, and there remained to him only the corpse in his arms." In a tale of the Micmac of the Gaspé Peninsula and New Brunswick, recorded by Father Le Clercq in 1691 (208–13), a giant gives a father his son's soul to carry home from the land of the dead in a little bag; but a curious woman opens it, "and the soul escaped immediately and returned whence it had come."

Countless such legends, many strikingly similar to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, have been recorded in much of North America, indicating the high importance attributed to personal communication with the spirit world. Nor were such journeys possible only in a mythical past. "Many of our tribe have been there and returned," Kohl's Ojibwa informants told him (220–25), citing a living hunter who had overcome great obstacles in returning from the dead to care for his children; nearly a century later Hallowell (1955, 151–71) found that visits to the spirit world by the dead or dying still played a major part in the life of the Berens River Saulteaux, a hunting people of Ojibwa derivation living east of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba.

These tales perpetuate ancient shamanistic beliefs and possibly even seances aimed at reviving a dead person: according to Hultkrantz (1957, 240), "the Orpheus tradition may in its core be regarded as the text to a shamanistic act." In contrast to ritualistic agrarian ideologies, "its basic tone is individualistic, not collectivistic; it is founded on a shaman's ecstatic experiences, not upon the more sober therapeutic methods of a medicine society" (263), and it has been kept alive in North America—more perhaps than anywhere else—by the widespread guardian-spirit quest whose fundamental assumptions closely resemble its own.

The land of the dead in "Orpheus" myths is generally located near the setting sun. It is "a happy land" in a tradition created, Hultkrantz suggests (1957, 92–93), by peoples with a harmonious view of life and little terror of death. At least equally prominent in North American myth and ritual is a spiritual realm connected with the sky, and this realm, like the other (which is sometimes the same), may be the goal of a quest by the living.

The Onondaga and Seneca, two of the five (or six) Iroquois nations, believe they sprang from the ground (Morgan, 6–7), but such origin myths are as rare in the Northeast as they are common in the Southwest. The Huron "have recourse to the Sky in almost all their necessities," Brébeuf wrote in 1636 (Kenton, 1 :261), and among Algonquian peoples the Great Spirit and his delegates lived in the sky, and stories were told, Copway wrote in the mid-nineteenth century (152), "of some of these high born personages coming to earth to dwell among the people; also of men going up and becoming inhabitants of the skies." The Montagnais-Naskapi of Labrador believe, Speck writes (1935, 50), that souls are transformed into stars until they become reincarnated in babies.

The living, too, have access to this realm, and one main purpose of certain Algonquian rituals was to raise participants' souls to the heavens. Each day's performance of the twelve-day Delaware Big House "lifts the worship a stage higher in the series of twelve successive sky levels until on the final day it reaches the Great Spirit himself" (Speck 1931, 61). And the Ojibwa Midéwiwin incorporated "eight successive grades of curing—the first four called Earth grades and the second four called Sky grades—the 'power' rising with the grade," that is, with closeness to its source in the heavens (Landes 1968, 52).

Most Iroquoian peoples, Brébeuf wrote of the Huron (Kenton, 1: 250), trace their origin to the fall of a woman from the skies. In one version (251–52), Aatensic threw herself after a heavenly tree whose felling her sick husband dreamed could cure him. Turtle then bade other aquatic animals dive down, bring up soil, and put it on her shell, so that Aatensic dropped gently on an Island; her daughter thereafter brought forth two boys, one of whom killed the other. In later Iroquois legends the twins, "Good Mind" and "Evil Mind" in Parker's version, contend for influence in the human world, but the story is basically the same.^[3] Its major elements—the fall of a human progenitor from the skies, the creation of land from the waters by an "earth diver," and the exploits of heavenly twins—are widely paralleled in myths from different regions of North America.

Along the "path of souls," or Milky Way, the soul returns after death to its home, the transcendent sphere from which it has been partly cut off during life. Among the Iroquois, "a beautiful custom prevailed in ancient times, of capturing a bird, and freeing it over the grave on the

[3] For Iroquois versions see, e.g., Hewitt 1903 and 1928; Parker, "A Seneca Cosmological Myth" (1923), in Tooker 1979, 35–47; and Fenton 1962. On the "earth-diver" myth see Dundes 1962.

evening of the burial, to bear away the spirit to its heavenly rest"; on the invisible road to the sky, Morgan reports (174–76), "the soul ascended in its heavenly flight until it reached its celestial habitation."

Like its terrestrial counterpart this heavenly home could in exceptional cases be visited by the living (at least by mythical heroes) as well as the dead. A Seneca myth told to Parker (132–35) by Edward Corn-planter, a descendant of Handsome Lake's brother, gives clearer expression to the soul's quest for its celestial home than we have found in other Native American stories outside the Southwest. In old times, the youngest of three brothers suggested that they travel to the edge of the earth, where sky touches sea. Watching the sun slip under the rim of the sky, the two younger brothers ran under in time but the oldest was crushed, "and his spirit shot past the other two" (like Homer's Elpenor), meeting them on the far side where "everything is different." The father of the Sky people purified them by skinning them and washing their organs, and his son Haweníio sent them back to their country by the path of the sun. "The brothers did not care for the earth now, but wished themselves back in the upper world"; they were later struck by lightning, and killed.

In this myth of a realm beneath the western rim of the sky, the two seemingly distinct afterworlds of North American Indian myth are found to be one; at the liminal horizon earth and sky meet. This is the celestial (or subterranean) realm to which shamans, pre-eminently of the living, have been thought to have access from time immemorial, and even religious leaders who repudiated traditional shamans claimed a heavenly source for their revelations. Thus the Delaware Prophet of 1762–63 dreamed of receiving a divine message from the heavenly "Master of Life" (A. Wallace 1970, 117). Handsome Lake in 1799 envisioned a sky journey to the afterworld where he was told the moral plan of the cosmos on which his reformed religion was based (243). And the Shawnee Prophet, transformed into Tenskwatawa, "the Open Door" for his people's salvation, was borne to a spirit world and saw past and future in a paradise of abundant game and fertile fields where spirits of virtuous Shawnees could flourish (Edmunds, 33). However much Christian doctrine may have influenced these visions, their core appears to be the indigenous quest for spiritual transcendence variously expressed in medicinal rites, initiation ceremonies, and origin myths of Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples throughout the northeastern woodlands.

Various classes of traditional shaman coexisted among northeastern peoples, some obtaining power through visions, others by purchase. Among the Minnesota Ojibwa, Hoffman (1891, 156–58) distinguished not only the Midé priest but the wabeno, a visionary healer and fire-handler often associated with evil spirits, and the ecstatic jessakkid "seer

and prophet" commonly called a jongleur; similar distinctions have been made for various Algonquian groups.^[4] All except the Midé priests practice alone and appear to embody traditions of individual shamanism older than the Midéwiwin, which by communally sanctioning personal vision guided the questing impulse into more predictable channels.

Early French accounts make it clear that individual ecstatic practices as well as collective ceremonies were a widespread means of curing disease and probing the future. When a Huron is sick, Father Sagard reports (200–01), the medicine man manipulates hot stones and chews hot coals ("the deed of an unchained devil") and rubs, blows, or spits on the patient; both medicine man and sick person "make grimaces and utter incantations and throw themselves into contortions" until "the sick man appears quite mad, with eyes flashing and frightful to see, . . . throwing about everything that comes in his way, with a din and damage and outrageous behaviour that have no equal."

A few years later, in the Jesuit Relations of 1633 and 1634 (Kenton, 1:114–15), Father Le Jeune described how a Montagnais sorcerer treated both a sick child and himself. In ministering to the child he "howled immoderately" while whirling his tambourine, then blew on the patient's body, "as I conjectured, for I could not see what he was doing" in the surrounding darkness. And in treating himself he "acted like a madman," with truly Siberian frenzies, "singing, crying, and howling, making his drum rattle with all his might; while the others howled as loudly as he." After hissing like a snake, hurling the drum to the ground, and running round the fire, "he went out of the cabin, continuing to howl and bellow" in a display, the Jesuit missionary asserted, of "foolishness, nonsense, absurdity, noise and din."

Both the Franciscan Sagard and the Jesuit Le Jeune are among those who noted the use of sweat baths to induce ecstasy by Iroquoian and Algonquian tribes. Le Jeune's description of 1634 (Kenton, 1: 115; cf. Sagard, 197–98, and Raudot in Kinietz, 365) is especially reminiscent of Herodotus's account of Scythian vapor baths two thousand years before. "They plant some sticks in the ground, making a sort of low tent," and after heating it with red-hot stones, "slip entirely naked into these sweat boxes," where they sing, cry, groan, and make speeches while the "sorcerer" beats his drum and prophesies; nor could the skeptical remonstrances of the "black robes" diminish belief in their "oracle."

[4] See Landes 1938, 133, and Jenness, 60. Hoffman (1896, 138–61) distinguishes three classes of Menomini shaman: "jugglers," wábeno, and "dreamers." Generally in the Northeast, Ritzenthaler and Ritzenthaler write (101), "there were two types of shamans, whose concerns were primarily those of healing, and a third, whose art seemed to lean toward the darker side"; the first two (who sometimes coincided) were the conjurer or "juggler" and the sucking doctor, and the third was the wábeno .

Such descriptions confirm that curing and prophecy in northeastern North America required supernormal powers attained through ecstatic trance. Whether this condition implies departure of the shaman to distant realms in quest of power, or of errant souls, is less clear from our sources, in which frenzies of "sorcerers" tend to be considered diabolic possession. But the frequency of quests to the underworld or the skies in "Orpheus" tales and other myths suggests that the shaman's spirit was indeed thought to journey to transcendent worlds in search of a dead or dying person's soul, and similar beliefs persisted among some Algonquian peoples into the twentieth century. "If an Indian dies and a good medicine man starts after him quickly enough he may be brought back," Hallowell's Ojibwa informant claimed (1955, 174–75); thus one shaman restored a dead girl to life by following her to the Land of the Dead and catching her soul "just in time."

The soul's journey to distant places is most evident in the "shaking tent" seance of Algonquian "jugglers" attested since the earliest European observers. "In all their encampments," Champlain (159) wrote of his Algonquian and Huron allies, describing his journey of 1609 from the Saint Lawrence to the lake that now bears his name, one of their "soothsayers" builds a cabin and

places himself inside, so as not to be seen at all, when he seizes and shakes one of the posts of his cabin, muttering some words between his teeth, by which he says he invokes the devil, who appears to him in the form of a stone. . . . They frequently told me that the shaking of the cabin, which I saw, proceeded from the devil, who made it move, and not the man inside, although I could see the contrary. . . . These rogues counterfeit also their voice . . . and speak in a language unknown to the other savages.

To the pious Champlain, such "impostors," as he called medicine men in general (96), were defrauding benighted peoples who "do not recognize any divinity, or worship any God and believe in anything whatever, but live like brute beasts" (321).^[5]

Le Jeune in 1634 (Kenton, 1:106–07) tells how a Montagnais juggler howled like a French puppeteer and "fell into so violent an ecstasy, that I thought he would break everything to pieces," speaking several languages while others urged the spirits to enter. Some imagined he "had been carried away, without knowing where or how. Others said that his body was lying on the ground, and that his soul was up above the tent." Finally, "the Savages believing that the Genii or Kichikouai had entered, the sorcerer consulted them," and to his questions the spirits, "or rather

[5] Parkman, who also described the "magic lodge" rite (1983, 1: 254 and 398), believed two and a half centuries after Champlain that the Indian conjurer's remedies "were to the last degree preposterous, ridiculous, or revolting" (1:362).

the juggler who counterfeited them," gave answer. "I could have said as much myself," the skeptical (and possibly envious) Jesuit remarks of his savage rival's oracular pronouncements.

The Algonquian "shaking tent" or "spirit lodge" has remained essentially the same in the centuries since Le Jeune. (In one common variation, the shaman is tightly bound at the beginning of his performance and frees himself, like his Eskimo counterpart, by the end.)^[6] Among the Saulteaux of the Berens River, Manitoba, a shaman seeks supernatural revelation during the puberty fast (Hallowell 1971, 19), and soul abduction is the "characteristic modus operandi " of the conjurer (59), who occasionally engages a rival's guardian spirits in "a dramatic struggle to the death" while the audience watches the tent shaken by spirits thumping within it, sometimes with fatal results to one of the antagonists (62–63). His other main functions are prophecy and location of lost articles through his spirit companion, the turtle (66–68). The Algonquian conjurer is no mere charlatan, Hallowell stresses (73–83), but an explorer of the liminal zone between the given condition of human beings and the world of undetermined potentialities—the world of the spirit—to which they likewise belong.

Among the relatively settled Iroquoian peoples we find only traces of individual vision quests, by shamans or others. "Time was when it was necessary to fast thirty entire days, in a Cabin apart," Brébeuf wrote of the Huron in 1636 (Kenton, 1:274); but those times were vanishing when the French arrived, and a modern scholar can only infer that Huron shamans probably obtained power through visions (Tooker 1964, 97; cf. Trigger 1969, 65). Among Iroquois of the Five Nations, the vision quest seems once to have been more prominent. At puberty some boys withdrew to the woods under supervision of an elder, fasted, abstained from sexual activity, and mortified the flesh (A. Wallace 1970, 37–38); dreams at such times "were apt to be regarded as visitations from supernatural spirits who might grant orenda, or magical power, to the dreamer, and who would maintain a special sort of guardianship over him" through a charm or talisman associated with the dream.

Among Algonquian peoples the individual quest seems to have been nearly universal, at least for boys; we find it among the Delaware, for example (M. Harrington 1913, 214–15; cf. 1921, 61–80), and above all among the Ojibwa, who retained many of their indigenous practices after eastern Algonquian tribes had been exterminated or displaced. An

[6] Densmore 1932a, 45–46; 1932b, 104–05. Hultkrantz (1981, 79) considers such seances "forms of a jugglering complex" ranging from northern Asia and the Americas to Southeast Asia.

Ojibwa father, the Jesuit Dablon reported around 1670 (Kinietz, 326–27), made his son fast until he saw a vision of "Sun, or Thunder, or something else"; more recent descriptions have richly elaborated on this early account.

Girls too, Jenness writes of the Ojibwa of Parry Island, Ontario (1935, 50), fasted under their mothers' supervision. But a girl's quest coincided with first menstruation, thought (as in many tribal societies) to bring pollution; therefore, unlike a boy's "hopeful striving for broader horizons," her puberty ceremony "is a conscientious withdrawal of her malignant self" (Landes 1938, 5). The quest was more central for boys than girls, Barnouw suggests (20), because "a man's activities—hunting and warfare, etc.—involved unpredictable elements in which magical support was essential for success." Women might be more open to spontaneous visions, but mastery of spirits through the disciplined quest was an overwhelmingly male prerogative.

An Ojibwa boy driven out to fast in a lonely spot (Landes 1968, 8–11) might lie naked on the ground or make himself a huge "nest" in a tree as he fasted for as many as ten days. "When he swooned, the Ojibwa said he was being carried to the sphere of the manitos," or spirits. A successful visionary kept his dream secret and continued fasting in later years; over time he would come to resemble his guardian spirit—moose, bear, or other—and at night "would leave his human shape on his bed to stalk the country" in its shape. A shaman might eventually identify himself with the manito, even at the price of madness or death.

As the "nest" suggests, a connection with the sky is characteristic of Ojibwa visions. Thus the Christian convert George Copway, a friend of Longfellow and Parkman, tells how his visionary spirit made a lofty pine, "reaching towards the heavens," heave as he sang, and told the youth, "I am from the rising sun" (Zolla, 238–39). A decade or two later, one of Kohl's Ojibwa informants recalled (204–07) climbing a tall tree after his mother's death and being escorted through the air above high mountain tops and out into the sunshine, where the Sun revealed earth, sky, and his own image, and gave him protecting spirits.

An old Ojibwa told Kohl (232–42) how his grandfather took him as a boy into the forest and made him a bed high up in a pine. His first attempt to fast failed, and the next spring, determined not to return "till my right dream had come to me," he again bedded himself in a pine and after days of deprivation fell into a dream in which he followed a spirit through the air to a mountaintop. There four men disclosed the earth and the "glorious sight" of the sky, and bade him choose his destination: "I will go up," he replied. Four white-haired men revealed the gifts of God; from then on he was "a perfect man." Similarly (375–76), a great

chief, "the Little Pine," followed a visionary path "higher and higher into heaven," and was told he would be a mighty hero: "And the dream was really fulfilled."

Few early European accounts of vision quests survive, no doubt largely because of their individual nature (since observers largely thought of religion in terms of communal rites) and because visions were normally kept secret until old age or death (Jenness, 50). But on the basis of later evidence, quests appear to have been nearly universal; a shaman was not set apart by his unique call, as in Siberia, but by intensification of a visionary experience common in some degree to every member of the community, especially among the mobile and "highly individualistic society" (Landes 1938, 119) of the Ojibwa and other Algonquian hunting peoples. The first (and principal) quest normally took place in early adolescence, and others could be occasioned by any personal crisis; they were individual rites of passage substituting for the collective ceremonies of more settled peoples.

Individuality and unpredictability were characteristic also of visions themselves, which despite recurrence of common motifs were by no means as standardized as the drug-induced hallucinations of tropical South America. The outcome of the quest could not be known in advance, and the possibility of failure ratified its inherent uncertainty. Years of preparation were required, and though "complete failures were very rare" (Densmore 1932a, 71), repeated and increasingly rigorous fasts might be necessary before a vision came; it was far from automatic. Ojibwa men who never attained visions were disdained by fellow tribesmen, and on the modern reservation, where suicide is endemic to some Ojibwa communities, this once-exceptional failure may seem to characterize a whole society from which the vision quest "molding a child's sense of identity" has vanished, leaving nothing in its place (Shkilnyk, 86–88). For the guardian spirit quest is "no passive relationship," Landes observes (1968, 9), but requires lifelong self-discipline, and in the solitary individual's uncertain endeavor to surpass his given condition lies a heroism all the more extraordinary, Kohl remarks (228), in that "every Indian, without exception," displays it. Small wonder that in the absence of that potentially transformative hope for a future differing from the present, life might cease to have meaning.

Visionaries of the Great Plains

The vision quest is most fully documented not among northeastern Algonquians, who were soon uprooted by invading whites, but among the migratory buffalo hunters who briefly but memorably dominated the Great Plains. These tipi-dwelling horsemen—Sioux, Crow, Cheyenne,

and others—were quintessential exemplars of the visionary shamanism once practiced by hunters and nomads in much of the world.

Yet the mobility of Plains life was not an immemorial inheritance. The tribes that entered this region in the centuries after the horse was introduced from Europe appear to have been displaced agriculturalists driven westward by the Ojibwa and others under pressure from the whites. Siouan and Algonquian peoples who had previously cultivated the land now embraced a nomadic life made possible by the horse and the seemingly inexhaustible buffalo; some, such as the Mandan and Pawnee, combined agriculture with seasonal hunting. Prominence of the Plains vision quest thus reflects not simply persistence but renewal, under conditions of heightened instability, of an openness to the unknown never wholly subordinated to the invariance of ritual.

"The American Indian was an individualist in religion as in war," the mixed-blood Wahpeton Sioux Charles Eastman, or Ohiyesa, declared (Eastman, 27). On the Plains, above all, this quality deeply impressed outsiders; thus every Comanche "could be his own priest and his own prophet—the individual interpreter of the wills and ways of the spirits" (Wallace and Hoebel, 155). Such "individualism" did not, of course, imply lack of communal affiliation: a profusion of organizations with elaborate ceremonies embraced almost everyone in a network of tribal traditions (Wissler 1916; Mails 1973). Yet few cultures have more emphasized individual achievement, and to none has the vision quest been more central.

A visionary dimension is evident in many communal rites. The Hako of the Caddoan Pawnee differs from fixed calendrical ceremonies in its collective quest for Mother Corn; other tribes, such as the Omaha (Fletcher and La Flesche, 1:74) and Teton Sioux (Densmore 1918, 68–77; J. E. Brown, 101–3), may have derived a similar rite from the Caddoan Arikara. Among the Teton Sioux, this ritual, with its "song of search" for children, was associated not with Mother Corn but with the White Buffalo Woman who gave the sacred pipe (Dorsey 1906; Walker 1980, 109–12, 148–50; Brown, 3–9). Purification by sweat bath—Teton Sioux inipi, considered their "oldest and most revered ceremony" (Walker 1980, 104; cf. Black Elk in Brown, 31–43, and Lame Deer and Erdoes, 174–82)—was nowhere more important than on the Plains; this ritual of kinship among those in the tiny sweat lodge and their "relatives" beyond was often a prelude to the vision quest.

Among explicitly shamanistic public ceremonies on the Plains were "shaking tent" rites like those of the northeastern Algonquians, in which a "conjurer" learned of hidden matters from spirits who freed him from his thongs. In the Teton Sioux yuwipi ("wrapped") ritual, a holy man versed in bird and animal languages both cures and locates lost objects

(Powers 1982, 21). In a curing session (Densmore 1918, 246), a medicine man bound inside a dark tent sang amid flying objects and animal noises until he was found "wedged between the poles near the top of the tipi, with all the restraining cords cast from him"; ascent of the pole, like ventriloquism, flying objects, and animal language, is reminiscent of Eurasian shamanism. Usually the yuwipi shaman's soul does not set forth in search of visions; thus spirits came to Fools Crow and showed him where to find the medicine of which they told him (Mails 1979, 94). But formerly a yuwipi shaman like Black Thunder learned the ceremony after long fasting in the hills (Hurt and Howard, 293), and yuwipi spirits themselves were thought to set forth with pounding noises from the darkened room of the seance and fly to caves, clouds, woods, or water to bring power to the shaman freed from his bonds (Feraca, 34).

But by far the most elaborate Plains ceremony is the festival commonly known (from its Dakota name) as the Sun Dance and widely considered, as by Fools Crow (Mails 1979, 44), "the highest expression of our religion." Like the Ojibwa Midéwiwin or the Winnebago Medicine Rite (Radin 1945, 72), the Sun Dance may have developed as a reaffirmation of tribal solidarity in response to massive cultural disruptions since the seventeenth century. Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux ascribes its origin to a revelation from the Great Spirit, Wakan-Tanka, "many, many winters after our people received the sacred pipe from the White Buffalo Cow Woman" (Brown, 67). Some form of the ceremony was all but universal on the Plains; its principal features were already apparent when Catlin (1973, 1:155; cf. 1967), in the 1830s, portrayed the "appalling scenes" he witnessed among the Mandan of the Upper Missouri shortly before their decimation by smallpox.

Since Catlin, many have described the Sun Dance, especially in its Sioux versions.^[7] In setting up the twenty-eight poles of the lodge around a central tree on the third day, Black Elk explained to Brown (80), "we are really making the universe in a likeness," the circle representing creation and the tree Wakan-Tanka, the center of everything. The number of poles is the number of days in the lunar month, of a buffalo's ribs, and of feathers in the war bonnet: "You see, there is a significance in everything." On the fourth day, participants begin their arduous dance with hands and eyes stretched toward the sun; the dancer's intense mental concentration, Curtis writes (3:95–96), "produces that state of spiritual exaltation in which visions are seen and the future is revealed." Bleeding profusely from wooden skewers fastened from his chest by

[7] See, e.g., on the Sioux, Curtis, 3:87–99; Walker 1921; Alexander, 136–69; Brown, 67–100; and Mails, 118–38. (For studies of the Sun Dance of other peoples, see Wissler 1921.)

thongs to the Sun Pole, the chief dancer lunges to free himself while others dance and sing; finally he tears loose and collapses before rising again to resume the dance. A feast, sweat bath, and prayer conclude the ceremony.

Catlin (1967, 39; cf. Wied-Neuwied 1906, 23:324–34) surmised that the Mandan Sun Dance, the "O-kee-pa," was an annual ceremony to which the people owed their existence through increase of the buffalo on which life depended; in a folium reservatum for scholars (83–85) he described a buffalo dancer pretending to impregnate others with a colossal red wooden penis. To the extent that these rites aimed to replenish the animal food supply, they resembled Green Corn ceremonies of southern agriculturalists and bloodier rituals of the Pawnee, who as recently as 1838 sacrificed a maiden to the Morning Star to promote the fertility of the corn.^[8] In contrast to this priestly ritualism, however, individual visions remained indispensable to most Plains Sun Dances, which were set in motion not by the inflexible calendar but by the pledge of the chief dancer. His ordeals were prompted, Alexander observes (162), by "a quest of understanding" culminating in a vision of an animal power that would henceforth be his personal helper. In former times, Fools Crow remarks (Mails 1979, 120), "every pledger was required to go on a vision quest before he did the Sun Dance," and so strong did the connection between individual vision and communal ritual remain, even after that practice lapsed, that Lame Deer (199) describes the ceremony as the hanblechia, or vision quest, "of the whole Sioux nation."

The close relation between vision and ritual is conspicuous in two more recent movements, the messianic Ghost Dance of 1890 (Mooney 1965) and the visionary "peyote cult" that became the Native American Church (La Barre 1975). Both originated to the south and west (the Ghost Dance among the Paiute of Nevada, the peyote cult ultimately in Mexico), both incorporated Christian elements, and neither was by any means limited to the Plains. But each attained particular intensity in this region, where during the crisis of the old tribal culture both the frenzies of the Ghost Dance (before its bloody suppression at Wounded Knee) and the hallucinations of peyote gatherings found a place denied or severely restricted by ritualistic ceremonialisms of the Southwest. On the Plains the Ghost Dance reached its culmination, and on the Plains peyote "facilitated obtaining visions already sought" (Shonle, 59) by allowing the Indian to "get into immediate touch with the supernatural without

[8] See Weltfish, 106–18. The Caddoan Pawnee, unlike the Siouan Mandan (who also combined agriculture with buffalo hunting), had no fully developed Sun Dance, and their ceremonies—even the Hako—retained much of the priestly ritualism, culminating in human sacrifice, characteristic of agricultural religions.

the long period of fasting" demanded by the vision quest; for this reason it took strong root.

The individual quest is central to a rare celestial myth of the Blackfoot recounting the origin of the Sun Dance, or Medicine Lodge (Grinnell 1892, 93–103). (Another Blackfoot tale [113–16] on the origin of the medicine pipe relates a rare Plains "Orpheus" myth.) In earliest times, the story of "Scarface" relates, a beautiful girl told her parents the Sun had said she could marry none but him. When a poor scarfaced boy asked her to be his wife, she said he must gain the Sun's permission and ask him to remove his scar as a sign. He traveled many days, asking animals to help find his home, until he finally met a young man, Morning Star, whose mother, Moon, protected Scarface when his father Sun returned. After Scarface saved Morning Star from great birds that had killed his brothers, Sun permitted him to marry, told him how to build a medicine lodge, and removed his scar; he gave the couple long life without sickness, and at last their shadows departed together for the Sand Hills, where the dead reside.^[9]

Just as Scarface returned to earth enlightened by the Sun, some tribes attributed a heavenly origin to shamans; a Canadian Dakota medicine man was said, for example, to have dwelt with Thunders before being born on earth (Wallis, 81). But most of their power, like that of fellow tribesmen, derived not from birth but from guardian spirits repeatedly sought. Shamans might fast for a vision at least once a year, and this persistent devotion to a quest shared by all was what set them apart.

If priestly inflexibility was largely foreign to the Plains, especially among wandering hunters such as the Sioux, visionary experience was lavishly developed. Many Sioux were empowered by visions, including heyokas or "contraries" and "berdaches" who dressed and lived as women. But the principal shaman was the "holy man" (wicasa wakan )—less commonly "holy woman" (winyan wakan )—who gained transcendent insight through repeated contact, above all by mastery of the vision quest, with the supernatural.

Vision, the Oglala George Sword told Walker (1980, 79),^[10] may come at any time to anyone, unsought or by seeking. The vision quest (hanble-

[9] For two other versions see Wissler and Duvall, 61–66; in one of these, Scarface and Morning Star "looked alike" (63) and were mistaken for each other by the Sun. (In Highwater's retelling the hero is Anpao, Dakota for dawn.) For a Winnebago analogue, see Radin 1954, 75–80; here ascent to the heavens is effortless.

[10] This volume consists of documents Walker collected as agency physician of the Oglala branch of the Teton division of the Sioux between 1896 and 1914; other documents are included in Walker 1982 and 1983. Dakota, which properly refers to the Sioux language, is subdivided into three dialects, Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota, the last of which is that of the Teton Sioux (though Walker used "Lakota," as others have more commonly used "Dakota," to refer to the Sioux in general). See Powers 1977, 3–14.

ceya or hanbleyapi, "crying" or "lamenting" for a vision) is a means for seeking what does not come unsought, or following up the "call" of a dream. Like the inipi sweat lodge, with which it is closely linked, the Sioux vision quest antedated the gift of the sacred pipe, according to Black Elk (Brown, 44; cf. Walker 1980, 104), and is therefore thought to be far older than the Sun Dance and other ceremonies influenced by it; it is an ancient shamanistic heritage—possibly revived by renewal of migratory life on the Plains since the seventeenth century—that remains, for traditional Sioux, central to their religion.^[11]

Native Americans of the Woodlands and Plains "democratized shamanism," Lowie conjectured (1940, 312), by making the vision quest—elsewhere often the prerogative of religious specialists or secret societies—open to all. Whatever the historical sequence may have been, among many Plains peoples such as the Crow "there was no limitation either as to age or sex," and even little boys sometimes quested in imitation of their elders (Lowie 1922, 332).

Where communal puberty rituals were generally lacking, as in much of North America, the vision quest might be a boy's rite of passage to manhood; thus among the Winnebago, on the eastern fringes of Plains culture, it "constituted the only puberty rite" for boys (Radin 1970b, 87). But this was not its sole nor always main function; both east and west of the Plains the vision quest, Benedict wrote (1922, 2; cf. Kroeber 1983, 418, on the Arapaho), is "a ritual at entrance to maturity," but on the Plains "it is mature men who characteristically seek the vision," not once alone on the threshold of adulthood but repeatedly throughout it, especially in times of crisis. "Every Crow, battered by fortune, writhing under humiliation, or consumed with ambition," Lowie writes (1935, 237), sought a vision which was by nature a continually varying response to the unpredictable hazards of life.

The outcome of the quest depended in part on the character of the seeker, purified in body and mind by the sweat bath that preceded it. The quester sought a vision alone—often on a solitary hilltop—but not unassisted; a shaman or relative instructed him before the quest and interpreted its meaning afterward, and no quest, of course, could succeed without help from the spirits. These might be supreme powers (Wakan Tanka or the Grandfathers for the Sioux),^[12] but were usually per-

[11] "The oldest and most revered ceremony," Walker's informants told him (1980, 104), "is the Inipi (sweat bath). The next oldest is Hanblepi (seeking a vision)."

[12] On wakan (roughly, "sacred") and Wakan Tanka ("the Great Spirit"), see Walker 1921, 151–52, and 1980, 68–75, 98–99; Powers 1977, 45–47; and DeMallie, 80–82. Cf. Fletcher and La Flesche, 2:597–99, on Omaha wakonda . On the Grandfathers (Tunkashila ), see Powers 1977, 200–201. Although both Wakan Tanka, often identified with the Christian God (Mails, 120), and Tunkashila are singular in recent Sioux accounts, it seems probable (DeMallie, 91) that the Grandfathers were always plural until reinterpreted by Black Elk under Catholic influence, and almost certain that Wakan Tanka "was a collective term, embodying various wakan beings in many different aspects." For a brief summary of the long controversy over supposed affinity of Dakota wakan, Algonquian manitou, and Iroquois orenda with Oceanic mana as a pre-animistic force at the origin of religious experience, see Hultkrantz 1979, 10–14.

sonal guardian spirits—animals or other natural forces—in their own or in human form. As early as 1847 Parkman noted (1949, 247–48) that the Indian's guardian spirit "is usually embodied in the form of some living thing: a bear, a wolf, an eagle, or a serpent." Most important of all, for Black Elk (Brown, 58–59), are the birds or "wingeds" nearest to the heavens: for like them, "we humans may also leave this world, not with wings, but in the spirit." The vision quest, he declares (Brown, 46), "helps us to realize our oneness with all things, to know that all things are our relatives"; through it, Fools Crow too believes (Mails 1979, 183), we regain the primordial human ability to communicate with birds and animals.

Power gained by the quest was not given once for all, as in quasiautomatic rites of passage; on the contrary, a Plains visionary's quest always placed him at risk. "I mistrust visions come by in the easy way—by swallowing something. The real insight, the great ecstasy," Lame Deer protests (217; cf. 64–65), comes from "the hard, ancient way" of the vision quest, with its demanding rigors and intrinsic uncertainty. Success was by no means guaranteed, and a "persistent record of failure" (Benedict 1923, 25) typifies many Plains accounts. "Sometimes men quest and don't see or experience a thing. In fact," Fools Crow says (Mails 1979, 86), "not many people do manage it successfully."

Some acknowledged lifelong failure; others pretended visions not seen; still others succeeded after several tries. Nor were success and failure, sincerity and pretense, always clearly distinct, especially once tribal traditions began to crumble. A displaced Winnebago whose autobiography Radin recorded confessed (1926, 26) he had seen "nothing unusual" during a four-day quest in which he claimed a vision; but after learning his boasts had helped a niece in labor, "I was really convinced that I possessed sacred power" and "the authority of a great medicine man" (137). The spirit moves in unpredictable ways, and who can be certain when—or whether—he was deceiving himself, or others?

The basic pattern of the Plains quest, similar (with many variations) to that of the northeastern Algonquians, is apparent in the earliest descriptions. "When they wish to choose their medicine or guardian spirit," Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied remarked (23:318) of the Mandan after his journey of 1832–34,

they fast for three or four days, and even longer, retire to a solitary spot, do penance, and even sacrifice joints of their fingers; howl and cry to the lord of life, or to the first man, beseeching him to point out their guardian spirit. They continue in this excited state till they dream, and the first animal or other object which appears to them is chosen for their guardian spirit or medicine.^[13]

A Blackfoot boy of fourteen or fifteen, Catlin wrote a few years later (1973, 35–37), explaining acquisition of the "medicine-bag" which Catlin considered "hocus pocus, witchcraft, and animal magnetism," wanders off for several days, "lying on the ground in some remote or secluded spot, crying to the Great Spirit, and fasting the whole time." The first animal or bird of which he dreams ("or pretends to have dreamed") becomes his lifetime protector; he later sets forth to procure its skin, which he keeps to bring good fortune in battle, act as his guardian spirit in death, and "conduct him safe to the beautiful hunting grounds, which he contemplates in the world to come."^[14]

The basic accuracy of these early accounts has been largely confirmed by later observers. Curtis gives a vivid description of the Teton Sioux vision cry (which he believed had "not been performed within very recent years") in the third volume (65–70) of The North American Indian, in 1908. Whoever pledges to pursue the quest solemnly passes a pipe to others, and a holy man raises it to the four winds, sky, and earth. Holy man and quester purify themselves and others in a sweat bath, and the quester cries aloud as the holy man sings. Taken to a distant hill, the quester stands with uplifted face, holding the pipe up to the sun and praying, as he stands until sunset and lies until dawn, to spirits of the four directions to grant him a vision. At some time during his four-day vigil a supernatural being—bird or animal, tree, rock, or ancestral spirit—appears, if his prayers are granted, reveals the future, and points out a potent medicine: "Thus every man who has seen such a vision

[13] Rpt. in Wied-Neuwied 1976, 246, a volume of selections from the Travels and accompanying watercolors by Karl Bodmer. A still earlier mention of the Mandan vision quest occurs in Lewis and Clark's entry for December 4, 1804 (1902, 1: 148), in Biddle's edition of their History, first published in 1814: "Each individual selects for himself the particular object of his devotion, which is termed his medicine, and is either some invisible being or more commonly some animal, which thenceforward becomes his protector or his intercessor with the great spirit, to propitiate whom every attention is lavished, and every personal consideration is sacrificed." This passage, lacking in Clark's brief entry in the Original Journals edited by Thwaites (1959, 1:233), was presumably added by Biddle on the basis of his supplementary sources.

[14] For"Grinnell (1892, 275) the Blackfoot world of the dead was a monotonous, unending, "altogether unsatisfying existence." Had Catlin romanticized their eschatology, or had they learned with the vanishing of the buffalo how bleak the future could be?

becomes, to a certain degree, a medicine man." Back in the sweat lodge, the holy man interprets his vision and the two again purify themselves.

With many variations, this underlying pattern—purification, self-denial, and solitary communion with transcendent forces culminating, if successful, in an unpredictable vision followed by return with magnified powers—has remained remarkably constant since the earliest accounts. The vision quest of the Teton Sioux and Crow was open to both sexes, moreover, whereas most girls among the Plains Cree, as among their distant Algonquian cousins, the Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, "never deliberately sought visions but were apt to acquire power during menstrual seclusion" or from unsolicited dreams (Mandelbaum, 159–60).^[15] The Plains vision quest, above all in its Teton Sioux version, thus represents the furthest extension of "democratized shamanism" in North America, offering a possibility of deliberate visionary self-transcendence, confined in many cultures to shamans alone, to mature adults as well as adolescents and to women no less than men.

Purification by sweat bath and fasting in solitude, usually for four days and nights but sometimes for as many as ten, were virtually universal to the Plains vision quest, but important variations from the Teton Sioux pattern occurred in the self-mortifications endured. The Teton Sioux quester, like his counterpart among the northeastern Algonquians, "cried" for spirits to take pity and grant a vision; but apart from fasting in isolation, standing for hours facing the sun, and lying unsheltered through cold nights, he normally underwent no extreme afflictions. Attainment of a vision no more depended on bodily mutilation or intense pain than on mental disorientation by drugs, for in his appeal to powers beyond him he strove to bring his own full powers to bear. The southern Comanche went further still in rejecting not only physical torments but every form of self-abasement as he quietly awaited whatever might come (Wallace and Hoebel, 157).

Among some other Plains tribes, however, the quester inflicted self-torture to signal his resolve in seeking a vision. Severing the joint of a finger was a widespread practice; among the Crow, Lowie writes (1935,

[15] Female shamans are prominent in many Algonquian tribes of both Northeast and Plains, but vision quests are largely confined to men. Mandelbaum found "many women doctors" among the Plains Cree (162), but their power came mainly from spontaneous visions like that of Fine-day (160–61)—whose initial dream was followed, however, by eight days of fasting as she stood facing the sun: a quest as rigorous as any man's! A medicine woman plays the leading role in the Blackfoot Medicine Lodge (Sun Dance), but her power derives not from a vision quest but from a vow to the sun in a time of family crisis (Grinnell 1892, 263–64; Ewers, 175). Andrews claims (1981; 1984) to relate the teachings of a Plains Cree medicine woman. Women are repeatedly said to have taken part in vision quests of non-Algonquian Plains tribes such as the Teton Sioux and Crow, but firsthand accounts are sparse; Linderman, e.g., contains almost nothing on the subject.

240; cf. Nabokov, 62–65), "cutting off a finger-joint was so popular a form of self-mortification that in 1907 most of the old people I met were disfigured in this way." A Crow quester might also choose to stand on a hill painted with white clay and run around a forked pole to which he was fastened by thongs piercing his chest or back. A Cheyenne quester, too, while "starving" for a vision, might be tied to a pole by thongs from skewers piercing his skin, which he attempted to tear by lunging against his bonds (Grinnell 1923, 1:84; 1920, 79–82). This self-torturing search of a vision was incorporated into the Sun Dance not only of the Crow and Cheyenne but of the Teton Sioux and others; whether it originated in communal ceremony or solitary quest, it bears witness to their close connection and to the supreme importance ascribed to visionary revelations by peoples willing to suffer such anguish to attain them.

In chiefs and holy men of the Plains the visionary experience shared with everyone in his tribe attained its greatest intensity. It is again from the Teton Sioux, especially the Oglala branch, that the most detailed accounts have survived. According to Black Elk (Neihardt, 70), the great Oglala warrior Crazy Horse, who led the Sioux and Cheyenne against Custer at the Little Big Horn, "became a chief because of the power he got in a vision when he was a boy." In traditional Plains belief, extraordinary accomplishment of any kind derived from personal vision (spontaneous or sought) vouchsafed by spirits without whose assistance no man could ever surpass himself.

Several Teton Sioux holy men, including Frank Fools Crow and John Fire Lame Deer, have told their stories to observers, but the classic testimonial remains that given by Nicholas Black Elk to the Nebraska poet John G. Neihardt and published as Black Elk Speaks .^[16] Born in 1863, Black Elk was thirteen when Crazy Horse defeated Custer and twenty-seven when the last armed revolt of his people ended at Wounded Knee: "A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream" (Neihardt, 230). He was sixty-seven when Neihardt, then forty-nine, met him at Pine Ridge in 1930, and he lived another twenty years. In 1931 Neihardt transcribed and retold the story of Black Elk's life, feeling it (xii) "a sacred obligation" to be true to his meaning and manner. (Sixteen years later, in 1947, J. E. Brown [xiv] found Black Elk on a Nebraska farm still hoping "to tell of the sacred things before they all passed away.") Neihardt's book, neglected for years, is itself a "quest for understanding" (DeMallie, 99) by two Americans, Black Elk and Neihardt (or Flaming

[16] DeMallie's The Sixth Grandfather contains transcripts of the interviews on which Neihardt based both Black Elk Speaks and his novel When the Tree Flowered . I mainly follow Black Elk Speaks, with occasional reference to the transcripts. (See, e.g., DeMallie, 94–99, for comparison of the two accounts of Black Elk's Great Vision.) Neihardt wisely knew that the truth of Black Elk's story did not rely on literal transcription of his words.

Rainbow), who bridged widely sundered worlds and found them essentially one.

As a child Black Elk heard a prophecy made long before the coming of the Wasichus, or white men, that "you shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land, and . . . shall starve" (Neihardt, 8). Bleak confirmation of this prophecy soon intensified, for those who fought despair, their deep-rooted need to transcend the given conditions of a world in which no abiding fulfillment could be found. The spiritual power given to the people by the white buffalo woman through the sacred pipe could be attained by anyone who courageously sought and followed his dream, but in its absence nothing was worth attaining. In old age, "as from a lonely hilltop," Black Elk considered his life "the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people's heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people's dream that died in bloody snow" (1–2).

Black Elk remembered (15–16) hearing voices when he was four. A year later, a kingbird ("This was not a dream, it happened") called him, and he saw two men coming from the clouds like arrows, singing a sacred song to the drumming of thunder; they wheeled toward the sunset, turned to geese, and were gone. These voices later recurred (17–21), "but what they wanted me to do I did not know." Then at age nine a voice said, "It is time," and as he lay sick he saw the same two men descend headfirst from storm clouds and heard them say, "Your Grandfathers are calling you!" In the great vision that became the formative experience of his life, he followed these men to the skies, where a bay horse showed him "a whole skyful of horses dancing round me." The bay then led him (21–26) through a rainbow door into a tipi in which six men were sitting, old as the hills or stars; in fear, Black Elk recognized the Powers of the World: the four directions, Sky, and Earth. Each of the Grandfathers exhorted him, and before changing to a bird or animal gave a gift able to bless or cure: a bowl of water and a bow, a white wing, a pipe, a branching red stick, and a red road. The sixth Grandfather, Spirit of the Earth, slowly turned to a boy, and Black Elk recognized "that he was myself with all the years that would be mine at last." Old again, he started toward the east, not on the red road of salvation but the black road of troubles and war.

Descending to earth (27–35), the boy slew drought and planted a red stick which grew into a cottonwood tree. Then the people, changing to animals and birds, set out on the red road, led by the twelve horsemen and followed by the boy, who became a spotted eagle, riding the bay. As they ascended the third generation, they were traveling the black road and each "seemed to have his own little vision that he followed and his own rules," and everywhere the winds were at war like wild beasts fight-

ing. Atop the third hill, "the nation's hoop was broken" and the holy tree stripped of birds. But a herb sprang up where a bison had been and the tree flowered again; amid gathering storm clouds "a song of power came to me and I sang it there in the midst of that terrible place. . . .It was so beautiful that nothing anywhere could keep from dancing."

A flaming rainbow arose and all around the earth was green (35–39). "I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world." From this height "I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being." The people's sacred hoop was one of many that made a circle, wide as daylight and starlight, in whose center grew a mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and father: "And I saw that it was holy." The Six Grandfathers cried "He has triumphed!" as he re-entered their tipi, and the oldest bade him return with power to the place from which he came. He looked below and saw his people well and happy except one—"and that one was myself."

This Great Vision shaped the life of Black Elk, pre-eminent holy man of his people during the terrible decades to follow. Its components are inevitably drawn from tribal archetypes—the Six Grandfathers, four horses, sacred pipe, red and black paths, thunderstorms and eagle, flowering tree, and sacred hoop—endlessly interpretable (as by Black Elk himself) in terms of Sioux traditions, to say nothing of recondite Wasichu theories. But the vision's force comes from fusion of these particulars into something transcending them: a revelation as vivid and universal as the biblical Apocalypse, though without the destructive frenzy of that counterpart from an earlier time of crisis and renewal. Whatever interpretations we give it, Black Elk's Great Vision is the summoning of an individual—weak and isolated like us all—to surpass himself by absorption of superpersonal powers embodied in natural forces and tribal spirits, and thus to fulfill his own aspirations through a vision of his people's potential—though possibly unattainable—unity with themselves and the world.

Black Elk's vision was the beginning of his quest: not a possession to be hoarded but a goal to be realized in his life and his people's. At first, like the Siberian shaman, he found himself alien from others: "Everything around me seemed strange and as though it were far away . . . and it seemed I did not belong to my people" (42). Several times during the years embracing Long Hair Custer's defeat, tribal dispersal, and the death of Crazy Horse, he again had a "queer feeling" presaging return to his vision, but only disorientation seemed to have come from his involuntary spiritual encounters. Finally (136–45), at seventeen, he told

his vision to an elderly holy man, who instructed him to perform a dance for his people. Through dramatic enactment of his vision, in which members of his tribe played the twelve horsemen, six grandfathers, and others while Black Elk played himself, he escaped from his imprisoning isolation. "I looked about me, and could see that what we then were doing was like a shadow cast upon the earth from yonder vision in the heavens, so bright it was and clear." Thus Black Elk learned that a man gains power over his vision only after he has performed it on earth for the people to see (173). By making his private experience communal, he transformed an unsolicited incursion of spirits into a deliberate quest for mastery of their transcendent powers.

This performance was followed (152–57) by the young man's first vision quest atop a high hill. From the nation of thunder beings, heads of dogs changed into Wasichus, and Black Elk knew the Grandfathers wanted him to perform the dog vision "with heyokas, . . . doing everything wrong or backwards to make the people laugh."^[17] Only after enacting this ceremony and discovering the herb of his visions did Black Elk perform his first cure and become a holy man. His life was now a dedicated quest to realize in this world the visionary oneness he had glimpsed in the other.

As in any quest the outcome was uncertain and failure always possible—all the more so in these fearful years when the buffalo vanished as relentlessly as the Wasichus advanced. At this hopeless time, "I felt like crying, for the sacred hoop was broken and scattered" (182); the people "were traveling the black road, everybody for himself and with little rules of his own, as in my vision" (183). In Europe he traveled with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show "like a man who had never had a vision," and returned to find his people near starvation, "pitiful and in despair" (196) after the Wasichus had robbed half their land.

In these years (1889–90) news of the Paiute Messiah's Ghost Dance, which would bring back both bison and Indians from the dead, reached the Sioux; Black Elk, though skeptical, determined to participate in it: "I believed my vision was coming true at last, and happiness overcame me" (201–02). Looking back, he saw he had mistakenly followed lesser visions, for "it is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows" (212–13). The butchery at Wounded

[17] Cf. DeMallie, 227–32. Throughout his book Neihardt altered transcripts of his interviews; among omissions at this point are the words "Many are called but few are chosen," a biblical echo deleted in accord with consistent suppression of any reference to Black Elk's' longstanding Catholic faith. The shorthand transcripts by Neihardt's daughter Enid (omitted from the typescript) noted that "the dog in this vision was a symbol of any enemy and all enemies should be killed without pity like dogs."

Knee seemed (as Neihardt entitled his final chapter) "the end of the dream."

Yet Black Elk lived sixty years more, and his quest had not come to an end. Perhaps no undertaking by this Native American shaman (and Roman Catholic catechist) demanded more courage than the decision to communicate his visions to the Wasichu who visited him in 1930. "It has made me very sad to do this at last, and I have lain awake at night worrying and wondering if I was doing right; for I know I have given away my power when I have given away my vision, and maybe I cannot live very long now. But I think I have done right to save the vision in this way" (174). He could redeem his vision because he now knew that the sacred hoop embraced not only the Oglala, nor only the Indian (as the Ghost Dancers thought), but the white man as well; his visionary quest, he now understood, was theirs no less than his.

In the extraordinary postscript to Neihardt's testimonial, Black Elk (231–34) stands in the flesh on Harney Peak, where the spirits had long ago shown him the sacred hoop of the world; dressed and painted as in his great vision over sixty years before, he holds the sacred pipe as clouds gather round and prays to the Great Spirit, his Grandfather, to "make my people live" (see DeMallie, plate 8). He had persisted in striving to realize for the good of his people—and now of others as well—an exalted vision that seemed (as every transcendent goal must seem) beyond attainment; in beseeching the blessing of life at the center of earth the old man is continuing the quest he began as a boy and has never relinquished. It was "next to impossible," he well knows (DeMallie, 293), "but there was nothing like trying."