X.] THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 395 



Council Fires," and constituting the formidable confederacy of 

 the Dakotas, " Friendlies," i.e. "Allies' (of which the chief 

 members were the Santees, Sissetons, Wahpetons, Yanktons, 

 Yanktonnais and Tetons), and the other branches of the Siouan 

 family Assinaboins, Omahas, Ponkas, Kaws, Osages, Quapaws, 

 lowas, Otoes, Missouris, Winnebagos, Mandans, Minnetaris, 

 Crows (Absarokas) who formed independent national groups 

 often hostile to the Dakotas, and presenting many distinct features 

 in their speech, tribal organisation, religious beliefs, social usages, 

 and even in their physical appearance. So marked are some of 

 these characters, as amongst the Assinaboins, Omahas, Osages, 

 and Mandans, that the Siouan family may be regarded as a 

 wide-spread people who, in pre-Columbian times, were already 

 undergoing a process of disintegration which, if left to themselves, 

 must in course of time have resulted in the development of several 

 distinct nationalities. 



But exceptional interest attaches to all the Siouan peoples, 

 thanks to the light which their social systems throw 

 upon the origin of the family, clan and tribe, the 

 totem, early religious conceptions, and the other 

 primitive elements of human society. Hence the importance 

 of the bulky memoirs devoted to the Siouan Indians by 

 Mr W. J. McGee and the late Rev. James Owen Dorsey in 

 the fifteenth Annual Report (1893-4) of the Washington Bureau 

 of Ethnology (1897). Thus Mr McGee clearly shows that the 

 current conception of the Dakotan Wakanda, as well as that of 

 the Algonquian Manito (" Manito the Mighty " of Hiawatha), 

 as the Supreme or Great Spirit, Creator and so on, is a delusion, 

 Wakanda being rather a quality than an entity, and in any case 

 only a material substance or being, and in no sense a spirit, 

 much less "Great Spirit." Thus among many tribes "the sun 

 is wakanda not the wakanda or a wakanda, but simply wakanda ; 

 and among the same tribes the moon is wakanda, and so are 

 thunder, lightning, the stars, the winds, the cedar; even a man, 

 especially a shaman, might be wakanda or a wakanda. In 

 addition the term was applied to mythic monsters of the earth, 

 air, and waters. So, too, the fetishes and the ceremonial objects 

 and decorations... various animals, the horse among the prairie 



