THE CROW INDIAN SUN DANCE 
By Robert H. Lowie 
HILE I was investigating vari- 
ous phases of the old Crow 
culture in 1910, I heard a 
good deal about the sacred dolls formerly 
used in the Sun Dance, but without any 
expectation of ever seeing one “in the 
flesh”? since the last ceremony of this 
type had been celebrated thirty-five 
years previously. After a while I 
learned however, that not only a doll, 
but what my informants regarded as the 
most sacred of all dolls, was still in the 
possession of an elderly widow, named 
“Pretty-enemy,’ whose husband had 
been the real owner. Pretty-enemy, 
being a woman, was not even permitted 
to unwrap her precious possession, which 
was occasionally taken out by old men 
visitors, who would address it in prayer 
and restore it to its envelope. The 
sense of unremunerative ownership evi- 
dently weighed on the woman’s mind, 
and when she heard that I had bought 
numerous articles of ethnographical in- 
terest she approached me through my 
interpreter with an offer to sell the doll. 
The price first demanded was so extra- 
vagant that I felt obliged to decline with 
regret, but after a lapse of negotiations 
Pretty-enemy again approached me with 
a more reasonable offer. Then the 
purchase was consummated after I had 
pledged strict secrecy so far as the 
Reservation people were concerned, for 
the woman was very much afraid of 
social ostracism as soon as her action 
should become known. 
Looking at the doll with a layman’s 
eye, one would hardly be disposed to set 
much store by it. It is a stuffed effigy 
of the human form, about six inches long, 
with crudely marked eyes and mouth, 
and a number of half-faded rectangular 
crosses front and back, to symbolize the 
One of the most highly venerated of the medicine bundles of the Crow Indians. 
a rawhide envelope in which was kept the sacred doll together with various smaller sacred objects 
used in the ceremony of the Sun Dance. 
It consists of 
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